Technical Twists: The Case of the Goofy Gauge

In this occasional series, I talk about tech editing issues I’ve encountered as an example of issues to look out for in your own pattern writing/knitting adventures.  All cases are anonymized  – the patterns and their authors will not be identified and I will give only the details necessary to explain the issue and how I fixed it.

I was checking the finished object measurements on a pattern where the finished object was supposed to be roughly 5x7, and the math was not mathing. My calculations from the gauge stated in the pattern were giving finished object parameters that were roughly square (about 7 x7), and yet, I could see in photos of the finished object that it was definitely rectangular, not square.

I had one clue in the fact that the object was entirely knit in a very textured stitch pattern that I had worked with before. I knew from my previous work with this stitch pattern, that it tended to have a very compressed row gauge (i.e. almost twice as many rows as stitches in 4 in/10 cm).  But in the gauge listed in the pattern, the row gauge was not even 1.5 times more than the stitch gauge.

At this point we were on the second pass edit for this pattern, all cleaned up and in the final publication layout, so I went back to the original text only file to see if something had been inadvertently changed when the pattern was moved into the layout file (which does happen occasionally).  And that’s when I realized the original pattern listed a gauge measurement calculated at 2 in/5 cm – and the designer had just changed it into the 4 in/10 cm standard in a previous editing pass by doubling the gauge numbers.

But what’s wrong with that? you ask, Shouldn’t the gauge come out the same at half size as at full size?  

In many stitch patterns, especially stitch patterns that are flat or even across multiple rows (like stockinette, garter, or even moss stitch), this might be true.  However, this particular stitch pattern was not flat or even – in fact it was designed to make a puffy, bubble-like texture, plus it was knit in bulky weight yarn.  Which meant that the smaller the gauge measurement, the more variation you would get in the row gauge depending on where on the swatch you measured.  2 inches measured vertically didn’t quite cover a full repeat of the stitch pattern, so the original gauge measurement wasn’t fully reflective of how much the gauge was compressed vertically, and when it was doubled it became even more inaccurate. There’s a reason why 4 inches/10 centimeters is the standard gauge measurement for knitting patterns and that’s because most stitch patterns will give a consistent measurement at that size.

I went back to the designer and asked them to remeasure the gauge on their finished object, making sure to go all the way to 4 inches this time.  Sure enough, the row gauge came out just about double the stitch gauge, and the math then calculated to the 5x7 final measurements that matched the finished object.

The takeaway:  As a designer, be very aware of the qualities of any stitch pattern you are using – if it has some dimension or variation to it, be very careful measuring your gauge! You may want to take a few measurements across different parts of the pattern (or have friends or test knitters take gauge measurements) to check that the gauge numbers you list in the pattern are what most knitters will get when they measure the gauge.  If you discover that you have one of the rare stitch patterns that needs a larger than 4 in/10 cm gauge to come out correctly, make sure to highlight that in the pattern, so knitters know to check on a larger scale.