I got my sweater edit back from the grader, but I’ll talk about that in a bit. Before I opened that file I used an old trick I have to see how well the clothes I’m making are going to for the size I’m making them for. I took my partially finished sweater to the store and laid it on top of another sweater that is also size 5T. They were very different…
I always have a tape measure in my bag and so I pulled that out and took a couple of measurements. The size of the yoke was fine. The differences were the length from the underarm to the bottom and the armscye. Those were the measurements I recorded and then finished shopping.
Later, I pulled my sweater out again and showed my daughter, who works with 5 year olds on occasion, she said other than a bit short it looked good. I also pulled out the size chart I used and one other to compare. The numbers were all right. I did the right number of rows based on the gauge so what’s wrong? I measured my sweater and it was about two inches short in the length. The armscye is right where it should be for the measurements in the size charts, the store had that bigger than needed. So now what?
Now, I am swatching, again…
I don’t know if the swatch lied. If I wrote it down wrong or measured wrong. I’ve been at this project for so long I can’t even remember what yarn I swatched with before starting the sweater.
Sometimes it looks like a swatch lied. It didn’t really lie, it just tells a different story when the picture is bigger. That is why the swatch patterns in many of my patterns are larger than 4″ / 10 cm the gauge is given in, to see more of the story.
I made a large swatch, blocked it and measured BOTH before and after blocking.
You can see in this photo that the unblocked swatch is square.
You can see in this photo that the blocked swatch is no longer square and the stitch definition is different.
The stitch gauge is bigger than I wrote in the pattern, but I’m not concerned about that. This piece is too flat for what I intended because I smoothed it out too much during blocking. The row gauge however is only slightly different from unblocked to blocked.
Well how different is the row gauge from the gauge I had written down to the gauge of this swatch? 5 rows per 4″ / 10cm. While that doesn’t sound like a lot, it comes out 1.25 rows per inch. When that is multiplied over the length of the sweater, it adds up to a crop top.
I have rewritten the pattern to reflect the new gauge in the row and round numbers. And have reknit it. The length is correct.
The edit overall went well. The editor had feedback about the newborn size being too big. I went back and did the math and yes, it was too big. I was thinking when I sent the pattern to edit that maybe I didn’t need all of the sizes, but the change in the newborn size means it gets to stay.
After redoing all of this math, I have sent the pattern back to the editor. More to come later. I’m learning a lot and that’s what’s important.
Happy Making!
Azariahs Fibre Arts 