A Knitter’s Blog

When I first started knitting over 50 years ago, I don’t remember my mother or my aunts teaching me about gauge. I do remember going to the yarn store, choosing a pattern, and then the shop owner pointing us to the yarn from which we could choose to knit the garment.

Once we chose the pattern, there really wasn’t much else to do but to choose color. Bert, the owner, would check the pattern for size and the number of skeins we needed. She would then ask if we had the needles. If we didn’t, she would again check the pattern, and add needles to our order.

In those days, patterns didn’t even provide a row gauge. They must have provided a stitch gauge, but I have no memory of stitch gauge.

Most patterns were published by the yarn companies and were written specifically for their yarn. If you bought a Bernat pattern book, then you would be using the specific Bernat yarn. The assumption being that you would knit at the same gauge, using the same size needle as the person who knit the sample.

The pattern never directed the knitter to increase every x number of rows, but to increase every 1/2 inch or some variation of a measurement.

One was considered an accomplished knitter if the finished garment fit as it was intended to fit. In other words, if one could replicate the gauge of the person who knit the sample, then one could join the master knitting class.

There was no such thing back then of substituting the suggested yarn with another yarn.

My Aunt Teresa, an accomplished seamstress, was the only one I knew who really understood construction of the knitted garment. She never needed the text directions in a pattern. All she needed to do was look at the picture, and she could replicate any sweater.

However, if we asked her how she could do such a miraculous thing, she could not explain it to us. I think she had years of accumulated knowledge that just translated into the hand movements.

She was the person who saved my many failed projects when I was a young knitter.

It is unthinkable for us today not to know the gauge of our current project. It is equally unthinkable that we should start a project without knitting a gauge swatch.

Yet, many of us, caught up in the excitement of working with a new yarn and a new pattern, just cast-on and hope for the best.

How many projects that were started with “hoping for the best” have ended up in the unfinished box or given away to good will because finished, the garment didn’t fit the intended recipient?

More tomorrow…

Filed under: Knitting by cwulster