Sizing in Knitting Patterns

July 22, 2012 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

Every time I write a garment pattern, I think a lot about sizing. Not just the number of sizes to offer and the physical/mathematical work of making the pattern for various sizes, but also more generally about the proper size the garment should be for people of particular sizes.

When I first started out I thought if a pattern said its chest measurement and mine were the same that must be the right size for me. In some cases that’s right, but in others you don’t want a piece of knitting that is your exact same size. A bulky sweater, for instance, or even just a cardigan that’s meant to be worn over another piece of clothing, needs to be bigger than you are to fit well and comfortably.

There are standards for the sizes of people you will find within a given clothing size, but that does nothing to account for ease, which is the fancy term for that extra space that makes a sweater more comfortable. And it’s not always easy to tell the amount of ease that ought to be found in a particular garment for the best fit.

Yarn companies and book publishers are getting better about this. Interweave Knits, for example, has its galleries, which show some garments from the magazine on a range of people or offer tips for customization. I’ve read two books recently that suggested how much ease you should have when choosing what size to knit, and the recent Berroco newsletter took on the issue with its presentation of the free pattern Talcott, which is an oversized sweater worked in a cotton/linen yarn (Berroco Linsey, by the way, which is an absolutely beautiful yarn — great to knit with, soft, gorgeous colors…).

Berroco says that its patterns are always the same garment size even if the measurements vary. So if you know you usually knit a medium, you’ll still want to knit a medium in an oversized pattern to get the proper amount of ease.

That makes a lot of sense, and actually is probably the way most people handle it.

How do you decide which size of a project to make? Any ease horror stories? Spill it!

[Photo by Berroco.]

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Knit Some Pretty Flowers for Spring

Whether because of Mother’s Day coming up or wishing spring flowers would arrive a little faster, now is a great time to knit yourself some flowers that won’t wilt. I’ve shared some flower knitting patterns before but I think these are all new ones that you can add to your collection!

These pretty little flowers from Fitting in Knitting on Etsy are great because you can customize them in lots of different ways. Change up the color, of course, but you can also make them with or without stems and leaves depending on how you want to use the. You can also make the center of the flower a contrasting color or not as you like. They use DK weight yarn and the flower itself is 6.5 cm/2.5 inches across.

Tina Vejlø Andersen’s lotus flowers (available on Ravelry) are so pretty and delicate. I love them in the purples shown in the sample but think they’d be lovely in any pastel colors. The petals are knit separately and sewn together, and knit stamens are also added. You can work the petals in three different shades or make it a single color. There are instructions for knitting a stem as well. The pattern uses fingering weight yarn and is available in Danish and English.

For a very different look, try the Puffy Petal flowers, free on Ravelry from designer Hanxiao Zhou. These are cute as purse accessories or backpack charms, and though the pattern calls for worsted/aran weight yarn you can use different weights to make flowers of different sizes.

Or you can make a cute floral bookmark from this design by JaNae Yagi. The flower is knit separately from the stem, which is made out of I-cord and includes a leaf at the end. The pattern notes on Ravelry say the yarn choice depends on your gauge, but finer yarns would be best for using as a bookmark.

If you want to try your hand at translating Norwegian, the Strikkeroser flower from Helene Rønquist Knutsen is really pretty collection of three roses the designer describes as having three different levels of difficulty, though they are all pretty easy. The pattern calls for fingering weight yarn and is free (though, again, only in Norwegian, but Google Translate did a good job with the pattern page) on Ravelry.

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