Remember how we talked the other day about doodling out the important bits of a stitch on paper to help you understand it and how that can come in handy if you want to do things like scale a stitch up or down (or tile it…or mirror it…or offset it…or get it to flow smoothly into another pattern)? (It’s back a few posts if you want to listen to me flop fabric around and point at things while talking about it.)

Yeah, well this is what happens when you continue on down that path. The swatch is a scaled down version of the stitch on the mitt (and that bright pink hat you’ve been seeing for the last several days is a scaled up version of it).

I mean there are some other things going on with the swatch too (namely ‘what happens if we decide to make one of the ridges a different color’ and ‘can we slide back into ribbing neatly), because I’m a firm believer in using one swatch to answer as many questions as possible!

But ‘doodle it out on paper’ really is a handy way to approach modifying a stitch. It won’t replace actually putting needle to yarn, but it is a quick way to try out a bunch of options at the start of the process!