If you’re creating your own knitting pattern from scratch, you’ve probably done gauge math yourself before. Knittrick just makes it easier and faster, especially when repeating patterns are involved, which is something I appreciated when I went to design myself a copy of Hermione’s sweater (from the Deathly Hallows movie) a number of years ago.
I was completely distracted by Hermione’s sweater when I first saw (one of?) the Deathly Hallows movies. (That button band! That reverse-stockinette combined with colorwork yoke!) A few years later, I finally put in the time to make a similar one for myself.
Although I’ve confused myself a bit in trying to figure out exactly what I did and why all those years ago, the basic process isn’t too complicated. To start with, I could tell by looking at photos online that the sweater had a circular yoke, which is a style that hides a few rounds of decreases at intervals in the colorwork. Since the gauge was large (each of those scallops is 1.6” wide!), everything about the sweater would depend on fitting the right number of pattern repeats into each section of the yoke.
I could only find a centimeter ruler just now, but 10 cm is also very close to 4” and either one is the standard distance over which to measure knitting gauge (the number of stitches it takes to cover a certain distance). Accurate gauge measurement is essential for a well-fitted result. Make sure you knit a swatch larger than 4” in each direction and wash it the way you intent to wash the finished project before you measure the gauge.
Using Elizabeth Zimmermann’s EPS (“Elizabeth’s Percentage System”), which you can find in several of her books*, and adjusting for the 1.5” that my planned button band would take, I figured I wanted the yoke to be about 53.6” at the start of the colorwork. The EPS system (with Swansen’s modifications) said the first round of decreases should bring the measurement to about 40.3”, the second to about 26.9”, and the third to 16.3” for the neck.
*I particularly appreciate The Opinionated Knitter, which has great editorial comments from Meg Swansen (Zimmermann’s daughter) and some refinements to the EPS.
Knittrick calculations for how many stitches should be in each section of the yoke, without considering the pattern repeats.
Plugging those numbers into Knittrick gave me stitch counts, but the pattern repeats were so large and bold, I really wanted them to fit neatly into the space, not get cut off randomly at the button band.
This is the actual pattern chart I made and followed for this project, but be warned that although it made sense to me 7 years ago, it’s a bit incomplete and hard to follow. For instance, there are clearly a few color blocks missing and I think the <decreases> notations mark is where I could see stitches overlapping, which means the decreases were actually worked in the row above them. The bottom section of the pattern repeats at the top.
I made my colorwork chart by closely examining the knitting in photos on the internet. That allowed me to see where the yoke decrease rounds were happening, and that the pattern sections were all based around repeats of 6 stitches. Also, the checkerboard-type section had alternating blocks of 6 stitches and I wanted the pattern to be mirrored on each side of the button band, so I knew that section would require an odd number x 6 stitches. And for the scallop patterns, I would need one extra stitch at the end of the row to visually complete the scallop. With all that in mind, turning on “Require whole repeats” in Knittrick and setting the repeat length to 6 showed me the tradeoffs I needed to consider.
Knittrick calculations with whole repeats of 6 stitches required. I’ve left off the final round of decreases here because the colorwork is finished by that point, so the repeats don’t matter.
Other than being a little bigger than I intended at the start of the yoke, this looked pretty good. However, the section between the start of the yoke and the first round of decreases was meant to be taller than the others, and should have included the checkerboard pattern that I wanted to be symmetrical on either side of the button band. So the even number of repeats (34) suggested by Knittrick wouldn’t work well for me there. Since the actual measurement I wanted was right in the middle of the what I would get from 33 repeats of 6 (plus one stitch) and 34 repeats of 6 (plus one stitch) , I could have just made the sweater smaller overall and started with 33 repeats (plus one stitch) . But I really wanted this to be a big cozy sweater, so I didn’t like that option. I also didn’t want it to be too big by going all the way up to 35 repeats (plus one stitch) at the start of the yoke. I decided to sneak just a few decreases in after knitting the solid blue row above the first scallops (that way the overlapping stitches are in the solid row and basically invisible), so that I would have exactly 33 repeats of 6 stitches for the checkerboards (unlike the scallops, an extra stitch at the end of the row would have unbalanced that section of the pattern).
For reasons I don’t remember (maybe because of the relative heights of the sections again?), I ended up doing 24 repeats (plus one stitch) for the next section and 16 repeats (plus one stitch) for the last section of the colorwork.
This Forest of Dean project is on my Ravelry page with a couple photos from when it was new… and very few notes! As partly explained above, I ended up designing this pretty much from scratch based on photos and measurements, but I did appreciate the information in the Of Hallows and Horcruxes pattern by Megan Murray while I was thinking it through, and I think I used her instructions for the button band. The yarn is Briggs & Little Heritage 2 Ply in Aran weight, which I love. It is woolly without being itchy (with at least a t-shirt underneath) and it wears beautifully with almost no pilling. It is woolen spun, which makes it light and warm, but does make it a little more susceptible to wear. This sweater has seen a whole lot of use in the past 6 or 7 years and I just added some reinforcing darning at the elbows, where I could see the fabric was getting weak. I’ve also replaced the last half inch or so of the cuffs at least once.
This project was finished years ago and has been worn a whole lot. Here you can see a bit of the reinforcement I darned into the elbows recently.