Gauge swatches.
Just in saying that, I bet most of you have had some sort of reaction, whether positive or negative. For some reason, swatching for gauge is seen as controversial.
I am firmly on team SWATCH. I don’t like to start a project, particularly a garment project, without one.
Something I’ve learned in my years of knitting is that for me, gauge is key to whether I like the finished article or not. I’m quite particular – I like a tight gauge, and I don’t like it to be overly stretched when in use.
The other thing I’ve learned is that I’m a bit of a loose knitter. I often have to go down half a mm when choosing needles to achieve the same gauge as the pattern. Might be because I refuse to learn Continental and continue to throw; might be my tendency to make sure stitches are well up on my needles, a habit leftover from the days when I was terrified of dropping stitches; might just be the way I do it.
Anyway. Put those two things together and you have a situation where I need to do a lot of swatching.
Here’s the thing though – I am also inherently lazy. I don’t want to do anything if I don’t have to, and if I’m going to do something, I want to do it in the most efficient way possible. Which means I don’t want to waste time and yarn making the same swatch twice.
So I don’t.
This is my Gauge Library spreadsheet. In it I log every gauge swatch I ever knit: the exact yarn I used, the exact needles and method. The stitch pattern used, and the number of stitches and rows per 4″. I also calculate the number of stitches per inch.
Handy, isn’t it? This way, when I’m looking at a pattern that’s calling for a particular gauge, I can check the spreadsheet and see if I’ve done something similar. I have a filter on the yarn weight column, so I can only look at the weights relevant to the pattern I’m concerned with. I know if I’m only 1 or 2 stitches off I can probably get there with blocking – and if I don’t have a jumping off point, I’m not just doing a job before I can get on with my knitting, I’m adding to my own personalised resource. My gauge library is specific to me, the yarn I like to work with, and the way I knit. It’s useless to anyone else, but such a time-saver for me.
I also keep all those swatches! They get tagged with the basic info – yarn, needles, gauge – and stored in a folder. This part is really handy for designing – if I have an idea in my mind of a particular drape, or I want to refer back to a stitch pattern I’ve used before, I have a tangible reference that I can get out and investigate.
I find the little extra effort upfront is well worth it, and saves me time, effort, and frustration in the long run.
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