Summary
Melissa demonstrates how to adapt knitting patterns to fit individual body measurements and gauge, or create patterns from scratch. She walks through the mathematics of converting gauge measurements into cast-on stitches and increases, using a pair of dance pants she's making for a friend as a practical example.
Key Takeaways
Full Transcript
Introduction and Required Tools
Melissa: This is another Melissa Spins video, and actually it's Melissa Knits. I thought today I would go over a little bit about how to either come up with your own pattern just based on a gauge swatch and your body measurements, or how to modify an existing pattern based on your gauge swatch and your body measurements.
The things that we'll need for this are: you need to know how to measure your body, and you can find that out from a bunch of different sources. There are great Craftsy classes on it. It's often a feature of design books. Amy Herzog's books on sweaters has a great section on how to measure your body. So you need your body measurements. If you're going to work from an existing pattern and try to modify it, you need that pattern in front of you. And you also need to have a gauge swatch. You need your gauge swatch to be knit up — if it's going to be in the flat, it needs to be in the flat. If it's going to be in the round, it needs to be in the round. It needs to be knit on the needles that you're going to be using. Once you have those three things and a calculator, you can go forth and pretty much modify or make up any pattern that you want to.
Essential Reference Materials and Body Measurements
I brought down some of the essential things that we need. Like I said, first off you need to have some accurate body measurements. Here are just a few of the books that I have upstairs. They teach you a lot about the different shapes of different kinds of garments and things like that if you're interested in designing your own. They'll also tell you a lot about accurate body measurements based on the designs. So they'll show you where to put your tape measure across the backs of shoulders if you're going for a sweater, how to measure necks and waists and things like that. So these are all really handy things to look at.
If you're designing for yourself, it's great to keep a record of your measurements once you have them, because then you don't have to keep doing them over and over again. In my case, I'm actually making something for a friend, and so the first thing that I had to do was measure her. We came up with a schematic for what her body actually looks like at the waist, at the hips, at the knees. If you're designing for someone else, you need to make sure you get a good sense of their measurements. Don't be shy. Ideally they'll be able to try on the garment as you go along, but sometimes that's not possible, so getting as close to their measurements as you can.
The other thing you can always do for yourself and for others is borrow their favourite garment. Take your own favourite garment — a sweater, if it's pants, if it's gloves, if it's a hat, whatever it is, but especially with sweaters. You can actually use that garment to cut a mock-up, to measure and kind of see how it's constructed, why it might fit their body well. All that kind of stuff will actually help you.
Preparing and Measuring the Gauge Swatch
The second thing you need is your gauge swatch. This is the yarn that my friend chose. It's a Barraco Artisan. It's a merino and silk, which will be interesting for this particular project. I'm not actually sure how it's going to work out. I wouldn't necessarily have picked this blend because silk tends to be a little drapier, and merino will hold together fairly well, but it feels a little bit like a superwash and it definitely feels drapey.
I ended up the gauge swatch on size 4 needles. I played with a couple different sizes. I was fairly happy with the density of this fabric and the way that it looks together. I did a rib stitch up on top and on the bottom to kind of help it lay flat. I washed it, dried it, and then from there you can get your accurate gauge.
To get gauge, what you need to do is you need to have at least a swatch that's this big — 4 inches by 4 inches, preferably bigger. To get an accurate gauge, you need to measure two things. You need to know how many stitches you have in 4 inches across, and then you'll also need to know how many rows you have over 4 inches going up and down.
When you're counting rows, you're looking for the little V in the stitch right here, and you're going to just count down. Some people pin a piece of paper to the swatch, and that helps them kind of count. I can usually eyeball it, especially with a worsted weight yarn — you can see the Vs pretty well. If you're using a fingering weight or a lace weight yarn, you're going to have a lot more trouble seeing what's going on. You want to make sure that your ruler is, if you can, kind of flat up against a single row so you're not going across different rows. You just count down 4 inches and then you divide whatever number you get by 4, and that's how many rows you have per inch.
