Lately I’ve been noodling around with garter stitch and zigzags. I’m intrigued by the power of separated increases and decreases to alter the knit fabric (stockinette) in the first place and now I’m really looking at how garter stitch is affected. I’ve spent weeks working out zigzags, garter and a bit of mosaic patterns with scrap fingering yarn.
Well, I worked out a lot of pattern issues to my satisfaction, charts were made and socks are being planned. But then I thought: “how about a matching SHAWL??!” Wouldn’t that be grand?
The next question, of course, was what shape? I immediately answered “triangle”, so that was settled. But there are choices: uneven, single equilateral, or a double triangle with a spine were all possibilities in the running. Starting out simple, I made a mini shawl swatch of a single triangle worked from the bottom up. The zigzags thus appear horizontal.
My DIL and I both agreed that the zigzags looked good, but wouldn’t they look EVEN BETTER if they came together in a V in the center?! So… on to the next swatch.
I just doubled this triangle and added a spine stitch. My selvedge was kind of puny so I went from 2 to 3 ST as well. Of course, this design means I’m knitting from the top down and would need a garter tab as a point of origination.
And, indeed, the zigzags did look grand coming together in a V shape. But. The garter tab at the top was quite a bit more protuberant than I would like. It did not disappear into the background like good garter tabs do. And I have a pet peeve about poorly designed garter tabs that curl or torque or just don’t do their job. The thing is, a lot of stresses can accumulate at that point depending on the specific stitch patterns employed. If the garter tab is too big, small, wide or thin, it cannot serve as a near invisible foundation if it does not mesh in its specific shawl. Different patterns in combination with different yarns and even needle sizes can all contribute to garter tab issues. Maybe you’re thinking: “meh, some good stretching and blocking will fix that.” Oh yeah? Here’s what happened when I stretched this swatch out. So yeah…NO. Not going to work.
The whole tab has just flipped right over upon being stretched. Sure, I could pin it down flat, but just like stockinette without any ribbing, this baby is going to curl over forever.
Cogitation. Maybe a bigger, beefier tab would stand up to the stresses of the fabric there. I doubled the width of the tab but kept everything else the same including the thickness of the tab though (number of rows) as I still wanted it to flow into the selvedge.
This resulted in a notch! That zigzag pattern really pulls on the tab, doesn’t it? Honestly, I didn’t hate this notch as much as the protuberant tab. I stared at it for a good two days trying to talk myself into it. Everything else laid nice and flat. I could just sew up the notch and no one would know. sigh.
More cogitation: 1. That tab was too wide, so cutting back the size of the tab again. But only half as much. Next one midway between this and the small one I had started with. And: 2. stockinette is so malleable, maybe straight up garter for more rows beyond the rectangular tab itself would be more resistant to the heavy stresses generated by the zigzags.
And here she is! I just kept knitting garter for several more rows after the tab. Just increasing for the 2 triangles of the shawl to grow but not increasing/ decreasing for the zigzags yet. My guess that garter stitch zones are more stable and resilient to stresses from later pattern rows was correct. They did bend and compress a bit but not nearly as much as the stockinette did. There is a bit of waviness to the edge, but believe me: the tab does not flip/curl over or anything else silly. It really does even out with some stretching so blocking should take care of this nicely. And if it’s still a bit wavy, I can deal with that.
Yay! So garter tab is sorted…now to plan out my sequence of patterns. Stay tuned!
Lizzie Knitzz 