It Was The Gauge

I rarely rush into things, and deciding what to do about my too small sweater was no exception. It still bugged me that I could be so far off and not sure that adding more stitches was going to work. I kept doing a bit of math and envisioning where I would add those stitches. But as I studied my swatch and the sweater itself, I noticed that those "v" stitches looked smaller on the sweater. The pattern gauge worked out to be 4 of them per inch, but now I put my tape measure on them to find an extra stitch in that inch. More calculations (and math is not my strong suit so this took some time) and wrapping my head around what it meant resulted in coming up with the exact measurements for the size down directions and understanding why. It's actually exactly the same as when you sew a quarter inch seam allowance when you are piecing together a quilt but maybe it is a sixteenth wider which doesn't seem like much, but over the width of a block, and then an entire quilt, suddenly your end results are smaller.

Having watched knitting videos and vlogs suddenly paid off as I realized I might not have to add stitches to match the next size up but just try a bigger needle size. Fortunately, I found one in my collection, knit up another swatch and easily made gauge with wiggle room. Time to "frog" the sweater back close to the underarm join. I don't think I've ever done this before but it is really quick to do and I just let the yarn pool over the top of the tote bag where the yarn balls reside.

One does have to be a bit careful that a loop doesn't drop down to the next row as stitches are mounted back on the needles. It was quickly obvious that getting them on the larger needle without dropping stitches would be very slow and hard, so I put them back on the old needles (still tricky), then started up knitting again using the new needles - transfer complete. I've knitted enough rounds now to check if I'm now at gauge and I am. I'm knitting a bit looser too - I think that was part of the original issue, that my tension as I wrapped yarn around the needle was much tighter once I got going than it was on the gauge swatch. Anyway, totally worth it to have figured this all out and hopefully end up with a sweater that fits! Plus I learned a valuable lesson of what to look for that I can apply to future projects.

What have YOU learned this week?