Knitting: Get started: Knit a dish rag

Posted: 2026-05-29

To learn to knit, buy inexpensive yarn and needles and knit a small dish rag.

Requirements

For yarn, get non-mercerised cotton¹ suitable for needles of any size between 4.0 and 6.5 mm. The larger the needle size, the sooner you’ll finish the rag.

These squares (up to a certain size) are called “swatches”. Knitters knit them when starting large projects, in order to measure “gauge”: the size of individual stitches under a specific configuration (tension, yarn, needle size). This is useful to adjust patterns to meet exact target output sizes.

Process

To knit the rag, you’ll need to:

1. Cast-on, which is used to create the first row of stitches. Search for “Long Tail Cast On”.

2. Knit a single stitch. You’ll repeat this a couple thousand times, perhaps tens of thousands of times. Because you are knitting flat, this means you’ll be knitting the garter stitch texture.

3. Bind-off, “closing” your live stitches to finish the rectangle.

4. Hide the tail.

Next steps

After knitting a few rags, you can:

• Add borders. To do this, learn to do a purl stitch. By alternating purl and knit stitches you can knit seed stitch at the beginning of every row as well as for the first and last few rows. I did this, for example, in Flurin’s Blanket.
• Knit a long rectangle and call it a scarf. You may want to switch from cotton to merino wool or alpaca.
• Add more textures to your repertoire.
• Knit in the round: create cowls or headbands.

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