Knit Stitch and Garter Stitch
The Building Blocks of Knitting
The 'knit stitch' is obviously the most important stitch in knitting...although the 'purl stitch' is a very close second.
You can use the knit stitch on its own (i.e. knit stitches along every single row) to produce knitted material. When you do this, it produces what is called garter stitch*
* Unless you're doing circular knitting...but don't worry about that yet; I'll get to that much later!
So a garter stitch pattern would just be:
Row 1: k
Row 2: k
Row 3: k
Row 4: k
Row 5: k
etc.
Where k = knit stitches along the whole row.
One row of garter stitch consists of 2 rows of knit stitches.
Once you start knitting, you will soon find garter stitch to be a very recognisable texture of raised wavy ridges.
Both sides of garter stitch consist of the same texure; therefore it's reversible.
Being the same on both sides makes it a good choice for beginners when making an item with both sides on display, such as a scarf.
Here is the video lesson on both the knit stitch and garter stitch:
Garter stitch is all you can knit if you only know the knit stitch. In the next lesson, I will show you how to do the purl stitch too, and once you know how to knit and purl you can create a much wider variety of textures and patterns.
Then the world is your oyster!
Photo showing the texture of garter stitch, by Bob Hosking.