Knitting Patterns: Measure Stitches

Video Transcript

"Once you've knit your gauge swatch to be about four inches wide, you're going to want to measure it to see if you're getting the right stitches to the inch. So, here's my swatch. It's completed, it's not on the needles. What I prefer you to do when you make your swatch is take it off the needles or measure it away from the needles because the stitches near the needle can kind of skew it to the top. You want to make a big enough gauge so that you're measuring inside because your edge stitches are going to be kind of funky and your cast on might be too tight or too loose. So, you want to be able to measure in the middle. So you're going to take your gauge swatch and you're going to line it up so that you can count those stitches. If you see right here, there's the V of the stitch. One, two, three, four, five, six, six and a half. So, if I wanted to get three and a half or seven stitches to two inches, I'm getting too few stitches to the inch. So, I'm knitting too loose. So then what you have to do is go down a needle size and put a marker so you know where you left off and you can see the difference. So then I went on and went down a needle size and knit the same thing again. You can see this is a lot smaller. So then, again, you're going to measure. You've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven which is exactly what I need to get this gauge for this project."