KASAD2 Plain Jane - Knitting for charity

KASAD2: Plain Jane

The Plain Jane is the staple of knitting for charity blankets. They are quick and easy and great for beginners. You can use them to try out new yarn and once you get going you don't need to pay much attention. Patterned and 'feature' squares are great - and we'll certainly get to many of those this month - but the Plain Janes are needed to space them out so it's not a clash of patterns. Plain Janes can also be used as the starting point to add some embroidery or emblishments to later.

To be honest, I actually love the boring, repetitiveness of plain knitting. For me knitting is a very important de-stress. I rarely knit in complicated stitches, I need the stitch, stitch, stitch, repeat of knitting to just keep going along. That said, I rarely do Plain Janes (a square of all one colour) as I get bored quickly, so I tend to change the colours and do stripes or blocks of colour.

Square 2

Materials- 8 ply yarn. Small amount only - approximately 50 - 60g
- 6mm knitting needles
- yarn needle to weave in ends, scissors to cut yarn.

Skills and difficulty
Beginner knitter
- cast on
- cast off
- knit stitch

Colours
In this example, light blue yarn is used.

Procedure
1. Cast on 32 stitches
2. Knit every row (work in garter stitch) for 56 rows (28 ridges).
3. Cast off and leave a 50cm tail.
4. Weave in beginning end and butterfly the tail.

Variations
If you would like to use smaller needles to make a denser square, then cast on the following number of stitches and continue until the square is as long as it is wide (ie, a square).

4mm:    40 stitches
4.5mm: 38 stitches
5mm:    35 stitches
5.5mm: 34 stitches
6mm:    32 stitches

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