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The Garter Tab

 

Sooner or later, every avid shawl knitter will come across the Garter Tab. It is a popular method for starting shawls, but it can be somewhat fiddly to knit and many knitters dislike it.

Let’s look into it and analyze if this technique is worth using.

The Garter Tab is often used for triangle or crescent shawls that are knitted top down. With this construction method you start at the center of the top edge and the shawl grows from there.
 

 

If your shawl has a border – and most shawls do – that means you have to work a bit of border first before you get to the actual body of the shawl.
 

 

As an experiment, I tried making a mini-shawl without a garter tab. To show where the edge ends and the shawl body begins, I used different yarn colors.

This shawl started as follows:

CO 1 st.

Work one increase on each side, every RS row, until there are 7 sts.
The center stitch is the first stitch of the shawl body.
From now on, increase on both sides of this center stitch as well as along both edges. That is a total of 4 increases every RS row.

It was rather easy to knit, and the result looks like this:

 

Not bad, but there is something wonky at the center, right where I started.

The close-up shows the problems:
 

The increases at the center push the stitches outwards and distort the garter ridges. Those ridges had started out as horizontal lines but now they have to bend sideways to a vertical orientation.

Now you might say that this is a tiny area compared to the rest of the shawl, and that it might be noticeable in this mini shawl but would not be very conspicuous in a big shawl, and that’s a valid point.
If you worked border and shawl body in the same yarn it would be even less noticeable, but the problem of the distorted garter rows would remain. And nit-picky perfectionists like me tend to fret over things like that.

Fortunately, some other nit-picky perfectionist came up with a solution to solve this particular problem: the garter tab. I was not able to find out when the garter tab cast-on was actually invented, but it seems it has been in use for a long time.

 

What is a Garter Tab?

For this technique you start by knitting a strip of garter stitch and then you pick up stitches along one side edge of this strip and after that you pick up some more stitches from the cast-on.
For a step-by-step tutorial see here.
The stitches you picked up from the side are the first stitches of the shawl body. This means you do not squeeze in the additional stitches but you make room for them right from the beginning. The stitches you pick up from the cast-on edge are going to continue as edge stitches for the other half of the shawl.
 

 

How many stitches you pick up depends on your pattern. Theoretically, you could make a very short tab and pick up one single stitch from the side. But most shawls require 4 increases per row, and it’s a bit tricky to fit 4 increases into that single stitch. That is why most shawls start with 3 stitches or more. That allows you to spread your increases over more stitches.

The result looks like this:
 

The closeup shows the garter ridges that are now nice and tidy.
 

The only slightly wonky area now is the pick-up along the cast-on edge. You could avoid this by starting with a provisional cast-on. Personally, I only do that when the shawl has a reversible stitch pattern, or when the edge has a certain pattern I want to continue uninterrupted. For plain old garter stitch, especially when knitted with lace or fingering weight, I usually don’t bother. (See, I’m not that nit-picky!)

 

To summarize:

The Garter Tab gives you a pretty, even flow of the stitches in the edge border and it can be made totally seamless by using a provisional cast-on. Depending on your project, these advantages might well be worth the effort of working the fiddly Garter Tab cast-on.

If you want to see a video that shows the technique, head over to my new YouTube channel: Garter Tab Tutorial on YouTube