Hurdle Stitch

The hurdle stitch is a really interesting stitch pattern that only consists of knit and pearls. What I really like about it is that you don't need to really add any kind of extra border onto the edges of your fabric. You can just knit the stitch pattern as is, and it looks great. So let's take a look at how to make it. So to start, you're just gonna need an even number of stitches on your knitting needles.

So if you're making a blanket, you know, you would just cast on and you had enough for the width of the blanket and then it's just a four row repeat. Um And actually rows one and two are the same and rows three and four are the same. So this is the kind of knitting that I call potato chip knitting because it's really easy. It's easy to memorize. It's the kind of knitting that you can do while you're watching TV, or maybe listening to an audio book.

So it's a really great stitch pattern to know. So I've worked a few repeats here already. So you can see how it looks. Um It has a very nice texture to it and it is actually kind of squishy. So this is really one that's good for, especially things like baby blankets.

So for row one, we're just going to alternate between knits and pearls. So it's like doing ribbing. We're just going to knit one pearl one all the way across. So I've done my knit one and then I'm gonna do a pearl one. Remembering to bring my yarn in between the needles.

As I'm switching from the knits to pearls, I'm coming to the end here and I've ended with a pearl and now I'm ready to go to the wrong side of my work. And once again, I'm going to knit one pearl one all the way across. And if we take a look here, you can see that we can really read our knitting here. So this first stitch, we have a V here and that looks like a knit stitch. So we're gonna knit and then the next stitch we have that little pearl bump and we're gonna pearl.

So rows one and two are just simply knit one, pearl one all the way across to the end of the row. And we're ending row two with that pearl one. And now I'm turning it back over to the right side. So you can see here, we've just created this little bit of ribbing here. Just two little tiny rows of ribbing.

And now for rows three and four, we're simply just knitting all the stitches. So I'm just knitting all the way across. I don't have to do anything else. And that's part of what makes this so easy is that it's four rows and two of those rows, you're simply knitting all the stitches. So that takes care of row three and we'll turn it over for row four where we're knitting all the stitches again.

Coming to the end of my row here and there we go. So now I'm flipping back to the right side and I would just start at row one again, which is just knit one, pearl one all the way across. So let's just take a look a little bit at this stitch pattern. So as I said, at the beginning, you don't really need any kind of border added on to your um fabric, especially if you're making something like a blanket because I have not done anything to block this fabric at all. I didn't steam block it or anything like that.

And you'll notice that it is staying very flat, you know, often times with different stitch patterns, you know, especially if they're sort of what I call any background of stat, meaning that you're doing a stitch pattern where you're doing mostly knits on the right side and mostly pearls on the wrong side. Those kinds of stitch patterns have a tendency to curl. And so that's why you often will add some kind of border on each edge. Both the beginning edge and ending edge as you're working your row so that you don't have that fabric curling on itself. But with this one, because we're doing the ribbing and then doing essentially garter stitch because we're doing the two rows of knit back to back, you end up with this fabric that's just really nice.

And I think that the edges themselves look really nice too. I feel like it doesn't need a border at all. So that's all there is to the hurdle stitch. It's a very simple stitch pattern. It's really easy to make and you can use it on just about any kind of knitting project.