Smart Swatches

Swatches are not very glamorous, but they're an amazing tool to ensure knitting success.

At one point, I dragged out every swatching tip I ever encountered and made a Knit Natters demo out of it. I incorporated that demo into the beginner course in this lesson:

Lesson 28 Gauge Swatch

When you routinely knit a swatch this way, you get all these benefits:

• It's the right size for the Knitleader (and good for DAK, too)
• There are a bunch of places where you can measure width, just in case you stretched a little too much in one area when blocking
• It's big enough so you don't have to measure to the edge for anything
• It's big enough to really feel the texture
• The eyelet holes give you a permanent marking of your tension settings
• Both cast-on and cast-off are finished, and you can launder it like the real garment without fear of it unravelling (and you need to launder it like the garment)
• Doing a pattern stitch? Of course, knit the swatch in pattern! This helps you assess what it's like to knit and gives you measurements of the real deal.
• The swatch is big enough that you can weigh it and measure it and those square inches can help with planning the yarn requirements.

In the past, I've gotten a nice cone of yarn and made the swatch, then rolled it and tucked it inside the cone for the day I could actually begin to knit that yarn. That swatch gives me a better idea what the yarn will be like than looking at and feeling the cone.