Video Tutorial: The Seafoam Stitch

It’s a lot of fun to intentionally drop stitches when you’re knitting. Dropped stitches open up the work without actually increasing or decreasing at all, so it’s a great skill for newer knitters who might be afraid of yarnovers and decreases. I actually just used a simple version of this technique a few weeks ago when I knit my Garter Dropped Stitch Scarf you can check out at About.

Purposefully dropping stitches can get a little fancier than that, though, if you wrap the yarn around the needle more than one extra time and/or use different numbers of wraps on different stitches across the row. That’s how the Seafoam Stitch is made, and it looks like a lot of fun.

You can check out a video of the technique at Knitting Daily. The demo shows it as the edging of a shawl, but wouldn’t it make a great season-shifting scarf or wrap all on its own? For example, this really cute Seafom Scarf from Put a Sock in It?

Have you ever used dropped stitches in a pattern? Spill it!

[Photo by Put a Sock in It.]

I guess I must have had this pattern on my mind, because I had chosen this log cabin blanket recipe to write about, promptly forgot about it and a couple of weeks later started knitting a log cabin blanket using all my pink yarn.

It might stay pink if it makes it to baby blanket sized, or I might add in some pastel green and blue, too, to make a bigger blanket. We’ll see. I’m also holding several strands of yarn together to make a kind of bulky yarn, which means it’s deeply satisfying how much yarn is used even as the project is still relatively small.

In Kristen Finlay’s version, DK weight yarn scraps (or fingering/sock yarn held double) are used to make a simple scrappy log cabin blanket that’s lighter weight than my version. Log cabin is a great technique for knitters of any skill level because it’s worked in garter stitch. The only not completely basic technique you need for log cabin knitting is picking up stitches.

If you’ve never worked a log cabin knitting project before, this is a good introduction, and it is really nice to use all your yarn scraps in one big project you’ll use for years to come.

If you use a lot of DK weight yarn you can keep building on it whenever you finish a project, or if you use more worsted weight you can do the same thing with it, it will just be a little bigger starting out than the pattern calls for. How big it gets is totally up to you.

I have really been enjoying working on my log cabin project, and it’s my current sitting at my desk and need a break knit (do you have one of those or is it just me?).

Ready to start your own log cabin blanket knitting project? You can grab the free pattern from Kristen Finlay on Ravelry.

Need more log cabin inspiration? Check out more log cabin knitting patterns.

[Photo: Kristen Finlay]

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