Knitting a Sweater: Gauges

Video Transcript

"Knitting a gauge is an important part in any knitting pattern especially when you're making a garment. Knitting a gauge is what will tell you if you're using the right needle, giving the right stitching to the inch. Without knitting a gauge your garment can come out too big or too small. So for starters, this pattern gets a bulking gauge of 3 1/2 stitches for the inch. So for my gauge I cast on 18 stitches and knit a swatch that's approximately 4 inches wide by 4 inches tall. When you're done knitting your gauge you're going to want to take it off the needles so that it doesn't get skewed by the needle. When you're measuring the gauge, you'll notice that you need the 4 inches because anything close to the cast-on the edges, or where the needles is will curl and skew, so you won't get an accurate gauge. So then I'm going to take a two inches measure and I'm going to place it in the center around the stitches so that I can count the stitches. What I'm counting are these little V's as you go across. So there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and a half which is just the right amount of stitches to the inch for this project."