I’m knitting a hat to a Rico pattern but am having problems with the tension. For merino dk yarn, normal stocking stitch tension square should be achieved with 4/4.5 needles and this seems to the case when I checked this. However the pattern suggests 3.5 needles for fisherman’s stitch. I believe it is usual to use smaller needles for this stitch. However using the 3.5 needles, the tension square is far too small. Even using 4 mm ones doesn’t make it quite large enough. Any ideas about this?
Welcome to the forum!
Are you using the 3.5mm needles to knit a large swatch in fisherman’s rib? Both fisherman’s rib and brioche are very stretchy because of the extra yarn. It’s difficult to assess gauge because the recommendation is to “slightly stretch” the swatch, whatever that means. Just be sure to knit a large enough swatch so that you can measure over the middle 10cm.
Thank you for your reply!
The pattern says nothing about slightly stretching the sample though it seems a logical thing to do.
Initially I did use 3.5 mm needles but the square was only about 3 inches, unstretched, rather than 4.
Tricky to assess how much to stretch…
It is. It seems to me that I can “slightly stretch” to any gauge. Make your swatch larger than 4 inches however. The gauge is over 4 inches it’s true but you don’t want to include the end sts as they are smaller than others.
What is the name of your pattern?
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Rico 648 - hat for men
Very nice!
Hopefully it will be, if I get the tension right!!
Thank you, Salmonmac, for the tip to knit quite a large tension square - this helped.
However it was still quite hard to assess the effect of using larger needles on the original sizing with 3.5mm ones when also stretching slightly! I have decided to add some more stitches into the pattern and use 3.75 needles, rather than even larger ones which change the effect of the stitch. We’ll see how that goes!
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