Knitting the Basketweave Stitch

Hi, I am Toni Lipe with Toni's Design Studio. I am talking about combining knit and purl stitches. I wanted to cover a basketweave stitch. It's a series of several knitting stitches, several purling stitches across the row and then once you get several rows knitted, you start reversing those stitches and it looks like a basketweave, very nice for children's Afghans, whole sweaters and it is just a nice, easy pattern that makes you like you really know what you are doing.

To start, we are going to use a 4x6 basketweave. So, we are going to knit four stitches, one, two, three, four then we will pull our yarn to the front and purl four stitches, one, two, three, four. Reverse, knit four and you can see by knitting these series of four, we are always going to have to work with a series of eight stitches at a time to end up at the right number of stitches for the end of our row.

Once we have completed that first row of basketweave stitches, we will knit the knit stitches and purl the purl stitches. Right now, it appears as if we are doing a 4x4 rib. We will continue on until we have six rows knitted of the basketweave stitch. I am purling now and as we continue on, we will reverse the stitches so that we have six rows of knitting stitches, six rows of purl stitches then, in the next row we start with six rows of purl stitches, six rows of knitting stitches.

You are not limited to a 4x6 pattern. As long as you have the mathematics right and you end up with the even number of stitches on the end, you can make your basketweave as large or as small as you would like. That's the basket stitch. Next, we are going to start talking about increasing stitches in our patterns.