Most professional knitters — and many other dedicated stitchers — will tell you how important it is to swatch beofre starting a project if you actually want it to fit the body for which it is intended.
Ball bands offer a suggestion of what needle might get you a reasonable gauge, but we all knit differently with different needles and under different circumstances, so it’s important to swatch so you know how many stitches per inch you are getting and how that compares to what the designer intended.
Berroco recently did a swatch experiment with nearly two dozen knitters using the same yarn and the same sized knitting needles. While six knitters got the same stitch gauge as the ball band suggested, fully 18 of them did not, and no one got the same row gauge as the ball band suggested.
The difference between the tightest and the loosest swatches was more than an inch in all directions, which would make a huge difference over the course of a garment.
We know knitting swatches is not that much fun, but it’s kind of like getting a flu shot. Getting a shot is far better than getting the flu; likewise, knitting a swatch is better than knitting a sweater twice because you didn’t get the right gauge the first time.
Do you have any gauge horror stories or times when knitting a swatch saved your bacon? I’d love to hear about it!
[Photo: Berroco.]
