Counting Rows in Stockinette Stitch

Hi there, Mary Beth Temple here for The Knitting Circle. and in this video, we're going to learn about counting rows in stockinette stitch, because sometimes instead of saying knit for three inches, it might say knit 12 rows. and if you're interrupted and you have to go back and count, it's, it's a little difficult if you're not familiar with it, to count the rows properly. So I'm going to show you how to do that in stockinette. So there are two ways to do this, one is from the right side of the work in stockinette, which is the smooth side. And what we're going to count is V's. If you see the knit stitch on the right side of the work makes a little V at the bottom, and you can count the V's to see how many rows that you've made. Now, if you're counting from the very, very, very beginning, you see that V down there at the very beginning. We're not going to count that because that was the cast on row. So that was what we cast onto the needle. So if the instruction say knit for 10 rows or 12 rows or however many, I'm going to ignore that one and I'm going to count from the next row up so I'm going to count one, two and smooth this out a little bit, three, four, five six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and we are going to count this one 16 because this is a row that has been knit. It just happens to be up on my left hand needle because I'm right-handed of course it would be on the other needle if you were left-handed. So that's how you count from the right side of stockinette stitch. You look for those V's. Now, what if I prefer to count on the wrong side? If I want to count on the wrong side, every one of these ridges, see the ridge, every one of those ridges is a row. So I don't want to count a ridge, the top of the ridge and the bottom of the ridge and top of the ridge and the bottom of the ridge because that's going to give me too many. So on the Pearl side of stockinette stitch, I'm going to count half the ridge so for example, I like the ones that go this way they look like a little rainbow. They're pointing down. I'm going to count those one, two, three, four, five, six seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, ah 13, 14, 15, 16, and I'm going to count that ridge that's right up there on the needle. Okay, So on this case, either pick the top of the ridge, which is the, the U shape facing down or the bottom of the ridge, which is the U shape facing up but only count all tops or all bottoms. Alright, Let me try that one more time. I'm going to count my top of the ridge. That's one, two, three, four five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. So now I know that I have knit 16 rows on my stockinette swatch. So now you know how to count rows and stockinette stitch. You can count them when you need to. Thanks so much for joining me here. I'm Mary Beth Temple, and this is The Knitting Circle.