What is Gauge in Knitting?

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Christine Pachini for Expert Village and today I'm going to teach you some basic knitting techniques. So what is this thing called gauge anyway? Gauge is how you measure your knitting and keep your knitting in line with the size that a pattern requires. So basically the gauge is the number of stitches per inch. It's how we measure our knitting against the pattern that we're knitting with and make sure that everything is the right size. When you're doing scarves, gauge doesn't matter so much. A scarf can be bigger or smaller, it's still going to fit you. But gauge becomes really important with sweaters and stuff like that where you're actually trying to fit a person according to their size. And here's an example of two different gauges of knitting. This is a very large gauge, this is a slightly smaller gauge. This piece was knit using around size 20 needles and this was knit on an 8. And the gauge would break down to, for this piece, about 24 stitches per 4 inches so 6 stitches an inch. And for this one, you can see that this is an inch, this is about 2.5 stitches per inch much much bigger than this one. With a larger gauge your knitting will go faster, it will require less length but often bulkier yarn is more expensive for that reason than thinner yarn. And your knitting will go much faster than with a smaller gauge. So if you're a beginning knitter, don't start a project with size 1 needles like I did. It will take you a year to finish your sweater and most likely you will abandon the project before finishing it. "