Go on, admit it. 
You know who you are.  Yes, you in
the back corner.  You don’t always knit a
gauge swatch. Oh, I know.  There are some
of you thinking, “What’s the big deal? I always get gauge.”  Well, bless your hearts!  After many years of knitting and working in
yarn stores I know that there are others of us who do not “always” get
gauge.  And the knitting gods have
punishments in store if you think you do. 
Eventually it will catch up with you. So our first lesson is, knit a gauge swatch.

Even when you do knit a swatch you can have
problems. I have been thinking of this ever since a problem with a pair of mittens–Pinion
from Brooklyn.  These are knitted
sideways, so a mistake in gauge means that the mitten is too long and you can’t
just frog back and shorten it.   I knit a
gauge swatch and I did the first mitten correctly.  And then I knit a second one, defeating
second mitten syndrome. I used the same yarn, needles and pattern.  But my gauge changed.  Not a lot, but enough to make the second
mitten longer than the first. The lesson here–even if you knit a swatch and
got gauge, even if you knit a whole mitten and got gauge–keep checking your gauge.

So along comes LightWaves–a small shawl originally
designed to be knit with worsted-weight yarn. 
Now, shawls and cowls are among my favorite things to knit for many
reasons but one of them is that gauge is usually a non-issue.  Substitute yarn to your heart’s content and,
as long as you like the fabric you are making, you can always knit it a little
longer or a little shorter and voila!  I
wanted to use Noro Silk Garden(NSG) for part of my shawl and a coordinating
solid yarn for the rest.

Reader, I made mistakes. The first one–I didn’t
knit a gauge swatch. In my memory NSG was a light worsted weight yarn.  I dug into the stash and found a skein of an
alpaca/wool blend–a light DK weight.  Perfect.
I knit blithely along until it was time to add the NSG.  (Insert the sound of squealing brakes.)  The Silk Garden was way too heavy.  So I checked the gauge of NSG—4.5 st/inch.  Back to the stash, another yarn.  This time I read the label—4.5 st/inch.  So I cast on but not for a swatch, for the
whole shawl.  Not until a customer at my
LYS said, “That looks kinda stiff for a shawl,” did I realize that to get a
good drapey fabric I would have to knit this yarn at 4 st/inch or even more.
Not a good match for NSG. So the third lesson– read the label and swatch anyway.

To shorten this already very long story, the third
try was a charm. The little shawl is finished and lovely and just what I wanted
it to be.  And I think that all the gauge
rules can be summed up in two words–pay
attention. Read the label, swatch, check your gauge often as you knit.  This should take care of most problems.  But don’t say that out loud.  The knitting gods are always listening.

Check out Lee and her patterns at www.harperandfigg.com.