making - the magic of swatching

swatching is one of the most important tools in a knitter’s toolkit, and yet it frequently gets a bad rep (or is just completely ignored). knitters find it tedious, a waste of time and energy, and not always as accurate as they want. it took me literally decades to see the value in swatching, but now i’m a total convert! in fact, i created a whole challenge just around making a swatch. i’ve come to love them and rely on them, and i want you to be able to do the same. 

swatching can save you a shit ton of time. when we’re looking at swapping out a yarn in a pattern, even if it’s just switching the colour, it can be really helpful to see our stitches knit up in quick time to see whether we’re happy with our choice or not. if you’re doing a bigger switch - different fibre content, swapping out an all-over stitch for a simpler one, maybe even tweaking the gauge - you can take half a project to decide whether a yarn (or its math) is behaving the way you want it to, and by then you’ve potentially sunk 20 or more hours into it. imagine if you’d just taken a couple hours to knit a swatch at the beginning and known back then what you know now!

swatching is also a fantastic way to get creative ideas out of your head and into physical stitches! whether you’re feeling castonitis, are distracted by too many exciting possibilities, or you need something quick, easy and low-pressure to get your knitting mojo back on track, swatches give you a satisfying outlet in a fraction of the time it would take you to make even a small project like a hat or pair of mitts. i will frequently knit a bunch of swatches at the beginning of a big project like a new book or upcoming sock collection, label and store them together with the yarns and other materials i’m planning on using, and then my ideas are right there waiting for me whenever i have time for them, even if it’s several months or even years in between.

here’s an important trick when it comes to swatching though - you want to swatch AND THEN BLOCK the same way you’ll be blocking your final project so that you have an idea of whether the finished fabric will work for you. if you skip the blocking step, not only do you have an inaccurate measurement for checking your gauge, but you also don’t really know how the stitches are going to sit - will the cables be too flat? will the lace open up how you imagine it will? is the yarn going to bloom in a way you’re not expecting? blocking will address these issues (and yes, you’ll want the proper wires or blockers to help you out, plus those puzzle mats they sell at home hardware stores).

if i haven’t already convinced you that swatching is the way to go, here’s my final “hard sell” - it’ll help you win yarn chicken. swatches are usually 5-10g of yarn for a decent sized swatch, and if you use the same yarn for your swatch as you do in your wip, you have a built-in safety net of extra yardage in case you run out during your bind-off. how great is that??

if you want to give swatching a proper chance, try the creative coven challenge! and from february 21-25, you can do it LIVE with the support of other fibre witches and me (and willow)! both creative coven students and the creative coven community will be coming together for the week, and you can join us here.

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