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At this point if you have been following the crochet lessons and practicing, you have a good amount of experience with stitching. Before you start your first sweater, let’s discuss a subtler point than the making of stitches: gauge, also known as tension.
Everyone crochets differently. Even two people who appear to be working identically – same hook hold, same yarn wind around their fingers, and even the same yarn and hook selections – will not produce an identical finished item. They are unlikely to be moving the hook in the same way, holding onto the yarn with equal tightness, or pulling the same distance after each yarn over. Even the same person can crochet differently from day to day depending on stress level, choice of seat (dining table versus easy chair), and other factors. This is a handcraft, not a mechanical process in a factory.
Consistency with yourself is desirable, of course, and practice is the main factor in that. You’ve likely noticed your tension has changed since the start of your crochet career. Make sure you are practicing correctly: firstly, insert your hook all the way to its maximum diameter whenever you are making a new loop of yarn. Inline hooks typically get to that point sooner than non-inline hooks, but either way it is the full diameter that gives the measurement of the hook in millimeters. Secondly, don’t stretch the yarn. It should be fitted to the hook but no more taut than it was in the skein.
Being consistent in your equipment can help as well. Clearly, even with the same yarn, different size hooks will produce different size stitches. What is not obvious is that the same size hook of a different type can also produce different size stitches. Many people report their stitches are larger when made with an ergonomic or comfort-grip hook, because they aren’t pinching the hook tightly. A tight grip can translate to tight stitches. The mouth of an inline hook is a different shape and depth than the mouth of a non-inline hook, which means the same motion puts the yarn in a slightly different place. Slight differences in stitching, multiplied over the many yarnovers in a crocheted piece, can add up to large differences in the finished work.
But back to more large-scale differences. What happens when a person who crochets more loosely with a given hook and yarn wants to make a sweater or hat from a pattern designed by a person who crochets more tightly, or vice versa? Or if the person wants or needs to use a different yarn than is recommended? How do they get the correct size? Enter the gauge swatch.
A gauge swatch is simply a square of test fabric. If the pattern’s main pieces are fields of double crochet, the swatch will be a square of double crochet; the pattern should tell you what to stitch up to check gauge. Once you have the swatch, you’ll let it rest a while so the yarn can relax, and then make measurements. For the best accuracy, do everything that you will do to the finished item: washing, drying, and blocking. [Blocking is essentially the yarnwork substitute for ironing, which will smash your stitches and possibly damage the yarn. For Dummies has information about spray-blocking and wet-blocking.] The pattern will tell you how many stitches and how many rows should fit in a given distance.
The other important factor in accuracy of the gauge swatch is leaving a margin between the edge and the parts you will be measuring. If the pattern tells you how many stitches are in two inches, make your swatch 4″x4″. If it uses four inches, go for 6″x6″. The stitches and rows near the edges of the swatch will be somewhat different from the ones in the middle, and if you’re making a sweater the ones in the middle will have a far greater impact on the size of the finished piece. Knitting and Crocheting Smart has pictures of measuring gauge. I do it a little differently, though. I put the end of the ruler between two stitches or rows and look for a place where some whole, half, or quarter-inch mark on the ruler is also between two stitches or rows. Then I do arithmetic to find the number of stitches in the distance specified by the pattern.
Here are some swatches to give an example. They were all made by chaining 20 and then single crocheting 25 rows. The darker pink swatches are Red Heart With Love, a substantial, solid yarn with a slightly fuzzy texture. The brighter pink swatches are Caron Simply Soft, a thin, almost slippery yarn with strands that have a tendency to separate as you work. Both are 100% acrylic and yarn weight class 4-Medium. The larger swatch of each yarn was made with a K hook (6.5mm) and the smaller with an H hook (5mm).
Left to right, Simply Soft H, With Love H, Simply Soft K, With Love K.
