A New Way to Look at Gauge!

We all know that in order to make a finished project the size that we expect, we need to match the pattern gauge, right? We know that, even if we don’t always do a gauge swatch! 

Now, we also know that it may take several tries on different-sized needles to ‘get gauge’. Sometimes it can be quite frustrating and time-consuming. Experienced designers tell us that swatching is a wonderful way to get to know your yarn, if it will be suitable for the idea you have in mind, and it is also a good way to practice any design elements. However, most of us just want to get on with the knitting!

Well, how about if we turned the idea of swatching to get gauge on its head? What if we swatched first and only chose a project after we know what our gauge is? We may still knit a few swatches, maybe baby ones to see if we like the fabric we created. Once we’re pretty sure we like the fabric, how it drapes, how dense it is, depending on what we want to do with it, we can then make a larger swatch. Once we have the larger swatch, we will have a nice amount of fabric to measure to get stitch and row gauge. By ‘larger swatch’, I mean at least a four inch square! Before progressing, block the swatch and count your stitches to get your stitch gauge.

Next, we turn to Ravelry! In the upper left corner of the home page, right next to the red logo, click on patterns. Under the Search Patterns box click on advanced search. Over on the left side you’ll see a list of boxes with headings such as category or weight. Scroll down until you get to the bottom where you'll find a listing of more search options. In this list you’ll find Gauge (4 in). Click on it. 

Up will come a box where you can input a range of stitch numbers. Let’s say you have 22 stitches over four inches of fabric. Enter 22 into both of the boxes. You will find 1275 pages of patterns! That’s a bit mind-boggling so let’s go back and narrow it down. 

For our hypothetical project, we have a gorgeous skein of fingering weight yarn. Our yarn for this project is a souvenir from a trip and we want to make something special. We have 437 yards. Going back to the boxes on the left, we can narrow our search by going to the Category box, clicking on Accessories, and choosing Neck/Torso. We can narrow that down by deciding what we might want to make. For our project, we aren’t quite sure so we’ll choose cowl, poncho, and shawl/wrap. We get bored knitting scarves so we’ll leave that out! Hmmm, this gives us 166 pages of patterns….better but not good enough.

We head back to the boxes and in the Weight box we choose fingering. Aha! Now we have only 64 pages of patterns but still, that’s more than we want.

Let’s look at some more filters. In the Craft box, we choose knitting.

In the Availability box, we choose Ravelry download. 

In the Yardage box, we choose 300 - 450 yards.

In the Colors used (typical) box, we choose 1

These are a few of the patterns that popped up!

Success!  We have narrowed down our search to 10 pages of patterns. At the top of the page, choose the drop-down menu under the Sort by box. This will give us lots of options. Let’s choose Most projects to start with. Now the fun begins! What do we want to make? What will best show off our yarn? And you know what the best thing is?  You can start right in!!!!

Let us know if you decide to use this way to choose a project!

Happy knitting!