Tips for knitting stripes in garter stitch

In this post, we’re taking a closer look at knitting stripes in garter stitch.

I just love knitting garter stitch! It’s so relaxing and the garter stitch fabric is so soft and cuddly. I use it for scarves, blankets, shawls, washcloths…

Add some stripes and it becomes even better!

Colorwork can be as easy as adding some stripes to your garter stitch project. But sometimes those garter stitch stripes can end up messy. Today I will explain why this happens and what you can do about it.

Sometimes stripes in garter stitch look messy because the start and the end of a stripe don’t look the same or two stripes may look different at the color changes. Like on my gray and green swatch in the pic.

Some color changes look super clean and others add a line of dot’s in the old color over the new color at the row of the color change. These are called purl dashes or purl dash lines.

Tip 1: Garter stitch stripes with an even number of rows will always have the purl dash line on the same side.

So, to make things easy for yourself make stripes that are 2, 4, 6, etc rows high to ensure that the dashes appear on the same side every time.

Tip 2: Place a removable stitch marker on one side of the work. Make all the color changes when the stitch marker faces you.

If it’s not super important that the stripes are a specific number of rows this is a way to skip the counting part but still have control over the purl dashes.

I used this tip a while ago when I was knitting a scarf with leftover yarn in a lot of colors. I decided in which order I wanted the colors to appear and did each stripe as long as I had yarn.