Suffering from tension
Nov. 16th, 2025 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseI have a favourite toddler. His name is Simon (that doesn't really give much away); he's three and a half; he's the son of two very dear friends I used to play D&D with until he came along; he's staggeringly intelligent; but he's also autistic, so it's taken till now to be able to have any kind of conversation with him beyond "high five!". He could reliably count to ten shortly after his second birthday, but even now he's not sure what to do after he's said hallo to you... but at least he can do that now. Also, in common with quite a lot of autistic children, he likes watching tiny sections of video on endless repeat (my nephew is the same), so he has picked up various lines from these bits of video and he will use them fairly randomly, without any apparent context. He is a bundle of energy and quite exhausting for his parents, especially since he's not only bad at sleeping through the night, but also bad at understanding that other people need to do that. Nonetheless, he's a lot of fun too.
I knit Simon a jumper every Christmas, and he's quite big for his age, so he needs age 4 - 5. I narrowed it down to two designs and wasn't sure which to do, so in the end I did a little poll on one of my craft Discord servers. The choice was between a traditional mock aran (done in DK yarn because it's child size) and a more modern cable jumper; both were very nice, and I thought, whichever one they decide, I'll do the other one next year. They voted for the mock aran, so that's what I'm doing.
Now, this pattern is from an independent designer. I can't remember where I got it from originally, though I'm fairly sure it wasn't straight from her website. And I very rarely bother to work tension swatches, because I'm so used to my tension working straight out of the box, as it were; generally speaking, if you give me a knitting pattern, my tension's going to end up pretty much spot on, at least widthways. Lengthways I'll usually need slightly fewer rows, because my stitches are a little on the tall side, but that's not a problem. It's widthways that really matters. If your tension's a bit out lengthways, you can always decrease (or increase) the number of rows to make up for it, but you can't easily alter it widthways once you've started working.
This one, however, is way out. For the size I needed for Simon, it said to cast on 80 stitches (well, in fact this pattern has 1 x 1 ribbing welts, so I actually cast on 81 and reduced on the last row of the ribbing). Once I'd been going for a bit, I thought "that looks a bit narrow"; so I measured it, and it was, in fact, quite a lot too narrow. 12 stitches too narrow, in fact, working over Irish moss stitch. That's a heck of a discrepancy.
It's straight up and down (no armhole shapings), so I briefly toyed with the idea of doing side panels; then I thought, no, no matter how carefully I make it up, that isn't going to look good. I sighed, frogged the whole thing... and then started again two sizes larger. I mean, if your tension's too tight for the pattern they tell you to use larger needles, but honestly, if I'd used needles that were big enough to get the tension right, I'd have had to have switched to actual aran yarn anyway. And I rather like the red DK I'm currently using. (I may later, just as an experiment, try working the pattern in aran yarn to see how it measures up, but I'm not faffing about with that now.)
Well, he should still get it in time for Christmas; and with it being a nice bright red, his parents will spot him quickly if he zooms off, which he's in the habit of doing!
I knit Simon a jumper every Christmas, and he's quite big for his age, so he needs age 4 - 5. I narrowed it down to two designs and wasn't sure which to do, so in the end I did a little poll on one of my craft Discord servers. The choice was between a traditional mock aran (done in DK yarn because it's child size) and a more modern cable jumper; both were very nice, and I thought, whichever one they decide, I'll do the other one next year. They voted for the mock aran, so that's what I'm doing.
Now, this pattern is from an independent designer. I can't remember where I got it from originally, though I'm fairly sure it wasn't straight from her website. And I very rarely bother to work tension swatches, because I'm so used to my tension working straight out of the box, as it were; generally speaking, if you give me a knitting pattern, my tension's going to end up pretty much spot on, at least widthways. Lengthways I'll usually need slightly fewer rows, because my stitches are a little on the tall side, but that's not a problem. It's widthways that really matters. If your tension's a bit out lengthways, you can always decrease (or increase) the number of rows to make up for it, but you can't easily alter it widthways once you've started working.
This one, however, is way out. For the size I needed for Simon, it said to cast on 80 stitches (well, in fact this pattern has 1 x 1 ribbing welts, so I actually cast on 81 and reduced on the last row of the ribbing). Once I'd been going for a bit, I thought "that looks a bit narrow"; so I measured it, and it was, in fact, quite a lot too narrow. 12 stitches too narrow, in fact, working over Irish moss stitch. That's a heck of a discrepancy.
It's straight up and down (no armhole shapings), so I briefly toyed with the idea of doing side panels; then I thought, no, no matter how carefully I make it up, that isn't going to look good. I sighed, frogged the whole thing... and then started again two sizes larger. I mean, if your tension's too tight for the pattern they tell you to use larger needles, but honestly, if I'd used needles that were big enough to get the tension right, I'd have had to have switched to actual aran yarn anyway. And I rather like the red DK I'm currently using. (I may later, just as an experiment, try working the pattern in aran yarn to see how it measures up, but I'm not faffing about with that now.)
Well, he should still get it in time for Christmas; and with it being a nice bright red, his parents will spot him quickly if he zooms off, which he's in the habit of doing!
