If you are a fan of knitting shawls, the title of this tutorial may seem oddly familiar. That’s because I’m taking the idea of the garter tab and changing it in a few places. First, instead of knit, it will be Tunisian crochet; second, it’s done in a stockinette pattern instead of garter.

If you’re not familiar with garter tabs, the idea is simple enough–You make a thin rectangle then pick up stitches on three sides. The stitches coming off the short sides will keep elongating the thin rectangle and create one edge of the shawl. The stitches coming off the long side will create the body of the shawl.

To work a shawl in this manner you will need a Tunisian/afghan hook with a long, flexible cord. You’ll also need some familiarity with Tunisian crochet, of course.

For a left-handed view, hover your cursor over the photos.

For the purposes of the tutorial, I’m making my starter tab 4-stitches wide, and since I want to work with a body of 7 stitches, to start, I start by working 7 rows as follows

Row 1: Forward Pass: ch the number of stitches needed for the width of the tab plus one, pull up a loop in second ch from hook and in each ch across
Return pass, ch 1, (YO, pull through 2 loops) across until only 1 loop remains on hook
Rows 2-End of tab: tks in each stitch across

Now it’s time to start picking up stitches.

Tks in each st for the next row, but do not work the return pass.

Pull up a loop in the side of each of the previous rows.

For this step it helps to turn your work upside-down (Your hook will be facing upward if you let it go). Do you see where, with the work inverted, it looks like there are tks? (They’re actually the spaces between the tks you made before.) Insert your hook into each of these “tks” and pull up a loop. This is where having a hook with a flexible cord comes in. If you’re having trouble making it around the corner, move the stitches you’ve already worked to the cord.

Now ch 1 and work the return pass.

Your tab is finished, and you can work your pattern now. For my swatches, I used tss along the long side for the sake of differentiation.

To get a swatch like mine:

Row 1: tks in first 4 tks, tss in next 7 sts, tks in last 4 tks: 15 sts
Row 2: tks in first 4 sts, tss in next 3 sts, YO, tss in next 3 sts, YO, tks in last 4 tks: 17 sts
Row 3: tks in first sts, tss in next 4 sts, YO, tss in next 4 sts, YO, tks in last 4 tks: 19 sts
Row 4: tks in first 4 sts, tss in next 5 sts, YO, tss in next 5 sts, YO, tks in last 4 tks: 21 sts
Row 5: tks in first 4 sts, tss in next 6 sts, YO, tss in next 6 sts, YO, tks in last 4 tks: 23 sts

You can continue the pattern, increasing on either side of the center stitch, to make a simple shawl! If you need any help, feel free to leave a comment below.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2016 at 12:00 AM by Candace and is filed under Tutorials and Help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.