About Garter Stitch

Bunny is wearing a garter stitch scarf and three snowdrops.

The scarf is very easy to knit - it's only about 2 cm wide and I only cast on 5 stitches using Double Knitting yarn and 4mm needles.  I just kept knitting until the rabbit said it was long enough.  He is very small. 

If you wanted a scarf for a bigger animal try casting on more stitches until you have the width you want.  Although we all knit our stitches to a slightly different size (tension) a scarf 5cm wide might need 15 stitches (3 stitches per centimetre).

Garter stitch (knit stitch or plain knitting) is stretchy sideways.  So, it is very useful for some things and not so for others.  Its name comes from the way it was used to make long woollen garters which were wrapped around the tops of stockings.

It's sometimes called White Stitch because the white squares in a knitting chart represented the knit stitch.