Learning to Read Patterns

How-to Questions
1

Hi all,
I’m just learning to knit, and I’m finally ready to start following my first pattern. I have a list of some of the most common abbreviations, but there’s something at the beginning of my pattern that I don’t understand. It says:

STITCH GLOSSARY: Tw2R = knit into front of 2nd st on left hand needle, then knit into front of 1st st, slipping both sts off needle together.

I get that they’re defining a term that will be used later on in the pattern, but what does it mean to “knit into front” of something?

Also, I’m wondering whether my finished product will end up larger or smaller than the one in the pattern (it’s a tea cozy, so it doesn’t matter that much, but the pattern can be for a small one or a large one, so I can compensate that way). The pattern says:

TENSION: 19 sts and 32 rows = 4 ins [10 cm] with 4.50 mm needles in pat.

and I knit a swatch with 22 stitches with size 6 needles (not sure by which measure, I got them from a drawer in my mum’s basement in Canada) and it’s 7 inches long (although I’m not sure how far apart to spread the stitches for the purpose of measuring the length). I’m using double knit yarn.

Thanks for your help!

2

Welcome to KH! :yay:

Knitting into the front of a stitch means knitting it as you normally would, not into the back.

The 4.5 needle is equivalent to a US 7.
http://www.yarnfwd.com/needleconv.html

Generally when you measure you should take the needles off the swatch so it can lay flat w/o any stretching. You can run a “lifeline” through the stitches to hold them if you might want to add to it or reuse the yarn.

Is the yarn you are using the same as the one recommended? A different size needle and/or yarn could affect the final product.

Here is some info about gauge swatches.
http://www.knitpicks.com/content/index.php/cat/gauge/