A Sweater Story: Swatches?! We don't need no stinking Swatches!

Yes, yes we do...

Gauge swatches have always been loathed by me. I'm impatient and I want to start my project right away and to hell with the consequences! Well, not with my sweater. I decided in the beginning that I was gonna do this sweater thing right. I was mainly reluctant to swatch because the only time I've seen it done for stockinette in the round looked messy or involved cutting  the swatch to lay flat. Ugh! in both respects. I happened to be watching The Knitgirllls podcast and I saw that Leslie had done some swatching for a future sweater of her own. They were beautiful! They were done in the round without slicing and dicing the yarn! It was a way of swatching she learned from Steven West and it was now gonna be my go to swatching in the round! So I busted out my size US13 needles and my bulky weight yarn and went to town.

Yay!

Ugh!

Right away I noticed something was off. The yarn was knitting up very loose and airy. The pictures of the designers sweater was not loose and airy. The gauge of this sweater should be 10 sts and 14 rows for a 4 inch swatch so 2.5 sts per inch. I was so not getting this. So I hopped on Ravelry and popped on over to the pattern to see what others said about the gauge. I saw Super Bulky! The pattern clearly says Bulky but I guess it was more of a super-bulky Bulky. So after a period of feeling dejected, looking for other patterns that might fit the yarn, whining to my husband, looking for more patterns, maybe a tad more whining, I went out and bought, I hope, a sweaters worth of Super Bulky yarn. Swatched and got beautiful gauge the first try. I casted on and next thing I know it's time to separate for the sleeves. I love it!
The moral of the story, kids, is do a swatch. I would have knit a good chunk of that sweater thinking, 'Sure, it looks a little off but it will fix its self in the end', gotten mad when it didn't fit and tossed it in a corner to be frogged a month later when I could bear to look at it again. Just swatch.