Gauge & Swatching in Knitting

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Kelsey. I’ve been knitting for 10 years and I’m a member of several knitting organizations. I’m going to talk a little bit about gauge right now. Gauge is a tem in knitting to describe the looseness or the tightness of your knitting. It’s a really important concept, especially when you’re making garments such as sweaters or hats or socks or anything that has to fit. Often when you view a pattern it will have a specified gauge; knit this at 5 stitches per inch or 4 ½ stitches per inch or 6 stitches to an inch. That same pattern will probably give you a recommended needle size and a recommended yarn which are good to follow, but you sill need to make a swatch, which is a small piece of knitting and measure your own gauge to make sure it matches. It seems like a small thing, but even a difference as small as a ½ stitch per inch could mean whole inches in terms of your sweater fitting. When you’re making a gauge swatch there are a couple of things to keep in mind. You want it to be big, much bigger than this. You want it to probably be 4x4 in. This helps to balance out any sort of inconsistencies in your knitting. You want to make sure that you’re using the stitch that’s specified in the patterns, so if it’s a ribbed sweater, knit it in ribbing, if its in stockinet or garter, knit in stockinet or garter. You want to take your swatch and treat it as you would your sweater or your hat. Wash it as you would, hang it for a little bit, let it stretch out a little bit if you think it will probably stretch out while you wear it. Basically treat this swatch exactly as you would your garments so you can get a really accurate gauge and your fit will be right. Once you’ve got your swatch good and washed like it should be, what you want to do is lay it on a flat hard surface, such as a table. That’s a really important thing, so make sure you do that. Take a ruler, not a measuring tape because measuring tape will be too sensitive to bumps, take a flat ruler or a knitting gauge such as this one and lay it down. Normally, since your swatch will be bigger, you’re going to want to take the number of stitches and divide by four to get your stitches per inch to get a more accurate number. Because this swatch is so small, I’m going to count the number in two and divide by two inches. Never start at the edge, because your edge stitch is often uneven and a different width from the rest of them. Start two or three stitches in. I’m going to line up the first mark on the ruler with the first column of stitches here, then I’m going to go ahead and count how many I get to the two. So I have 7 ½ right there because the two mark falls in the middle of that column of stitches. Again, it may not seem important to count a half stitch, but it can make a big difference in the size of your garment. So I have 7 ½ stitches over 2 inches. If I divide by 2 that’s going to give me 3 ¾ stitches per inch. That’s a really wide gauge, and as you can see this is pretty loose. If I wanted to make it tighter, I could go with a smaller needle, which would give me a higher number of stitches per inch, and a tighter, less see-through fabric. If I even wanted to go bigger, maybe a little lacier, I could go with a bigger needle. Or, alternatively, if I wanted to make a tighter fabric I could use a thicker yarn. Or if I wanted to make a looser fabric, I could use a thinner yarn. That’s the stitches per inch. You also want to do rows per inch. If you’re doing garter stitch and also seed stitch, one of the nice things is that they’re even. You’re going to have a similar number of rows per inch as you have stitches per inch, so its going to be kind of square. Its good for making square things because you just cast on 10, do 20 rows and you get that same thing. With stockinet, you’re going to have a pretty different figure. Let’s measure the rows per inch. Again, don’t start with the first row or the last row, because that’s going to be a little uneven. I don’t have room to do two here, which is a shame, because when you’re doing a gauge swatch you want to make it bigger. I count 5 ½ rows. So I have 5 1.2 rows per inch, and 3 ¾ stitches per inch. So for example, if I wound up using this yarn and the needles that I used, to make a scarf that was 6 inches wide, I would do 6 times 3 ¾ and that would be the number of stitches I wanted to cast on. That is the principle of gauge and swatching, and it’s very important. It seems like it’s a step that’s boring, but if you skip it, you’re going to have a lot of trouble making something that fits."