The other part of your gauge is the stitches per inch. Again, you want to get your ruler accurately kind of lined up. You can pin it down, whatever feels good to you. You're going to measure the Vs as they go along all the way, and you want to make sure you're starting on the edge of a V there, all the way along from 0 to 4. Get your number, divide by 4, and you'll have your stitches per inch. You want to do that over 4 inches because you'll notice if you just measure — if you count over 1 inch, this inch, this number of stitches here may be different than what you get in this inch or this inch. So you want to take an average.
When I measured my gauge here, I had 23 stitches for 4 inches, and so when you do the division, you get 5.6 stitches per inch. That's important — the .6 is very important, because multiplied over the space of an entire garment, that tenth of an inch is going to matter as it compounds on itself. So you want to at least go to that extent when you're dividing. For my rows per inch, I had 37 rows per 4 inches, which means 9.2 rows per inch. Those are my really important numbers, and I need to know those in order to gauge how many stitches to cast on, how many rows to knit, how many increases and decreases I need to get from one place in the body to another place in the body.
Selecting and Evaluating a Pattern
If the first thing you need is body measurements, the second thing you need is your gauge swatch, the third thing you need is a pattern that you want to modify. If you're going from scratch, or even if you're modifying a pattern, you might try something like a stitch dictionary, or this is called the Knitting Bible. If you're looking for inspiration for how you want your actual fabric to look, these stitch dictionaries are really nice because they offer you a lot of kind of tried and true known patterns — things like knit and purl stitches, things like cable stitches.
For my friend, she wanted to have a pair of dance pants and she made some very specific requests about what kind of dance pants she wanted. This was the pattern that was closest to what she wanted, that kind of sense of tights. She doesn't want them to be this long. She does want them to be this high. And there are a couple other features I want to work in.
Now for me, going from this pattern — if I just look at the sizes here, if I look at the measurements and I look back to her body measurements. So we're talking about hip measurements here, for example. Often patterns will go by shoulder, bust size, hip size as your kind of major gauge. Her hip size is 33 inches at the top down to 40.5 over that span. Imagine this is your natural waist, you know, when your stomach comes in — this is down to the hips. So her hips are somewhere between 33 and 40 inches wide. If you look at the pattern here — these are for tights — it's a range, right? You have 39 to 41 inches. It's not going to fit her as she wants it to be fit, which is very kind of snug fit. So that means I need to redesign this just a little bit.
This pattern will also, just like most patterns will, give you gauge. This pattern here says the knitting gauge is 19 stitches and 25 rows on size 4 needles over a 4 by 4 inch square. Now you guys will remember that our gauge is 23 stitches over 37 rows, which is very different than the gauge that's in this pattern. So not only did the sizes not match up with what my friend's body actually looks like, but the gauge that this pattern is written in doesn't match up with the yarn that we've chosen or the needles that we've chosen.
What that means is not that we can't use the pattern — we can use it, but we need to modify it. We need to base it off of our actual measurements and our actual gauge swatch rather than just blindly following the pattern, even if we could get gauge. Because you'll end up with a garment that doesn't actually fit the person that it's knit for. So that's when the math actually starts to come in.
The Mathematics of Pattern Modification
There are a bunch of different ways to do it. People do this all different ways, so I'm just going to show you one way that I do it. The only reason that I know that it works is that I've knit — three of the four sweaters I've knit, I've gone straight from a gauge swatch and body measurements with some basic schema of getting from here to here, and it's worked out. So I'm just going to show you my method, and if you like it or if you know of ways you want to modify it, that's great.
When I start out trying to design or modify a pattern to make this gauge swatch and this fabric match this body, the first thing I want to figure out is how many stitches I need to cast on. If I'm going from the top to the bottom, and I'm going to design this pair of pants — since I am following this pattern to modify it, it's a top-down pattern — so I'm thinking first about my cast-on. Then I'm thinking about how I'm going to increase to get from waist to hips. I'm thinking about things like short rows for getting around the bottom. I'm thinking about gussets and flaps to deal with the crotch of a pant. I'm thinking about how many stitches need to be held off on either side for the legs. And then once I am at the legs, how I'm going to decrease down to the knee, and depending on how much yarn I have or how low the person wants them, if I can go below the knee.
