Friday, August 21, 2009

Pet Peeve - Garter vs. Ribbing for Front Edges

I was going to blog about something else, but then I tripped across this... Mind if I rant and rave for a minute?

(I'm usually fairly polite and reasonable, so I hope you won't hold this one lapse against me.)

I keep seeing this pattern. The Knitting Pure and Simple Bulky Shrug.

This drives me mad for a couple of reasons...

I have something that looks very much like this in my pattern repertoire. (As do others, I'm not claiming it's such an innovative idea).

but more to the point... I think that it has a fairly serious design flaw.

Now, this is absolutely not intended to be a personal attack on the designer or the publisher or anyone (or indeed the other designers who have created something similar).

But come on -- a garter edge at the fronts, when the upper and lower edges are ribbing? Ick.

How hard is it to work the front edges in ribbing?


Like I did here?

It's not like you have to pick up stitches or anything to work the ribbed edge - you can still work it in one piece.

I think it makes a much more attractive finished result. If you click to enlarge the photo, you'll see that the front edges are smooth and subtle. The garter edges on the other version stand out too much, in my opinion.

What do you think? Am I wrong? Is there something really great about the garter bands that I'm missing?

3 comments:

Northmoon said...

Sorry, personally I like the garter stitch, at least in the photo example you provided.

Dina-Purls said...

I don't mind the garter edge, but I know what you mean. The edge trims should match. I think if it were my pattern, I would have picked up the stitches for the bands and ribbed them (with or without buttons).

TracyKM said...

I agree the bands should match, but I would rather pick up the band sts and knit them outwards so they would visually match...an inch or so outwards in ribbing would look totally different than the whole length in knit-as-you go ribbing...that would be much more subtle and just not look the same to me. But...I wouldn't want to knit it if I read the pattern and see that I have to pick up sts for the bands, LOL, and I'd probably change the pattern to....garter st? LOL.