Why you should always, always, always, always, ALWAYS do your gauge swatch.
I can already hear it now: “I’ve been crocheting eleventeen years and I’ve never swatched a thing, ever, and everything I’ve ever made has turned out perfect and I don’t need some crochet elitist telling me that what I’m doing is wrong and I will never, ever swatch anything, so you can just stop right there, oh and also, I’ve never blocked anything and anyone who blocks their work is dumb and you can’t make me do it.” I hear this about three times a week. Is it exhausting? Ohhh, you betcha. Then there’s my other favorite “I only do amigurumi/blankets/things where gauge doesn’t matter". Gauge always matters. Gauge matters because what happens when you try to make an amigurumi with a DK weight yarn and a 5mm hook? You get a floppy mess. Why? Because your tension wasn’t tight enough. In other words: you did not achieve the same gauge the designer did. So. Gauge is important, and always matters.
But that’s not the point of this post. This post is about how you cannot trust labels. I know it’s going to be a little ground-shaking for some folks and I understand there will be kick back about this, but it is a plain, simple, unavoidable fact that we have to face. We no longer have the option of remaining ignorant.
“…the data fell out
pretty much
the same way”
A while back, a dear friend ordered some bamboo hooks online. When they arrived to her, they were not labeled in size. She did what any right thinking person would do and grabbed her trusty aluminum gauge tool to help her determine what her hook sizes were. The only problem was that none of the hooks fit in any of the holes. She tried all 20 hooks in every hole on that gauge tool and they were all either too big or too small. There was nothing that fit just right. Off she went to the hardware store to obtain a digital caliper. (A caliper is a device used to measure the dimensions of an object.) So, caliper acquired, she set out to determine what size hooks she had. Much to her surprise, none of the hooks in her shipment of bamboo hooks measured into any standard size at all. She went on to measure the rest of her hook collection and found that the majority of her hooks, regardless of brand, materials, or age, were not the size they were marked. Initially, I rationalized it with “she has a lot of vintage hooks” and “she gets a lot of hooks from third party sellers, who knows what she has,” but this bit of information has tingled in my brain for the last year, and yesterday, something changed.
Two squares, both alike in dignity, made within moments of each other from the same yarn.
While working on a project, I mislaid my hook. I looked for it cursorily and didn’t find it. I suspected I’d left it at my boyfriend’s house or dropped it in the car. I thought to myself “well, it’s a good thing I have a million hooks,” and took out my hook case. I found a hook in the right size and as soon as I picked it up, I could tell something was wrong. It felt off. I couldn’t tell right away if it was bigger or smaller than my other hook, but it most certainly was not the same size. I made a few stitches with it and the stitches were smaller. I suddenly remembered the conversation I had with my friend the year prior, and did the same thing she did: I went to the hardware store.
When I arrived back at home, naturally, there was my hook, sticking out from under the edge of the bed so I picked it up and held it next to the hook I’d used to replace it. The one I’d misplaced was a mint green aluminum hook by an immensely popular brand, and the replacement was bright blue aluminum, also by the same brand, and both were stamped with the same size. There was a visible difference between them. I could feel the difference with my fingers. I opened up my digital caliper and turned it on. The packaging said that a variance of .1mm +/- is to be expected, so I grabbed the hook nearest to me. It measured 3.2mm. I thought “oh, perfect, this is a D/3.25mm hook so that’s right on the button” and then I remembered that this was actually a E/3.5mm hook. I picked up the other hook and measured it. 2.6mm. Next thing I did? I made some granny squares. I wanted to see just how visible such a difference was between two hooks marked the same size. The difference was dramatic.
The only thing left to do, then, was to measure all of the rest of my hooks.
Pretty little disappointments all in a row
To be fair, these are not all of my hooks. For this post, though, I wanted to show how even within a single brand, there can be so much variance. The hooks on the left are all hooks that fall within the .1mm +/- from the size marked, allowed by the caliper I bought. The ones on the right are more than .1mm +/- the size marked. Roughly 66% of my Boye hooks are marked with incorrect sizes. But I did check my other hooks. I checked the expensive brands, the inexpensive brands, the handmade hooks, the questionable third party brands I found on Amazon, and… as much as I hate to say it… the data fell out pretty much the same way for all of them. My Tulip Etimo hooks were the closest to perfect accuracy, but there were still a couple of those that were off by more than .2mm, which can be the difference between one hook size and the next.
What does this mean for us?
So let’s say you have culled your hook collection and curated it to the point to where you have every single hook, in every standard size, all of them perfectly on the money according to your digital caliper. Let’s say you find a sweater pattern that calls for a 4mm hook and a DK weight yarn. Let us also say that you have worked patterns by this designer before and, funnily enough, you know that you have tension exactly like theirs, so you grab your 4mm hook and start to work the pattern. You are bored by gauge swatches, so you skip that. And anyway, you already know your tension perfectly matches your designer, so what are you worried about? As you are working your new sweater, you notice that it’s quite large, and you’re going to have to make some adjustments. Ten hours in, you’ve forgotten what magic you did to one sleeve to make it work and you’re struggling through the second sleeve. In frustration, you shove it back into the project bag and toss it in the corner to teach it a lesson it won’t soon forget. You grumble to yourself, “my hook sizes are perfect. I know they are because I measured them myself. This pattern is wrong.” You can have every hook in your collection be a perfect example of accuracy, but you can’t control what hooks another person has. You don’t know that the 4mm labeled hook you’re using is actually the same size as the 4mm labeled hook the designer used. As another tech editor friend put it “I find it best to treat the hook size given by the designer as a starting point, like they are sharing their notes. The gauge is the important part - how many stitches per inch, how many rows. The designer is just letting you know ‘hey, so this is the hook I used to get that, just fyi’.”
So what happens now?
The Craft Yarn Council has been working with companies for several years now, trying to get everyone on the same page with standard sizing. There was a point in time when companies and regions all had different systems for sizing, and you can still see this today with aluminum hooks in the US being labeled with alphabet and steel hooks being on the aught system. With the democratization of information, the importance of having standards in fiber arts is really being highlighted and more is happening in that arena in the last 5-10 years than has happened ever in the history of crochet. We are practically running along at light speed comparatively.
Until that perfect consensus is reached, though, the only thing you can do is make your gauge swatches. I know. I know it isn’t fun. I know it’s not what you want to hear. It’s right up there with “floss more often”, “we need to talk”, and “this is your child’s principal calling”. I get it. But go hang around on the r/crochet subreddit for a little while. Take a look at the projects that people are doing that go catastrophically wrong. There is one unifying factor with every single one of them, and I’ll let you guess what it is.
Please, just make your gauge swatches, folks. Hooks are out there labeled as one size when they’re a completely different size and you never know what hook the designer used. Gauge swatches are usually only about 25 stitches wide and maybe 12 rows tall, right? That’s 300 stitches. Would you rather make 300 stitches to check your gauge, or would you rather make 30,000 and have a dress you can’t wear? Just a little something for you to think about while you’re clicking “add to cart” on your own set of digital calipers.