Hello, dear. Welcome to my little corner. My name is Ruth Schultz, but the grandchildren call me Grandma Ruthie and it has stuck to everybody else too, including the ladies at church, some of whom are older than I am. I have been knitting since 1941, when my mother taught me so I could knit squares for the soldiers' blankets, and I have been teaching people to knit for most of the years since.

My grandson set up this page for me (he says I have to say "set up" and not "built," I don't know why) so that I could put down the things I say to every beginner, in one place, and so my knitting friends who have moved away could find the scarf pattern. I have tried to write it the way I would say it if you were sitting at my kitchen table with the needles in your hands. Go slowly. Nobody ever learned to knit fast.

Needles. Two straight needles, size 8 (that's the American size; it's 5 millimeters if the package says it that way), about ten inches long. Size 8 is a nice middle size, big enough to see what you're doing. If you can find wooden or bamboo needles, get those for your first pair. The metal ones are slippery and your stitches will slide off when you least want them to. The plastic ones are fine too. They cost only a few dollars.

Yarn. One skein of worsted weight yarn in a light, solid color. Worsted weight is the medium thickness, the ordinary kind; the label will say "worsted" or "4-ply" or show a little "4" in a picture of a skein. Light and solid because you need to be able to see your stitches, and you can't see them in black or in the variegated kind with all the colors. Acrylic is perfectly fine and it goes in the washing machine. Wool is warmer and nicer to work with but it costs more and some people itch. For the first scarf, get one big skein, seven or eight ounces, which is plenty.

Also: a pair of scissors, a yarn needle (a big blunt needle with a big eye, for sewing in the ends), and a crochet hook, any size, for rescuing dropped stitches. A little zipper bag to keep it all in. That's it. Don't let the store sell you anything else yet.

Casting on is how the first row of stitches gets onto the needle. There are a dozen ways and every knitter swears by one. I teach the long-tail cast-on because it makes a nice stretchy edge and because once your hands learn it, it's fast. It is a little awkward the first ten times. Everyone's is. Keep going.

1. Pull out a length of yarn from the skein for the "tail." How long? A rough rule is about an inch of tail for every stitch you're going to cast on, plus a little extra. For the scarf below, that's about two feet. If you run out of tail before you have enough stitches, pull it all out and start with a longer tail. Everybody does this at least once.

2. At that spot, make a slip knot and put it on one needle. Snug it up but not tight. That slip knot counts as your first stitch. Hold this needle in your right hand.

3. Now set up your left hand. You've got two strands hanging down from the needle: the tail (toward you) and the yarn that goes to the skein (away from you). Hold your left hand palm up. Put the tail over your thumb and the skein yarn over your index finger, and catch both strands against your palm with your other three fingers. Spread your thumb and finger apart and you'll see the yarn makes a kind of "V" or a slingshot. Point the needle down into the V.

4. Here's the motion, all in one swoop. With the needle tip, go up under the strand on the outside of your thumb (the front of the thumb loop). Then go over and behind the strand on your index finger, catching it, and bring it back down through the loop you just came up through on your thumb. Let the loop slip off your thumb.

5. Put your thumb back under the tail strand and gently pull it out to the side to snug the new stitch up on the needle. Not tight. You should be able to slide the stitch along the needle easily. Tight cast-ons are the number one beginner trouble; you'll be fighting them all through the first row.

That's one stitch. Do step 4 and 5 again for each stitch you need. Count them when you're done. My saying is: up the thumb, over the finger, down through the thumb, let go, snug. Say it out loud. Nobody's listening.

Hold the needle with the stitches on it in your left hand and the empty needle in your right. The yarn coming from the skein should be hanging at the back of the work, away from you. (I hold the yarn in my right hand and "throw" it, the way most Americans learn. Some people hold it in the left and "pick." Either is right. This is the throwing way.)

In. Slide the tip of the right needle into the first stitch on the left needle, going in from the front and from left to right, so the right needle ends up behind the left needle and the two make an X. Go into the front of the loop, the part nearest you.

Around. With your right hand, bring the yarn under and then over the tip of the right needle, wrapping it counterclockwise if you were looking down from the tip. Just once.

Through. Now pull the right needle back toward you, keeping the wrap on it, and bring the tip out through the stitch. It comes out in front of the left needle. You've got a new loop on the right needle.

Off. Slide the old stitch off the left needle. The new stitch stays on the right.

In, around, through, off. That's a knit stitch. Do it for every stitch on the left needle, and when the left needle is empty, you've knit a row. Switch the needles to the other hands and go again. My daughter learned it as "in through the front door, run around the back, out through the window, off jumps Jack," and I'm told half the beginners in the country learned it that way.

When you knit every stitch of every row, front and back, you get garter stitch, which is bumpy ridges, the same on both sides, lies flat, and doesn't curl. It is the best stitch in the world for a beginner and it's what the scarf below is made of.

The purl is the knit stitch's opposite twin. You won't need it for the scarf, but you'll want it soon, because knit rows and purl rows together make stockinette, the smooth "V" fabric you see in a store-bought sweater, and knits and purls side by side make ribbing.

The differences: the yarn is held in front of the work, toward you. The right needle goes into the stitch from the right side to the left, going in from front to back, so the right needle ends up in front of the left needle. Wrap the yarn over the top and around the right needle, counterclockwise again, then push the right needle back and down through the stitch to the back of the work, taking the new loop with it. Slide the old stitch off.

People find purling clumsier than knitting at first. It is. Your hands will sort it out by the second hundred.

