Can never get my stitches tight enough

I’m knitting a shawl from a pattern I found on LionBrand. For some reason where its knitting or crocheting, my stitches are too large and the item has gaping holes. Help me… for I so love to knit.

This loose knitting shows that you are a relaxed person! :cheering:

However, rather than becoming ‘tense’ :teehee:…the only solution is to keep dialing down the size of your needle until you find a stitch gauge that fits the pattern’s requirements!

I used to have the same issue! When a pattern ‘suggested’ a US8 needle, for example…I had to dial down to a size US5 to get the proper gauge!

These days, my gauge is fairly ‘on the money’.

Try different ways of holding your yarn - thread it through your fingers, wrap around one finger or two or a different one.

I don’t know how long you’ve been knitting but for the most part getting a good even tension just takes practice.

Some folks, like me, are tight knitters, some are loose knitters. Adjust needle size to fit your style of knitting.

Yep, I have been there. I’m actually a very tight knitter but when I learned how to crochete it was like yours. lol I’m weird. It just takes practice to even out. I’ve been knitting for about 6 months and already I can see my tension evening out. I still knit a bit tight but it’s much closer to normal gague as I only have to go up about 1 or 2 sizes now. lol when I first started i had to go up 3 sizes!

Hang in there. You will get it. The advice with how you hold your yarn is very good too. You have to keep tension on it, not just let it hang or anything. Practice makes perfect and before you know it you won’t be able to believe how easy it is to knit the way you want to!

I always give my yarn a tug before putting it around the needle. That way there arn’t any loose ones. Especially the first couple and few last ones.

First of all, if you are new to knitting, make sure you are forming the stitches correctly! If you pick up one of the bars between stitches and accidentally knit it, it will give you a hole, same if you accidentally wrap the working yarn an extra time between stitches.

If you know you are making the stitches correctly and you just find that they are too loose, you can adjust your needle size until things look right, as others have suggested. I got in the habit of giving my working yarn a little tug after each stitch, which helps keep my tension even. I am a tight knitter because of this, which I don’t mind so much - if I put down my work and walk away, the needles never fall out! :mrgreen: