Calculating gauge from a swatch

I'm teaching a few machine knitting beginners at the moment, and I think the maths can be a bit daunting, so I figured it was high time I did a post about how to calculate gauge from a swatch. This also works for handknitting or crochet!

First you should make some swatches, using your desired yarn, stitch pattern and tension. For example, if I was knitting with 4ply acrylic on a standard 4.5mm knitting machine, I'd knit a tension swatch of 40 sts wide by 60 rows in tensions 5, 6 and 7, seperating each one with 6 rows of contrast yarn. I would actually cast on 50 stitches in waste yarn, and then transfer needle 21 on both sides and leave that needle out of work, to give an easily visible "gutter" to measure from. I mark what tension I've used by making 6 holes above the T6 section in the waste yarn - if you knitted T6 and one dot, mark this with six holes on the right and 1 hole on the left. The swatch should be cast off and washed/treated in the way you would treat the finished garment. Marking the swatch with holes is useful - you think you'll remember what tension you used, but believe me you'll probably forget!

Top tip: If you are knitting a tuck pattern, the bigger the swatch the better - for the Passap I knitted 100 sts by 100 rows. Note what you did for future reference, I keep a notebook for this!

The next step is to measure your swatches, top to bottom and left to right. I'll use the Passap sample mentioned above, the maths works the same no matter how you worked your swatch.

100 stitches = 32.5 cm wide

We want the amount of stitches per 1 cm, and to get that we divide the width by itself on both sides of the equation:

100/32.5 = 1 cm wide

3.076 sts = 1 cm wide

Knitting patterns tend to give the gauge per 10cm, so then you divide both sides by 10:

30.76 sts = 10 cm

You do exactly the same for the rows:

100 R = 15 cm

100/15 R = 1 cm

6.666R = 1 cm

66.6R = 10 cm

So 31 sts x 67 rows equals 10cm by 10cm (I round down if it's .4 or less, up if it's .5 or more). As this is a tuck fabric, it's a lot of rows to 10 cm. You can now check this against your pattern and see if you are close to the desired gauge. Personally I'd try and match stitch gauge over row gauge - it's much easier to add or lose a row every 10 rows, for example, than to try and recalculate stitch counts, especially around necks and armscyes.

You can also work this out another way - you can calculate the width and height of one stitch. This is useful as a double check. In this case, you start as before, but rearrange for stitches/rows not cm. I think this was known as "literal equations" in GCSE maths when I learned it, but I could be wrong! The pattern I was following called for 30 s x 67 r = 10cm square

100 stitches = 32.5 cm wide

1 s = 32.5/100

30 s = 30 x (32.5 / 100)

30 s = 9.75cm

100 R = 15 cm

1 R = 15/100

67 R = 67 x (15/100)

67 R = 10.05cm

I decided 9.75 cm x 10.05 cm was close enough to 10 cm square to go ahead with the pattern as written.

I hope this post helps with your calculations!

The machine knitting gods and the "art" of being thwarted...

TL;DR: A lot of stuff didn't work out this weekend, but I did learn some stuff and come out with some pretty socks!

So, we had a long weekend coming up, Easter weekend. For me that's Good Friday and Easter Monday. A lovely 4 day weekend - and the weather forecast wasn't great, so a perfect opportunity to get some machine knitting done. But alas, it was not to be!

It started well enough. Friday was overcast with a slight mizzle - started the day by getting up with the Cog (who had to go to work) and then going for a nordic walk - and the sun even came out briefly! Decided not to stop for coffee afterwards, the nordic ladies are a lovely lot but they all know each other very well (quite a lot of them are retired) and sometimes I feel somewhat socially inept amongst them. Plus I had things to do! Recycled some dead batteries at my usual supermarket and had a quick look for gf hot cross buns - alas, a shelf position, but empty. Carried on into town and struck gold at Asda - once I'd finally located the "free from" section, which took some doing. Picked up some fruit beers as an Easter gift and bought a takeaway sub in town and came home. So far, so mundane.

I had had a sore throat a bit last week - well, it decided, over the course of my long weekend, to develop into a full on head-cold snot fest. It hadn't shown up Friday night because we cooked chicken in a cherry pan sauce - nice, but sauce not v thick without flour alas! And I never attempt new recipes when ill!

Saturday morning I embarked on swatching for a knitweave cardigan, a lovely Sue Booth pattern. Dug out the AW1 but came a cropper barely 4 rows in - the chunky yarn caught in the spring of the AW1 and stretched it completely out of shape - I know, because some kind folks on Rav posted a picture of what it ought to look like. Mine's toast. Great. So I swatched the other way - which is really slow on a Knitmaster machine, because, with no pre-selection of the pattern, the yarn has to be moved from one side of the carriage to the other for every row! Argh! This is one thing the Brother is better at in my opinion. Despite the manual suggesting you thread the knitweave yarn through the mast and mimic the Knitmaster technique, it's much faster and easier to just lay it over the needles. So I have the wrong machine set up now. Drat. Did a gauge swatch anyway. You never know!

