Thanks to Sara Delaney for this week’s knitting tip on Swatching in the Round by Knitting Flat. This is a particularly good tip if you know your gauge knitting in the round is different than when you knit flat.

My friend, and one of our WEBS instructors, Annie Foley taught me this great trick.

When making a gauge swatch you want to work the swatch in the same manner and on the same needles as the peice you are swatching for. If you are planning to work in the round the best way to swatch is, of course, in the round but casting on 80 stitches to swatch on a 16″ needle or working your whole sweater on double points is kind of ridiculous. Why not just cast on 4″ worth of stiches on the 24″ circular needle you’ll be using for the sweater!

The trick is to work the whole swatch like a big i-cord. Knit across your stitches then DO NOT turn your work over, instead simply slide the stitches all the way back to the right-hand end of the needle and begin working them from right to left again. Just be sure to pull your working yarn across the back of the work nice and loose, leaving lots of slack.

This will leave the stitches along either edge looking all loosy-goosy but the center stitches will truly represent your gauge as worked in the round.

 

You’ve heard the phrase “gauge swatches don’t lie”. But what happens when you forget what needle size you used for a swatch? You take the time to knit a swatch, trying multiple needle sizes; wash and dry it. Then as you unpin it from your blocking board and admire it, you look down and see a big pile of knitting needles of various sizes piled together. Wait, which size needles did I use again? All that work swatching and now you have to guess at the needle size used.

This has happened to me more than a few times. Sometimes the amount of time from when I swatch to when I’m ready to start knitting a project is too long, and I just can’t remember which needles I used. To deal with this issue, I’ve started knitting a row of eyelets into each section of my knitted swatch. Each set of eyelets represents the needle size I used.

swatch knit with US 6, 5, and 7 knitting needles

If you’ve never knit eyelets before, it’s an easy thing to incorporate into a stockinette swatch.

• On the knit side, knit across a row until you’re ready to add some eyelets.
• [YO, K2tog] repeat until you’ve created the same number of eyelets as your needle size.
• Continue knitting to the end of your row.
• On the purl side of your swatch, purl across as your normally would. You should have the same number of stitches as the previous rows.

Do you swatch before every project? Or are there only certain types of projects you will swatch for? Tell us about your swatching habits in the comments.

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