Checking Your Knitting Gauge

Every pattern and most yarn labels will instruct you, "Be sure to check your gauge!" It is a very important step in knitting, especially when you're following a pattern.

What does it really mean?

Since knitting is made up of individual stitches and since needle and yarn sizes vary, there has to be a way to calculate the finished size of a knitting project. This is where a gauge comes in.

How Does it Work?

The idea is to knit to a certain size, usually 4" square and keep track of how many rows and stitches it takes to get there. Gauge will be different with all yarn sizes and all needle sizes.

When you read a pattern, it will usually tell you a gauge. Say for instance, the gauge is 10 stitches + 10 rows = 4" in stockinette stitch. You'll confirm this before you start the project. To do this, first check the needle size listed in the pattern and cast on the stitches.

For our example, say the pattern uses size 8 needles. Take your size 8 needles, cast on 10 stitches and knit in stockinette those 10 stitches til you've got 10 rows. You'll bind off your stitches and measure the finished product. Almost never will your results match the gauge listed.

Adjusting to Match the Gauge

Since it's likely your gauge will not match the pattern gauge, you'll need to adjust til you've got the right formula. Let's say your knitted swatch actually measures 3" square, not the 4" the pattern states. You have to figure out how many stitches and rows to add to get to the 4".

To do this for stitches, divide your stitches by inches. For our example, divide 10 stitches by 3". 10 / 3 = 3.33. This gives you the stitches per inch. Our target size is 4" so we multiply the stitches per inch by 4 inches. 3.33 x 4" = 13.32. Round to the closest whole number which gives you 13. So, to get to 4" you'll need 13 stitches.

For rows, do the same thing. In our example we knitted 10 rows and got to 3". Divide 10 rows by 3". 10 / 3 = 3.33. You get 3.33 rows per inch, so multiply that by the target of 4" and you get 13 rows.

So for our example, we've done the math and it turns out we really need 13 rows and 13 stitches to get a 4" square. Use these formulas for any stitch and row size to get the correct gauge.

Now that you've done all that work, you might want to start keeping track of gauges. What I do is keep a spreadsheet with all the gauge information. Since your gauge differs by yarn type and even yarns of the same weight are different, it's a good idea to have gauge information on every brand and type of yarn you want to know about.

I put headers titled Yarn, Needles, St/In, Row/In.

Since it's simpler to calculate with a gauge per inch than per 4 inches, I use my per inch figure in my gauges. If you keep track of this information, you'll always be able to reference particular gauges when you start a new project. This is really helpful if you make the same item repeatedly, i.e. scarves.