Short, Sweet and Nubby

This is a pattern to make a rectangular knitted object:

Here’s the whole pattern:

Choose your yarn, choose your needles, determine your gage with that yarn and those needles. Decide how many inches wide you want your object to be and how many inches long you want it to be.  Use your gauge to determine the number of stitches to cast on to get the desired width.  If that number is an even number, add 1.

Cast on an odd number of stitches.
Knit 1 row.
Row 1: K6, (k1, p1) until 7 stitches remain, k1, kfb, yo, k2tog, p1, ssk.
Repeat row 1 until you reach the desired length.
Cast off knitwise.

That’s it.  That’s all there is to it.  If you make the rectangular object narrow, it’s a scarf.  If you make it wide, it’s a shawl.  You use whatever yarn you want and you produce as dense or as lacy a fabric as you want by adjusting the needle size up or down.

It has a knit-as-you-go border that looks like it was worked with double crochets.  The body is worked in seed stitch.  Typically, seed stitch is worked over an even number of stitches in two rows like so:  Row 1:  K1, P1.  Row 2:  P1, K1, which means you have to keep track of which row you’re on.  But, when you work seed stitch over an odd number of stitches, you don’t have to keep track of your rows.  Every row starts with k1 because  the odd number of stitches automatically offsets each row by one stitch. I’m calling it “Short, Sweet, and Nubby.”