This is a typical swatch knit flat--knit a
row, purl a row, knit a row, purl a row--and that's great if that's how you're going to
work the piece that you're knitting. But if you're going to knit in the round, you're
going to want to swatch in the round because your tension with a knit stitch is actually
slightly different than your tension in a purl stitch, and you're not going to purl
when you're working in the round. But you don't necessarily want to have to cast on
60 stitches and knit essentially, a hat in order to get a swatch in the round. There's
an easier way to do it. You can swatch in the round but get a flat swatch. So that's
what I have here, I've just finished knitting a row. But instead of turning it over I'm
going to slide it back on my circular needles. Let me flip it over here so you can see, there's
strands across the back, it's actually forming a tube but only one side of it is knit and
the other side is just a strand carried across the back. So I'll show you how that's done.
I've finished knitting a row and I'm going to slide my needle through the whole thing
and I'm going to set myself up to knit my first stitch. And then I'm going to make sure
that I've got plenty of slack across the back. I'm going to hold my fingers up. Now you could
just drop it below and hold onto it here, it depends on how you tension your work and
how you hold your working yarn. And then I'm just going to knit my way across again. So
every row is knit, there's no purl rows because you're swatching for something that you're
going to work in the round. When you get to the end of the row, you just slide it back
to the end, to the end of the needle, bring your yarn across the back so it's nice and
loose, so you have those nice slack strands across the back, and then knit your way across.
And just knit until your swatch is the size it needs to be and block it accordingly.