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It’s easy to knit a dropped stitch scarf on a circular knitting machine, because it’s basically just like knitting a regular scarf, with a drop stitch twist.
This pattern is a classic knitting pattern for the Sentro or Addi circular knitting machine. It’s quick and easy to make and they make great gifts any time of year.
Making a Drop Stitch Scarf
The key thing to understand with you knit a dropped stitch scarf is that it’s going to get a lot longer when you are finished than it looks on the machine.
That’s because as you drop those stitches, you’re releasing yarn that in turn relaxes the stitches around them, making them longer. The purple scarf shown here gained 27 inches/68.5 cm in length after dropping stitches, while the green one more than doubled in length, from 32 inches/81 cm to 66 inches/167.6 cm.
So if you want to make a scarf of a different length than shown here, just know that it doesn’t take a lot more rounds to make a much longer scarf.
Materials
The purple scarf shown here was worked on a Sentro 40-pin circular knitting machine using about 133 yards of Knit Picks High Desert Worsted in Lupine.
The green scarf used an Addi Express King Size (48 pin) and a full skein (208 yards) of Knit Picks Mighty Stitch in Marina.
Both yarns are worsted weight, so if you use a different yarn you should get a similar result. You’ll also need a little bit of waste yarn to start your project.
Size
The purple scarf came out 8 inches/20 cm around an about 42 inches/107 cm long. I feel like it might be better for a child/teen than an adult, but it also works wrapped snug around the neck as shown above.
The green one is 10 inches/25.5 cm around and about 66 inches/168 cm long.
How to Knit a Dropped Stitch Scarf
Cast on with your waste yarn and work three full rounds before joining in the working yarn.
Crank out your desired number of rounds: the purple scarf is 100 (because I like to start my experiments with 100 rounds; see also my double thick hat) while the green is 138 (no magic to that, it’s just how many it took to mostly use the yarn.
Cut your yarn leaving a long tail if you aren’t that close to the end. Thread the yarn onto a yarn needle and pick up the loop from the first stitch on the machine and every other stitch all the way around.
The remaining stitches will drop off on their own or you can pull them off of the machine as you go around.
At this point I don’t pull on the yarn too tightly, but starting at this end, stretch the project widthwise so that one of the uncaught stitches starts to drop.
Keep pulling until you’ve made it all the way down to the waste yarn.
Repeat on each stitch that’s not on the waste yarn, which should be every other stitch around.
Once your stitches have been dropped you can pull the yarn end tight to cinch up the end of the scarf.
Stretch the scarf lengthwise to see how much longer it got after dropping the stitches!
On the other end, grab the stitches you didn’t drop on a double-pointed knitting needle and remove the waste yarn.
Take the yarn tail from this end and thread it on a yarn needle. Slide all the stitches off the knitting needle and onto the yarn. Pull tight to close up the end.
Using one of the yarn tails, sew the ends of the scarf together to make a loop.
If desired, wrap the yarn around the join a few times as shown to cover it up a bit.
Dropped Stitch Scarf Variations
You can knit a dropped stitch scarf that’s not a loop by just finishing both ends and leaving them that way. I don’t love the look of the closed up ends, which is why I sewed mine together.
I tried both knitting and crochet techniques to join the ends together or finish the ends so they’d be flat like the rest of the scarf, but because the stitches are so loopy and open it was difficult to get the tension right. If you have a different method for finishing your circular knitting machine drop stitch scarf I’d love to hear it!
You can also play with how many stitches are dropped around the tube. I went with the classic of every other stitch, but you could try every third or fourth stitch (depending on how many pegs your machine has) or even do it kind of randomly. The key is that you don’t drop two stitches right next to each other, and never drop the stitch from the first peg of the machine.
Have you ever knit a dropped stitch scarf on a circular knitting machine? I’d love to hear about it!