One of the basic, basic things to think about here is how to convert your gauge, which is stitches per inch, to actual cast-on stitches for your measurement. If I know that her body is 31.5 inches around right here — and remember, this isn't — my drawing is flat, but her body was measured in the round — so 31.5 inches around the waist. To figure out how many stitches to cast on, I'm going to take that number and I'm going to multiply it by the number of stitches I need to cover an inch.
So we've got 31.5 inches times 5.6 stitches an inch gives me 176.2. Now here you can round up or down. I'm going to round down because this is the top of a pant that's going to have a certain kind of ribbing on it. I want to make sure that it's actually snug, and I know the person that I'm making this for wants the pant to be somewhat snug. So I'm going to round down to 176 for my cast-on.
Calculating Increases
One thing I recommend doing is trying to take measurements not only of the body around, but the body going down, so that you know from the waist to the beginning where the hips start to flare out is about 4 inches, and then from that point down to the biggest circumference of the hips is another 3 inches. So you've got 7 inches going down here.
So 185 minus 176 gives us 9 stitches that need to be increased. Nine is an odd number. Sometimes that happens with increases and decreases. Given that I'm going to be working at 2×2 ribbing, I decided to abbreviate that and just say I'm going to increase by 8 stitches. That way I can do two on each side, everything's even, I don't mess up my 2×2 ribbing too much. But I know that I need to increase 9 stitches over 4 inches.
Now what does that actually mean? Well, we can tell, because 4 inches — we know how many rows are in an inch. So we take our 4 inches and we multiply by 9.2, so we're going to have 37 rows in which to get from here to here.
So that's the basic math for getting: how do you cast on, how do you get from there to there? And then you just continue doing that kind of math as you go down.
Additional Pattern Considerations
The rest of the pattern specifics for these pants, for example, are going to involve a lot of different things, including how to do short rows to fit somebody's rear end, how to do a gusset, how to bind off different legs. The main things I would say at this point is: as you're modifying patterns, keep doing the math back and forth over and over again until you're satisfied with what you think you need.
Once I write out this whole pattern, I'll often either leave sections where I need to go back and do some kind of rough end to try to figure out where my increases go and how smooth do I need them to be, et cetera, et cetera. But I'll also go back through and check all of my math again. So I'll do all my multiplication again, I'll double-check against my length measurements, and I'll think a little bit about the kinds of things that might need to be added or subtracted from a pattern.
For example, in this pattern, I have ribbing at the top. I don't have any ribbing in the front, but because of my particular fabric, which has a little bit of silk in it and so a little bit more drape, I'm going to continue some of that ribbing along the edges of the legs. That's not in the pattern as it's written, but I think it'll be important to the garment as I'm trying to design it. So you've got to take into account all those things: the body measurements, the gauge swatch, and the pattern, and how the pattern is kind of designed or written as you're thinking about what you want to design and how you're going to accomplish the mash-up of all of those different factors.
Conclusion
Hopefully knowing just those few things can be really helpful in trying to think about how to empower yourself as a knitter and know that you don't have to just pick up a pattern and work directly from the pattern if your size and your body is different from what's out there that's standard. That's OK. That's totally normal. That's like most of us. The tools that you need to deal with most patterns are your own gauge swatch, your own body measurements, and a little calculator, and you can usually modify most things so that they'll actually fit you and you'll enjoy them much more than just knitting by the book.
If you want more about knitting and spinning, my blog is Knitting the Stash at WordPress. If you enjoyed this video, you can hit the like button. If you have comments or questions or have other techniques that you use for measurement, please post them in the comments below and we'll be happy to chat about them.