How to Work Garter Stitch

Hi everyone, I'm Jen Lucas for the Knitting Circle. In this video, let's take a look at working garter stitch in rows. Garter stitch is a fabric that's created by working knit stitches on both the right side and wrong side of your work when you're working in rows. It's a cozy and squishy fabric that's so easy to work, and you're going to see it in all sorts of knitting projects like baby blankets, scarves, dishcloths. It's really just a beautiful fabric that you create with garter stitch and it's very, very easy. So let's go ahead and take a look. Working garter stitch in rows creates this fabric here where we're knitting on both the right side and the wrong side of our piece. So you can see that they look basically identical, pretty close. And because we're knitting on both sides, working the knit stitch on both sides, you can see if I sort of spread this apart, you can see that I have those smooth knit stitches that were worked on the right side. And then because I worked knit stitches on the wrong side of the work as well, it creates these bumps or, you know commonly referred to as pearl bumps, it makes these bumps appear then on the right side of our work. So we're just knitting on the right side and then also knitting on the wrong side because we're working this garter stitch in rows. So you're going to work the knit stitch. However you feel comfortable, whether that's the English method or continental. I knit using the English method so that's what I'm going to use here but just remember, making the stitches are the same. And so to work garter stitch on this little swatch here, I'm on my right side, and I'm just going to go ahead and knit and you can see that I have these smooth sort of stitches here that I'm creating. And so this is the right side of my work. I'm just knitting every stitch. And now I'm coming to the end and I'm ready to work my wrong side. I'm just going to flip this around to the wrong side of my work. And because I'm working in garter stitch, I'm just knitting all the stitches again. So we're just going to go ahead and get knit all those stitches. So this is probably for most people, the fastest fabric to create because most people are quicker at doing the knit stitch than they are the pearl stitch. So garter stitch ends up being a very quick fabric that you can create with your knitting since you're only using knit stitches. And so that's my wrong side. I've just knit every single stitch. And that creates garter stitch. And you'll notice here on my swatch that I have used a stitch marker. And that's because the right side and wrong side do look identical. You might be able to tell from the cast on or bind off which side is the right side or wrong side, but when you're working your piece and you're setting your project down and then picking it back up later, it might be a little bit difficult to tell which side is the right side or wrong side when it comes to garner stitch. So I actually like to use one of these removable stitch markers here to mark the right side of my work so that when I'm working garter stitch in rows, I always know where I'm at. And that's garter stitch. There you go. If you can cast on, bind off and work the knit stitch, you can make garter stitch and you're on your way to making lots of great knitting projects. I hope that you enjoyed this video. I'm Jen Lucas for the Knitting Circle. And I'll see you back here again very soon.