The Mental Design Team sings the Blues

Patternist and Editor sang

Ex-ten-ded lo-op stit-ches
they’ll dr-ive you in-sa-ne
The gauge of tho-ose stit-ches
They’ll make you loose your brai-en

The rest of the team looked on in wonder, what happened to the levelheaded two?

Sample Maker: Umm, ladies, we haven’t even written that pattern yet, what’s the matter?

Patternist: Oh, you made us a nice gauge swatch that approximates the crochet in knitted stitches, but how will we tell everyone what gauge to make?

Sample Maker: What’s the problem? Extended stitches you just wrap the yarn a few extra times around the needle, then let them all off as one on the next row. Sometimes you make extra yo after the stitch, and let it go so your stitch gets bigger, sometimes you wrap your stitch a bunch, then pull it through as one stitch, other times you just use a huge needle.

Editor: Yes, I know you can do it, but how do we tell other people to do it? They will be using different sized needles to get the same gauge as you on the regular stitches, but if, say they are using #8 needles and we tell them to wrap 4 times, but you were using #5 needles, then their extended loop will be much bigger than yours.

Patternist: We could make a chart of how many wraps for each needle size. Or we could measure each extended loop and say “wrap as many times as necessary to create a loop that is 1″/2.5cm high”

Editor: Why don’t we do what they do at marjaknit’s shop in San Francisco? She was teaching a shawl class, and wrote a pattern for a gauge swatch with the yarn factored into the pattern so no one had to guess if they had enough yarn or not. Instead of measuring rows and stitches, they measured the whole swatch. If the swatch was so many inches, they had the right needle size, other wise they ripped and tried again with other needles. It made the beginners happy.

Sample Maker: but if we do that, and one of their rows of lacy stitches are off, they won’t know how to change that one.

Patternist: What if we put a picture down in the pdf that is the same size as the yoke section, and they lay their swatch next to it. Then they can see if they need to adjust one of the extended stitch counts or not.

Editor: Or we could give gauge for each and every stitch.

Butterfly: I have an idea – lets get back to the mittens and think about this later.

Ex-ten-ded lo-op stit-ches
they will drive you in-sa-ne
The gauge of tho-ose stit-ches
They’ll make you loose your brai-en

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