The Truth Is Not In Them

A few weeks ago, chancing across a bin of $1 oddballs in a yarn store, I promptly collected a bunch of nice-looking wool ones to use for Pine Street Inn squares. When I started the first one this morning I discovered that 1) I wasn't quite as enamored with the yarn as I'd thought 2) I'd vastly overestimated the number of stitches I'd need. Persevering, and having been assured that the yarn was fine, I ripped out and started again with fewer stitches, but not quite few enough, as the second try was still about 9 1/2 inches wide. Having some experience in these matters, however, I bound it off when it was about 8 1/2 inches long, knowing that I could even it out in blocking.


So there was my first square. As soon as I had bound it off I picked up another ball of the same yarn in another color and cast on another square on the same needles, with four fewer stitches this time. Since I was getting a little over three stitches to the inch, that should put me a bit under nine inches, just right for pre-block size.


Wait a minute. Doesn't that look a little... um... small?


Why, yes, it does, and there's a reason for that: it is narrower. About two and a half inches narrower than the first one, in fact.

Now, I had always thought that the lurid tales I'd heard of egregious falsehoods perpetrated by gauge swatches originated in knitterly wishful thinking: if it's close enough, and if you squint, and maybe squish or stretch it just a teeny bit, the gauge will be fine. Really, perfectly fine.

To all the knitters who cried, "But I got gauge!" and whom I comforted sympathetically while smirking sideways, "bet you didn't really," I offer my sincere apologies and ironclad proof: for what does a charity square resemble more closely than a big swatch?

And what, therefore, is a swatch?

A dirty, filthy, stinking liar, that's what.