Kitchener on K2P2 ribbing?

How-to Questions
1

Been reading the website a long time but new to the forum. I am trying to finish off a scarf that I’m making for my wife. It is a Seaman’s scarf where you knit the two halfs from either end and then join them in the middle (pattern calls for kitchener stick). When I picked the pattern and checked around to make sure I could do it, I didn’t realize that all the instructions I found were for stockinette stitch and don’t work well for ribbing.

Does anyone have a resource to show me how to join this ribbing? I’d be most appreciative!

2

Welcome to Knitting Help!

Here’s page with a chart for grafting the different stitches. Reverse stockinette is what you’d do for the purls.

3

I recently saw a Seaman’s scarf pattern made the way you describe. So it was ribbing in the middle where it was joined, but they had you do the last row of each side in St st and then had you graft that. I don’t know how that looks but if you can’t figure out the ribbing graft that might be something to try.

4

Last fall I hunted for help on grafting 2x2 ribbing and found this excellent post from administrator Amy: http://www.knittinghelp.com/forum/showthread.php?t=33240&highlight=grafting+top+bottom+rib

I had to study the instructions for a while before it started making sense to me, and it also helped me a lot to write it out for myself in the words I use to keep track of myself while doing kitchener grafting.

For example, with regular stockinette grafting, I think of it as [FONT=“Courier New”]

prep:[COLOR=“White”]…[/COLOR] (front) purl;[COLOR=“White”]…[/COLOR] (back) knit
main part: (front) knit, purl; (back) purl, knit[/FONT]

When you are grafting stockinette, the two stitches you are about to work on always KK (because all the stitches are K). When you are grafting 2x2 ribbing there are four different possibilities for those two stitches at the tip of your needles:

[FONT=“Courier New”]KK [COLOR=“White”].[/COLOR] [/FONT] (which you are used to, it’s just like stockinette)
[FONT=“Courier New”]PK
PP
KP[/FONT]

(That is, [FONT=“Courier New”]KP[/FONT] (above) means the stitch at the tip of the needle is P, and the stitch just to its left is K.)

So you need a different “mantra” for each combination.
[FONT=“Courier New”]
KK[COLOR=“White”].[/COLOR] (front) knit, purl; (back) purl, knit
PK[COLOR=“White”].[/COLOR] (front) knit, knit; (back) knit, purl
PP[COLOR=“White”].[/COLOR] (front) purl, knit; (back) knit, purl
KP[COLOR=“White”].[/COLOR] (front) purl, purl; (back) purl, knit[/FONT]

Amy explains in her post why in a couple of spots these aren’t what you might predict based on analyzing the pattern. And she’s right: I tried it both ways too, and her way does come out better.

Good luck!

Anise

5

So I finished up the matching hat 2 nights ago, so now I’m ready to pick the 2 halves of this scarf back up and give these tips a try. Thanks!

6

Got it all finished up and she’s wearing it - thanks again!