The Knitting Fiend

I’ve fallen in love with lots of these elongated stitches; they are beautiful and easy to work. Now I want to design something using them. Of course, I also want to write a calculator that lets other people design their own garment and use the stitch they like.

This presents me with a challenge because noticed these elongated stitches tend to spread as I showed in my previous article. That means I need more data than normal to create a calculator I can use for a wide variety of stitches and have my final garment look the way I want it to look. Since I like to write pattern generators instead of conventional patterns, I want to guide people to collect the same data, and use it to create the custom garment they want to knit.

To resolve this, I modified and extended my normal swatch making procedure to collect data! I’m going to call this swatch the “designer swatch”. Today, I’m going to explain why you might need extra data; that way thinking knitters can decide whether or not they need to knit a designer swatch rather than an ordinary swatch for a particular design. (Of course, if you don’t want to understand or decide for yourself, you can skip my next few articles, and just wait until I write the “how to” knit the swatch article, and later follow instructions on how to enter data to create your pattern. )

Many of you have probably read books like Elizabeth Zimmerman’s “Knitting Without Tears”, and Barbara Wakers “Knitting from the Top” saw they both use one stitch gauge, then provide simple formulas, and think: “Why is Lucia going to so much trouble? Surely she could just read Zimmerman’s books and just use her ‘rules of thumb’.”

Well. Rules of thumb are fine and dandy, but I gaurantee you, those rules will not work if you use an elongated stitch. Why not? Each “rule of thumb” relies on at least one assumption. Elongated stitch patterns violate at least two.

The first rule of thumb it violates relates to the average relative height and width of individual stitches. both Walker and Zimmerman’s rules of thumb for shaping yokes and sleeves that say things like “decrease ‘x’ stitches every ‘y’ rows” and they tell you the shape will just work out.

What I’m telling you is they might, for some stitches. Here’s the problem. The recommended stitch decrease rates assume that the ratio of the row gauge to the stitch gauge for the main stitch pattern you use to knit the body is at least somewhat similar to what you might get knitting stockinette. If you look at a ball band on a yarn ball, find the number of rows in 4″ and divide by the number of stitches in 4″ you generally find that equals between 1.25 rows/stitch and 1.5 rows/stitch. If you were to figure the gauge for my swatch to the left, you’d discover the ratio is 2 rows/ stitch. (Yep. The average row is shorter than stockinette! Which, by the way, I would never have guessed before measuring. I would have guessed these stitches would be tall and skinny compared to stockinette. But, evidently, the tallness of the elongated stitch does not make up for the shortness of the three rows of garter stitch.)

Why does this matter? Well, say you want to use this stitch pattern to the right and want to knit a raglan sleeve, and you follow Zimmerman’s or Walker’s shaping instructions, I guarantee you your armholes will be too much too shallow; in fact they’ll be 25% – 33% shorter than expected. An armhole that should have been 10″ deep would end up between 6.7″ and 7.5″ deep. Ouch!¹

The next rule of thumb the elongated stitch violates is this: it spreads when compared to stockinette. What do I mean by this? Well, remember, yesterday, I showed a swatch that was 26-27 stitches wide along it’s length, but some stitches widened and some narrowed? Well, if I knit a region of stockinette and then switched to the elongated garter stitch shown above, the elongated garter stitch would be much wider than the stockinette. ²

Why does spreading matter? Well, obviously, if you were just knitting a straight piece and changed stitches to create some sort of insertion, the width would change. This is generally not what you want!

Because “rules of thumb” generally assume you are going to add borders at the cuffs, neck and hem. These borders are generally ribbed of knit in garter stitch. The simplified rules of thumb suggest some number of stitches be increased or decreased when you pick up stitches for the border, or finish knitting a border and change to the main stitch. They might, for example, suggest you cast on “X” for the cuff and then increase 1 stitch every 10 stitches after the cuff. That will usually make nice cuffs if you are knitting the cuffs in ribbing and then knit the sweater in stockinette or fair isle, but just imagine the amount of gathering if you switched from ribbing to an elongated stitch that widens?

All these ‘difficulties’ can be solved if you 1) knit a special swatch and 2) do a small amount of math.

You can see the special “designer swatch” above and to the right. I’ll be discussing how to knit it next. Later, I’ll discuss how to use the data from that swatch to do the math needed to design the cape Yvonne showed us. After that, I might knit my niece a shrug. (I need to contact her and find out if she wants a shrug! )

I know you don’t all want to make that cape, but it’s still a good design lesson. It lets me discuss yokes, and how to figure the number of stitches to pick up for border! ( And of course, I’ll create a pattern generator that does the math for a person who wants to make a cape! )

1. Digression: Ok. So you are looking at the photo of my swatch shown above and asking why it doesn’t seem to spread?

Well, I don’t want to explain everything about knitting that swatch yet, but suffice it to say that the region 1 is knit over 24 stitches, region 2 is knit over 16 stitches, and region 3 is knit over 21 stitches. Yes, if I’d kept 24 stitches on the needle and just switched to knitting the new stitch, it the swatch would have spread 50% wider above the border.