I'd seen a recent technique video posted on Youtube by a Russian lady - how to weave vertically on the knitting machine - and thought it might be the perfect thing to do with my Dream Week Challenge yarn - plus it looked like a lot of fun. I needed to knit a swatch for some black acrylic I bought with the DW in mind anyway. As it turned out it's a great technique, but not for very lumpy yarns, and the DW yarn is a black nylon icord interspersed with coloured squares which are much wider. Difficult to thread them through live stitches. Plus, some of the squares will not sit on the right side. Rats. Great idea but wrong yarn, back to the mental drawing board of my brain I guess. Looking at the swatch, the most effective is the red bit at the top - the Hayfield Illusion is a black and variegated yarn and doesn't show up well.

Ok, so park that - I'll have a go at the Swirl pattern. I printed it off a while ago - a simple rectangle and a short-row ruffle, plus sleeves, and you have a cardigan. Seemed fair enough. It was a bit tricky knitting Grigna at T10 - it's a boucle yarn and very lively at such a loose tension. I got part way around, and then suddenly realised I may have gone wrong. The pattern seems to be written in such a way as to do the short rowing part in two halves, but the first half is smaller because I wasn't resetting the row count. Or am I overthinking it? I parked it, so I could email the designer.

So project number three (getting somewhat annoyed now but trying to keep calm!). I've got quite a collection of sock yarn, so thought I'd have another go at the lace heart socks. The pattern is from a Jenny Deter's book and her version has 3-4 rows of hearts on the ankle, and then they continue down the foot. I chickened out last time, and one of the hearts came out wonky; the ill-fated socks ended up in the circular file when they later got felted in the wash. The patterns in that book use 1x1 rib to isolate the lace motifs - much easier to count stitches when there are a block of 13, not 72. The downside of doing lace with the ribber in place is that you can't see what you did on a previous row, or fix a dropped stitch - the CSM ribber is about 3mm higher than the cylinder and there's just no visibility. And guess what? On the second lace row, I dropped a stitch. So I had to transfer everything to the cylinder in order to get the ribber off, to try and rescue it. And as any knitter will tell you, rescuing a dropped stitch within a lace pattern isn't for the faint-hearted. Got the ribber off and bodged it as best I could - but then couldn't be certain how far I needed to tink back. You see, because of how a CSM works, you can't just take the ribber off, fix something, and put it back. To get the ribber off you have to knit around a bit to release all the ribber needles. At any time, quite a few of the ribber needles are within the cam mechanism - same goes for the cylinder - so the only way to fix a mistake is to knit past it and then tink it back. Tinking lace? Also not funny!

It had been an hour or two since the knitweaving, so I thought I'd measure my swatch. The stitches weren't far off, but the row count is out by a factor of 0.67, in other words I'd have to multiply by 1.3 to recalculate the pattern. It's sideways knit, so that would mean recalculating the neck and any armhole shapings. By this point I was losing the will to continue - I decided to go downstairs and slob out on the sofa, and do some more crochet on the blanket. Even I couldn't mess that up!

Sunday I was so full of cold I couldn't face anything too technical, so pretty much hung out on the sofa. Monday I frogged the Grigna (NOT easy!) - I've had some emails from the designer but I'm no clearer, I may have to call her. I also decided to snap the yarn on the lace sock (yeah, the CSM's feed is a closed system, breaking the yarn is quickest!) and start again. The original plan had been to knit the socks as per pattern - but again, I dropped a stitch and bottled out (although at least this time I managed to fudge it and pick it up again). Trust me, lace on a CSM is not for the faint of heart - though if you spot the note in Jenny's book, she does say it's a good idea to remove the weights whilst doing the transfers, but you must remember to put them back on again. I found a quicker way - grab the knitting above the weights and take its weight with your non-dominant hand whilst doing the transfers. Gives you a bit of insurance if the stitch does slip off your hooking tool. So at least I learnt something this weekend, even if again, the socks weren't as fancy as intended. That's a LOT of work! But so pretty!

Buoyed up by one mostly-successful pair of socks, and keen to get them off to graft, I started another pair of simple tube socks, in a lovely yarn I picked up at Kegworth (WYS Signature). It's knitting in really cool stripes, and unlike Knitpics Felici, isn't limited edition. Is it sad to admit I was really chuffed about that? Well, these self-striping yarns, you can never tell how they'll knit up until you do it - and the tension and width of your knitting can make quite a bit of difference, too. What looks great in the ball / skein can look very busy when knitted. Decided I'd do an ordinary short-row this time as the last pair still look nipple-like, despite washing!

