Without a ribber, forming knit and purl stitches on a flat bed machine takes a bit of work.

Here are 4 techniques that you can use to include purl stitches in your knitting to create ribbing and textured stitch patterns:

1. One of the first techniques that many machine knitters learn is mock ribbing. This is basically a hem that imitates ribbing.
2. Manually reforming stitches is tedious, especially on the smaller gague machines. But the results are worth the effort
3. Here's a decorative a cabled rib that is fun to knit on the machine.
4. There's no law that says you can't include hand knitting with your machine knitting to obtain the look you want. Even if you have a ribber, sometimes it's faster and easier to just pull out your knitting needles, cast on, knit a bit of ribbing and hang it back on the machine.