#short rows

This shawl is knit in garter stitch on US 10/6.0mm steel needles. The yarn is Lion Brand "Shawl in a Ball", which I bought many years ago and have tried to knit into a couple different projects that never turned out quite how I wanted.

I started with a 61-stitch crochet cast on. Row 1 a full knit row on the wrong side (after the first stitch, anyway, which is slipped) for the sake of consistency with subsequent triangles, and also because keeping track of which end is the "starting" end is easier when it's got the tail.

The triangles are shaped using short rows that increase in length by 3 stitches on each "right side" row, with a slipped selvedge—so, sl1, k2, wrap and turn, knit back to beginning of row; turn, sl1, k5, w&t, knit back to beginning of row; turn, sl1, k8, w&t, knit back to beginning of row; etc. I placed stitch markers every 6 stitches because for me that was the sweet spot between "minimize counting" and "minimize how often I have to interrupt the knitting motion to slip a marker".

Using this specific short row method in garter stitch—a wrap-and-turn where you DON'T pick up the wrap and knit it together with the stitch it's wrapped around, just let it hug the base of the stitch—is something I learned from one of Elizabeth Zimmerman's books; I think The Opinionated Knitter, but I don't have it on hand to check. It blends in really nicely with the garter stitch and gives a nice definition to the end of each ridge.

The last "normal" RS row for each triangle stops 4 stitches from the end of the row (followed by the usual w&t, knit back to beginning.) The final row, which is also the setup row for the next triangle, goes: BO the first 6 st, (k2tog, yo, k1) (this means stitches 7 and 8 are knitted together, and you pass the last of the bound-off stitches over that k2tog) to 7 st from end of row, k6… and use the 1 st remaining on the needle as the starting stitch for another crochet cast-on, adding 9 st. This means the stitch count for the next triangle is 64 st, the final stitch of which will become the base of the the next crochet cast-on—the method I came up with results in a crochet cast on that appears continuous, but nevertheless matches the color of the triangle it "belongs" to—and didn't require me to know when I started how many triangles I would end up with.