A Lesson in Gauge - The Arbor Vitae Jumper

My Best Friend Trying the Jumper on.

The progress I've been making on my Arbor Vitae Jumper has been stopped and the jumper almost completely ripped back, and on purpose too. The jumper had a complete body, and I had started on the first of the sleeves, having done the short row sleeve cap and just started to work in the round for the main part of the sleeve. When I got to that point I decided to try on the jumper to see how the sleeve was doing. I had tried the jumper on before when I had completed the body and the neckband, but back then I didn't think much about the bottom ribbing of the jumper being a little loose - Admittedly when I tried it on the first time I was on the train and at risk of looking more then a little odd, so didn't keep the jumper on that long!

This time I really noticed the loose-ness of the jumper, and it got me thinking about how I wanted the jumper to sit, and how often was I going to wear it if it didn't have the characteristics that I wanted. It was then that I decided that it was too big for me, and it might be an idea to start over again. Now I didn't know that much about gauge and swatching. I did swatch for this project, and I knew that my gauge was larger, but my inexperience with it all lead me to believe that it would only be an inch or so larger than it was meant to be. I also didn't really know what to do with the gauge information once I had got it.

Luckily when doing some research I managed to come across a few websites explaining gauge swatching in more depth then I had really looked for before. The For Dummies website (here) was more of a help then anything I had found before. It gives a brilliant run down of what you need to do, followed by a little bit of maths to work out the size of the knitting using the gauge and the stitch count. This came in really handy, and had my little geek brain all excited to be doing a little bit of maths to help out my knitting.

My best friend tried on my jumper when I was working out a little bit of the maths before I started frogging. She is a few sizes bigger than me and it fitted her almost perfectly. Shame it wasn't for her!
I worked out in the end that the jumper was about eleven inches too big, just a little too large for my liking. The second gauge swatch I did with a 2.5mm needle, which was the smaller needle size used for the ribbing and such in the pattern. My gauge was a little closer, but unfortunately not as close as it needed to be. We were looking at a gauge of 7 stitches per inch pattern gauge and 5.5 stitches per inch my gauge. With the maths all worked out, if I knit the smallest size, the outcome would only be a little bit bigger than it should be (actually an inch bigger, not eleven!) so I went with that, worrying that any smaller of a needle and then I might end up with a fabric which has a feel I don't like as much.

The Arbor Vitae, three months in progress, and only an hour to frog completely. I wasn't as sad as I thought I would have been ripping it out. I know that the yarn is a nice yarn that has a meaning to me, and the pattern is one that I feel I will enjoy wearing. So I am quite pleased to be able to have a second chance at getting it right, one of the things that I love about knitting.

So as the phoenix rises from the ashes, I have cast on and started the Arbor Vitae again, this time on a smaller needle and in a smaller size. But also with a much better understanding of gauge and how it affects the knit, and what to do about it when it isn't what you want. I feel so much better for finally understanding gauge, and I think I do feel a little bit differently about swatching now. I think I will enjoy it a lot more.

Llyn Fach

For a long time I have had a 009 gauge model railway. It is small enough to fit inside a cabinet bookcase, and I used to spend time working on it with my Dad. The past few years the railway has sat inside the bookcase, looking half finished and a little bit sorry for itself.

The railway has a little engine, its a generic saddle tank, and is named Sam, (after Peter Sam in the Rev. Awdry books), Sam also has a few coaches and a couple of trucks, that are shunted here and there around the few sidings.

Loading Gauge Issues

 A couple of years ago, I'd got the layout out and identified where some track needed replacing. Namely around the left side corner, where there was a slight track gauging issue... Some of the little plastic clips which hold in the rail had snapped and the engine would often derail there. I had bought a new length of track to fit there, but that too had been sitting in a box in the corner of the room waiting to be fitted. So I finally decided that I was actually going to do it. And I did.

I got out the layout and set up the controller to see if I could reassess the problem. What I found, instead of having track slightly wider than It should have been, was that actually we had a slight loading gauge issue around the road bridge. In my experience vehicles hitting bridges is never good. So I was faced with two options: move the bridge, OR move the track. Seeing as the bridge scenery was partially done, and I was going to replace the track anyway, I started going about replacing track.

The track around the bridge was also interesting. There is a station just before the bridge, loosely modeled on Wharf Station at the Talyllyn Railway, and so there is a platform and just before a loop. At some point there has been some bodging of track work when the loop was put in, and we were left with a rather untidy few sections of track leading out of the loop and under the bridge. The first of which seemed to be causing problems before.

Untidy Track

My plan,with the length of track I had, was to replace the entire curve up to the loop point, including the little messy piece. This is what I set about doing, pulling the track pins out, and saving the serviceable ones, and just chucking the old bent ones that weren't of any use. There was only one problem I came across, and that was that most of the corner is covered by the road across the top of the bridge...

Ultimately the only thing I could do was to take a knife to the cardboard bridge to get it out of the way. I had devised a way to cut up the bridge so that there was minimal damage.

I cut the bridge along the rear road boundary and completely lifted the back piece out, which gave just enough access to get in and remove the track, as well as lay the new piece.

Taking the two old pieces of track out was an interesting experience, as the track practically fell apart as soon as the track pins were out and it was slid out of the fishplates. I was rather glad I was replacing it.

The bridge coming off

Once the track was in and pinned down, and the bridge loading gauge issue was sorted, I slowly ran the engine around the curve to see how it ran. Unfortunately it did brush up against the wall at part of the curve, but that was solved by cutting out a section of the cardboard wall. The hole cut out is below the line of the top of the bridge, and will also allow some extra access to the curve once the bridge goes back on.

I was pleased with the curve once it had been relayed. The loading gauge problems were solved, and the curve looks a lot better, hopefully the engine will also run nicely too!

Done!