Photos from Garter Bar Filming

I've been refilming the garter bar course in glorious high-definition, and as I did it, I made some new samples and fished out the old ones, as well. Look at these photos of what you can do with a garter bar:

For starters, here's a picture of vertical weaving done with the garter bar. Fun, huh? I would have used Fun Fur, but wanted the weaving stitches to show. Here's you chance to use novelty yarns.

I do a lot of cabling with the garter bar. Naturally, I did an

rdinary 2 over 2 cable, and then some that are a little more unusual.

The blue woven cable was done with the garter bar. All those cable turns go really fast when you can do them all at once.

You can make eyelets, as well, with the garter bar. The key to eyelets and cables is a technique to transfer ONLY the stitches you want to move onto the garter bar.

I did a braided cable done with the garter bar, using the patterning system on the machine was set to select needles and "remind" me when to cable and which needles.

As a matter of fact, I used the machine's needle selection capability for lace, as well.

This simple zigzag lace was knitted by the needle selection to keep track of what to move. You could do a more complex multiple transfer lace, if you wanted to. Here's a way to do lace fairly

easily on machines with no lace capability - like the bulky I'm

demonstrating on.

Naturally, the lessons include decreasing across a row, increasing across a row, and gathering. I went over the simple calculation to determine where the increases or decreases go.

Often, the garter bar will work as a stitch holder instead of waste yarn, and one of my fave tricks is to use the garter bar to "park" the stitches from one side of a neckline while you knit and shape the other side. I use a twist tie to hang the garter bar from my

bulky machine's gate pegs, but on

the standard, the garter bar

hangs just fine with its notches against the pegs. Here, in blue, is a sample showing a very simple V-neck that was made using that method.

I also did this simple vertical dart. Vertical darts are much more

practical to do with a garter bar

.

In the pink and green photo, I tried to show Quaker Stitch's springiness when it hasn't been blocked and how it looks blocked flat (well, actually, acrylic sample "killed" with steam).

Finally, last but not least: garter stitch!