I Love/Hate to Swatch

I have devoted many hours and several posts to swatches for the Braids Cardigan. Yet I didn't swatch at all for K's last hat. I measured her head circumference and then multiplied by the gauge on the yarn ball band. The hat turned out the be too small. Maybe I measured wrong. More likely, I didn't knit to the ball band gauge.

I think I'm impatient. I can swatch a blue streak when I'm bored with a current project, you know, the one I'm supposed to be working on. But when it's time to start a new project I want to dive right in. Gauge be damned. I also love to do nonsense knitting when I discover a new yarn. I don't invest the time, thought or energy to come up with a small functional project to test the yarns capabilities. I'll knit an 8" x 24" swatch.

The swatches I knit get thrown into a basket. That basket contains all kinds of swatches - the tiny, minimal postage stamp sized swatches I absolutely couldn't avoid when starting an exciting new project and the huge placemat/scarf/pillow cover size swatches I knit when I'm bored with my current project. There's a rainbow of colors and quite a variety of yarn fibers in there too. Fancy, basic, boring, exciting, new and old, they're all in there.

What's up with that?



A selection of my swatches