It was getting way past teatime at this point, so the second sock is yet to be knitted. The cold is gradually easing off - yesterday, bending down for more than a few seconds gave me an instant splitting headache. Today, the cough is probably the most annoying thing.


Trying vertical weaving on a knitting machine - DW challenge yarn is bottom left.


Lace sock - smartphone picture and dreadful lighting, sorry! It was gone ten pm so no daylight to be found and I was too tired to do much else!


Stripey sock one - yes, my craft room is a mess, I know!

Current mood: okay

Switch Swatch

We're all delighted that one of our Rav members, Adriprints, is sharing her mitered detail cardigan with us as a MKAL on the big MK Ravelry group.  I've been swatching and washing on and off since Saturday trying to get gauge with the Kauni. Five swatches later, I finally managed to get 27.3 sts x 43 rows to 10cm - the pattern calls for 27 sts so I'm hoping that's close enough, I might have to add or subtract some rows if the row gauge isn't right. I'm well aware that the pretty swatches I made are unfroggable (Kauni is like a Shetland yarn) and thus the yarn is going down. As it's Kauni EQ I'm hoping if I do need another ball that the long colour changes of it will hide any dye lot mismatching. Here's hoping! 

I think in future I'll swatch three full numbers - eg T5, T6, T7 - and then fine tune from there. The pattern's written for Wollmeise but there's not a hope in h*ck of me getting hold of enough of that, and I'm not sure I want to - a friend brought some skeins to knit club once and I was underwhelmed by its rough texture. Of course, it might well improve when washed - I will keep an open mind should any fall serendipitously into my lap! :) I know it's prized amongst the knitterati.

Swatching is a tedious but necessary component of machine knitting (or indeed, any knitting/crochet where size is important). Just because you can knit it faster doesn't make it any less tedious, although in the past I've cheated by knitting either a front or a sleeve. Knitting a front means you can see straight away if the length/width is right and if the neck is decent or wider than the mouth of the Thames. You have the added complication that wide pieces might not be weighted proportionally as much as narrow pieces on the machine. In all cases, bigger is better swatch-wise. My usual trick of leaving needle 21 out of work was a bit fraught this time - it only really works on acrylics or non-slippy yarns but after washing it it's almost invisible in Kauni. Bearing in mind I've now made 5 swatches I've just tried plotting them in Excel to see if I could extrapolate whether 8. (8 dot) would be closer to 27sts than 8. The graph I got wasn't completely a straight line so I'm wondering whether one of the measurements is wrong. 

The boring grey jumper is finished. Going to Holland in the middle obviously obliterated some important brain cells, because Monday night I frantically knitted what I thought was the first sleeve, watching the yarn disappear and thinking there's no way I'll get a second sleeve out of that. Then I suddenly realised it's a raglan, and having completed the neck (THAT took several attempts!) the sleeves should already be part of the construction. Finally, I picked up the part-sewn jumper and realised the truth. The knitting is finished - I just need to sew it up and wash it. The Cog thinks this is all hilarious and is wondering when exactly I'm planning on growing a third arm?

I'm up to the armholes on the Quick Sweater. I was supposed to start them when the garment measured 12.5" from the hem. Which would be fine, except the garment is knitted in 1 row K2 P2 and 1 row K throughout, thus meaning I can stretch it. I'd much prefer a row count I think, because it looks like it might turn into a cropped top at the slightest provocation, and NOBODY needs to see that part of me! :/

Somebody told me this week that the garter carriage monitor can't possibly work because they don't have one. Well, I don't own a helicopter but I'm pretty sure they mostly work ok. Aren't people weird sometimes? It was a US invention and I have both sets of brackets (for main and ribber bed). I bought it to corral a naughty garter carriage I had at the time that would otherwise turn early just to cheek me - great if I wanted to knit bookmarks, but little else. Next garter carriage project I do I'll try and video it in use, and then there can be NO argument!

Someone chided me for trying a crochet project I was struggling on, too. "Why do that, it's too hard?!" Well, chimp work is fine sometimes, but sometimes I want to stretch myself. I learnt to spit-splice yarn last week. I remember my first major double-bed jacquard project, a banner for our knitting group (you can see it here at Godivafest). I was having no end of trouble getting a striped background, all I could produce was solid black, and I posted a query to that effect on one of the main Yahoo MK groups. The response, from one of the stalwart members, no less, was basically along the lines of "why are you doing this when you're a beginner?" To which my rude mental response was "not helpful, there's a deadline, just answer the effing question" and my polite response was, is - because otherwise I will ALWAYS just be a beginner. Without challenges, how can we grow? And I LIKE a challenge, even if I moan a bit when it gives me troubles. The only stupid question is the question never asked, and the only impossible task is the one not tried. 

Deep thoughts for a Wednesday!