Some things that will happen. Your first few inches will look terrible: loose, tight, wavy. That is what everybody's first few inches look like. Don't rip it out; keep going, and by the time you've got a foot of scarf you'll look back at the beginning and laugh. Some people give the first scarf to a dog, or keep it in a drawer to show the grandchildren.

You will also get more stitches than you started with, or fewer. Count every few rows. If you have 25, you accidentally made a stitch somewhere, usually by wrapping the yarn over the needle at the beginning of a row. If you have 23, you dropped one, which brings us to:

A dropped stitch is a loop that slipped off the needle and got left behind. If you don't catch it, it runs down like a ladder in a stocking. Don't panic. It's the easiest thing in the world to fix, and once you can do it, you're not afraid of knitting anymore.

Look down the work for a little loose loop with a row of horizontal strands, like ladder rungs, above it. That loop is your stitch. Each rung is a row it should have been knit through.

Get out the crochet hook. Put the hook through the loose loop. Catch the first rung above it with the hook and pull it through the loop. Now that rung is your loop. Catch the next rung and pull it through. Keep going up the ladder until you run out of rungs, then put the loop back on your left needle, the right way round (the right leg of the loop in front). Knit on.

One thing for garter stitch, which is what your scarf is: because every other row is a bump row, you alternate. Pull one rung through from the front of the work, then turn the work over and pull the next rung through from the back, and so on, front, back, front, back. If you pull them all through from the same side, you'll get a little smooth streak in the bumps. It's not the end of the world, but you'll see it. In stockinette, you pull every rung through from the smooth side.

If you can't figure out which way, put the loop on a safety pin so it can't run any farther, and bring it to somebody who knits. We love this. It makes us feel useful.

I want to tell you about one sock, because beginners always ask "how long until I can make socks?" and the honest answer is "when you're ready to be humbled."

I knit for fifty-five years before I made a sock. Scarves, hats, mittens, sweaters, afghans by the dozen, but never a sock, because socks are knit in the round on four or five little double-pointed needles with thin yarn, and every time I looked at a pattern it looked like a porcupine. In November of 1996 my friend Dolores from the church circle said, "Ruthie, it's silly, you can do a cable, you can do a sock," and gave me a set of needles and a ball of gray sock yarn.

The cuff took a week, because I kept twisting the stitches when I joined them in a circle and had to start over. Three times. The leg was easy, just round and round in ribbing, and I got cocky. Then came the heel.

A sock heel, if you've never seen one made, is a little miracle. You knit a flap back and forth on half the stitches, then you "turn the heel" by knitting shorter and shorter rows so the flat piece cups itself into a little bowl, then you pick up stitches along the sides of the flap so you're going round again, and then you decrease the extras away over the next couple of inches, which makes the gusset, the part that goes over your instep. I read the pattern nine times. I did it wrong twice. The third time, on a snowy night in January with the radio on, the heel turned and I sat there and looked at it like it was a baby.

The foot took three weeks because I got busy. The toe was decreases, and then a thing called grafting where you close the last stitches with a yarn needle so there's no seam, which I had to have Dolores show me at the kitchen table. I finished the first sock on March 4, 1997. One sock. All winter. And then, of course, you have to make another one exactly like it.

The second one took eleven days. That's how knitting is. The first one is for learning; the second one is knitting.

I've made maybe fifteen pairs since then. I'm wearing a pair now.

This has been a big year for our family. Three new grandbabies between March and August (my youngest, Karen, and my son Tom's two boys had a busy year, don't ask me how they planned it), two girls and a boy, and so this has been the year of the baby blanket. I've done all three in the same way, which I'll tell you about since a baby blanket is a wonderful second project after the scarf. It's just a very wide scarf.

Worsted weight in a soft acrylic (babies get washed a lot, and so do their blankets), size 10 needles for a looser, softer fabric, cast on about 130 stitches, and garter stitch until it's square, about 36 inches. About three of the big skeins. It takes me about three weeks of evenings. For each one I did a different color: a pale yellow for the first, a mint green for the second, and a lavender for the little girl in August, and I knit a little heart into the corner of each with purl stitches on a knit background, which is a trick for later. Two are delivered, one gets mailed to Arizona this week if I can find the right box.

Next up: Christmas. I have a list of eleven people and a hat pattern that only takes an evening. I may be optimistic.

Every Thursday morning at nine-thirty, eight or ten of us meet in the fellowship hall at our church with our bags and our coffee and we knit. We've been doing it since 1983. Some of the ladies crochet and we let them. We make things for the county hospital's new mothers, lap robes for the nursing home, and mittens by the box for the school, and mostly we talk.

Nobody has to know how to knit to come. That's the point of it. If you sit next to me, you'll know how by lunchtime. If you're a beginner anywhere and there's a church or a library or a yarn shop near you, ask if there's a circle. There nearly always is, and they nearly always want you. Knitting alone is fine. Knitting with people is better.

Dolores says hello, and to tell you that you can do a sock.

If you get stuck, write to me. I check the electronic mail on Tuesday and Friday evenings, when my grandson comes by, and I answer every letter. Send me a picture of your scarf when it's done if you've got one of those scanners. I'd love that.

You are visitor number
My goodness. Since February 1999.

Last updated September 16, 1999.
Other pages my grandson found for me that you might like: Sew What? Beginner Sewing, Stitches & Stories Quilt Guild, Aunt Peggy's Craft Corner, and the rest of the Fashion Avenue neighborhood.

© 1999 Ruth Schultz. Copy the scarf pattern for anybody who wants it; that's what it's for.