The gauge was as follows:
| Simply Soft H | With Love H | Simply Soft K | With Love K | |
| sc per 4″ | 14 | 11.2 | 11.4 | 9.6 |
| rows per 4″ | 17 | 12.8 | 14.5 | 11.8 |
Note that these yarns were in the same weight class! Despite that, they are not interchangeable, and the ball band (yarn label) reflects this: Simply Soft suggests using an H hook (5mm), and With Love a K hook (6.5mm). For more of this sort of study, visit PlanetJune for a comparison of eight worsted weight yarns. She found her single crochet stitch width varied by a full millimeter among them. That may sound negligible, and in a throw blanket or scarf it pretty much is, but in a sweater that is 70 stitches across in the back, it adds up to 2.75 inches. Novelty yarns, which for our purposes are those that are furry, loopy, ribbony, or otherwise not smooth, also stitch up differently from smooth yarns. More on that in the last page of this series.
Once you have measured your gauge, how do you fix differences between it and the pattern gauge? If you haven’t committed to a yarn, trying for one that is more similar to the recommended one can help. However, most of the time when you are at the point of making a gauge swatch you’ve already chosen and paid for a half dozen skeins of yarn (or more) and want to use them! Changing hook size is the first approach in that case. If your stitches are small (too many of them per inch), go with a bigger hook, and if they are large (not enough per inch) go smaller. As stated above, an ergonomic or comfort-grip hook may result in larger stitches than a plain straight-shafted hook. Adjusting your actual stitching motion may be in order for fine-tuning, as explained by Vashti Braha (though she is discussing double crochet, the technique applies more broadly).
Instead of changing your gauge you can also change the pattern, adding or subtracting a few stitches to correct widths. This article from JimmyBeansWool, which includes poetry, discusses getting “close” with hook size and adjusting stitch counts to fine tune. This article from Crochet Geek gives a more explicit example of adjusting stitch count. Knowing your gauge with a given stitch pattern is the first step in designing your own crochet clothing, as explained by example at Knitting and Crocheting Smart, or simply adjusting a commercial pattern to a different yarn or size, as discussed at Hands in Delight.
You’ll note that gauge is closely tied in to selecting yarn and hooks for a project, which matters even when size does not. For starters, here is a page on tightness of gauge and resulting fabric qualities from the For Dummies site. It is in their knitting section but applies to crochet as well. The Crochet Geek article linked above makes some comments on that as well, talking about swapping out yarns and hooks and using the gauge given in the pattern and the gauge of the swatch made with the desired materials to calculate stitch counts to achieve the same size garment. The swatch can tell you whether your choice of yarn has the right drape when stitched up, and whether the yarn and stitch pattern show each other off to best advantage.
The yarn label will usually have a suggested gauge, with hook size and stitches and rows per height and width. I have found a number of sites that recommend using this to guide yarn substitution. However, June also found in her comparison that at least one of the yarns had gotten thinner over the past five years, without a change in the recommended hook size on the label. I hope to make a study eventually of how my gauge compares to label gauge through different yarns, seeing whether it is a consistent amount (and direction) off from the label gauge or not. For now I would advise using it with caution, as it is a good first step (after all, Simply Soft and With Love even recommend different hook sizes), but likely not foolproof.
Crochet Brain has calculators for yarn and hook substitution. This will do the arithmetic for you to estimate the number of skeins of substitute yarn you’ll need, and the hook substitution if the pattern uses two hook sizes but only gives gauge measurements for one, and you’ve changed hook size on that. Remember that it’s just an estimate, though!
Hopefully you feel informed at this point rather than overwhelmed. Just remember that while so many variables makes it hard to control all of them at once, it also means you have many options for making it work. The approach of getting close via hook size and fine-tuning with stitch count is quite effective, and as you crochet more you’ll get a feel for how various yarns are going to stitch up. If you expect to make a number of gauge-sensitive items over the years, you may want to hang on to your gauge swatches. Make a project journal in a three-ring binder, including yarn label information, hook used, and the swatch itself. Add a photo of the completed item, the pattern you used, and any notes that spring to mind about the process. Later you can go back and look for similar projects to one you have in mind to stitch next, and compare the materials you used and the gauge you had in the past.
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