hello and welcome to the Marley bread YouTube channel brought to you by red hot yarn in this video I want to talk to you about doing the gatewatch for your texture triangle shawl as you know this is the middle log for the 2017 season right here on the Marley bird YouTube channel and we are making a beautiful texture triangle shawl the beauty of doing a shawl is that typically the gauge does not matter and I will venture to say that that is the case with this but because there are so many of you in the Facebook group that are either using a different yarn or changing the the yarn weight completely or maybe you want to try out different needles or this is the first project you've ever done I think it's important that you do a gauge swatch to really find out if the needle size that's recommended by the designer is the right size for you let's take a closer look at the patterns that you can see what it is I'm talking about as we take a look at the texture triangle shawl pattern which all of you should have downloaded by now it's a free pattern on red heart comm you can see along the side here it gives us all the vital details of what we will need for this pattern so we need three balls of soft essentials we need a size 11 29 inch needle circular knitting needle yarn needle stitch markers and then it gives us the row gauge this gauge is exactly the measurements per stitch repeats and row repeat that the designer Diane Moyer got to achieve the size of shawl that she achieved okay so what that means is Diane used a size 11 knitting needle and when she knit in stockinette stitch and we're basing this on stockinette stitch because that's what it says here in the gauge she got ten stitches four four inches and she got sixteen rows for four inches so what I want you to do is do a gauge swatch grab the yarn you plan on using grab the size needles that you plan on using hopefully you should be starting off with a size 11 that's where you should begin start off with your size 11 needles and cast on 20 stitches once you cap on 20 stitches go ahead and jump in to stockinette stitch I don't want you to worry about doing garter stitch along the bottom or garter stitch along the edges or along the top I purely want you to do some stockinette stitch and if you don't remember what stockinette is its where you knit on one side and purl on the next slide so you get this really nice fabric I want you to make your swatch till it's approximately 4 inches tall okay and then you'll bind it off and so you have something similar to this once this is done because we're not going to worry about washing or blocking our swatch since we're using an acrylic yarn I am taking it off of the needle member I said bind off you absolutely want to do that do not just keep this on your needle and then measure it I want you to bind off okay bind off and lay it down flat and what we wanted to then is grab a tape measure or a susan based knit check whichever one works for you and we're going to measure the number of stitches and the number of rows what I love about the Susan Bates knit check is that it has this little opening right here where it distinctly pins out two inches and two inches so stitches and rows so all I have to do is just lay this flat on my fabric and go ahead and begin to count how many stitches I'm getting for two inches and how many rows I'm getting for two inches well if the pattern says I need ten stitches for four inches then that means ten divided by two is five so I need five stitches so let's count one two three four five and I have half of a stitch right there that half a stitch is very important do not dismiss it okay you want to make sure you count that half a stitch because over the grand scheme of things that half a stitch becomes a full stitch when it gets to four inches right so instead of getting ten stitches I'm getting eleven stitches and then if I were to expand that out over a series of you know ten inches I have a significant number of extra stitches that I didn't plan for okay so always make sure you count that little extra bit there okay so my first thing here is that I'm getting too many stitches for my stitch gauge let's check out my rose I should be getting 16 rose for 4 inches which equals 8 rose for 2 inches so let's count 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 so I'm getting not enough Rose okay so I'm getting not enough rose here's the deal for a shawl I'm really not too concerned with the fact that my stitches are a little bit tighter because I don't want my child to be really extra loose and over stretch so I'm okay personally with the fact I'm getting a little bit more stitches than I then I needed to but if this were a sweater I would want to go ahead and change my needle size do another gauge swatch and really strive to get just 10 stitches for the 4 inches as indicated in the gauge does that make sense when you are getting too many stitches then your stitches are too small they need to be bigger so you need a bigger needle too many equals better bigger needle you're getting too few that means your stitches are too big they need to be smaller so you need a smaller needle so so here we go again too few equals smaller needle too big equals bigger needle does that help so what I need you to do is do a gauge swatch you need to decide if the size 11 needle that Diane Moore you're used to get her gauge is going to work for you and don't go and tell me that you always knit to gauge and you don't need to do a gauge swatch because that's bull hockey there is no such thing as knitting to gauge there is no standard gauge across the board because gauge is determined by the yarn you're using the needles you're using and how you knit so gauge is subjective to each knitter everybody knits differently I typically knit rather tight so it does not surprise me that my gauge is a little bit tighter than Moyer's and I'm typically I often have to go up a needle size in other people's patterns but I know that but I always do a gauge swatch to make sure and I want to make sure you do the same thing I understand a gauge swatch seems like it's just extra work and it's not necessary but it's good for you to get into the practice of doing gauge swatches when you're doing things like this especially when you start moving into things where the gauge matters more because it has to fit like sweaters okay so I want you to get in the habit of this and I also want to make sure that when you're making your shawl you don't run out of yarn if your stitches are too big and you're just going along happy-go-lucky and all of a sudden you right out of yarn you're going to be upset right well we want to make sure that your stitches are the same gauge that you're using the same amount of yarn that Dianne Moyer used to get her wonderful shawl hopefully this helps you understand how it gauge swatches works once you do your gates watch you are ready for video one where you make this really great section one of the textured triangle shawl and you actually have stockinette stitch in this portion so it'll be really easy for you to take your gauge swatch and compare it to what your actual shawl SWAT or its shawl is working along so you can see if you're getting the same gauge alright so don't rip out that set gauge swatch keep it set it aside and it'll be pretty you can practice on this leader maybe you can go and pick up stitches and practice different finishing you can practice duplicate stitch there's lots of good things for this shoot it could be your your new mug rugs right a new coffee cozy coffee coaster how about that whatever it is go and make sure you do your gauge swatch and let's begin the middle on for 2017 I'm excited you're joining me and let's get started thanks guys I'm Marley bird press spokesperson for red heart yarns and you are watching this video on the Marley bird YouTube channel bye