irish moss stitch slanted

hi! i am making a scarf using the irish moss stitch (rows 1 +2: k1, p1 rows 3+4: p1, k1) and the bottom is slanting. i don’t believe my stitches are twisted and i’ve gone down a needle size but the issue persists. pics below, please help me

for the record, the yarn is lion brand yarn heartland

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Hello,
I’m new here too. I will be interested to read what the issue might be with the bottom edge.

Otherwise I think it looks great, I really like that stitch.

Welcome to the forum!
There’s usually a strong diagonal in the irish moss similar to that seen here:

It may be that your yarn is so soft, it’s obscuring this pattern. Can you check the row on the needle now to make sure it alternates knits and purls? It’s difficult to tell in the photo.

It may be that washing and blocking (pin out to straighten the slant) will correct the slant that you see at the lower edgle. That might be due to different tension between knits and purls. Most of us have that different tension although we try to keep even tension between the two sts. Sometimes that just comes with practice and a bit of conscious effort.

The scarf is lovely nonetheless.

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it is alternating knit and purl on the needle! i figure since i don’t want to frog it for the 5th time blocking is my best bet. i would like to know why it slants and how to prevent/mitigate it for my next project

I think that part of you problem is that your gauge has changed. You said that you went down a needle size so your gauge is tighter. This will make the beginning larger and made the edge slant. You can see the difference in the photo. Are you a beginner and just learning to knit? That is another reason for your gauge to change.

it was more slanted with the larger needles. i went to down a needle size after frogging the whole thing so there was no gauge change on account of that. i’m not a beginner and have worked with other stitches alternating knit and purl but they weren’t slanted

There’s a bit at the end of this blog (before the comments) about moss stitch and bias. Happily the problem seemed to be solved with blocking.

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I have had this happen to me as well, although in my case I was knitting a sleeve in the round and the faux seam ended up gradually spiralling around the sleeve instead of going straight up.

It resolved with blocking. I hope yours does too, although if you changed needle sizes then the first part of the scarf is going to be wider than the rest, even if it squares up.

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i realize now that the wording of my post was a bit ambiguous but i can’t figure out how to fix it. first i used us size 9 needles, i made and then frogged the scarf about three times. so i decided to frog it and go down to us size 8 needles.

blocking is how i’m gonna try to fix it and at this point i’ll probably be ready for that by the end of the weekend

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