Dear Anne
My friend is having trouble knitting her garments and they all appear to be a different size. She does not use the Green Ruler and my question is would you be so kind as to explain this to me and I will pass it on to her. I haven’t been machine knitting for some time as I looked after my dad until he passed, then we moved house and just recently I had a bad fall so everything is on the back burner for now. Many thanks, Janice
Thanks for asking Janice and the Green Ruler is an excellent way of measuring the stitch and row tension of machine knitted swatches. It’s as accurate as most machine knitters require and can be used on all machines. A while ago, Sally Butcher wrote to say:-
Dear Anne
My chosen method of tension swatch measuring is to use the coloured rulers, as I’ve always been a Silver Reed (Knitmaster) fan and these were supplied with the machines. The three colours are used on the different gauge machines; green is for standard, yellow is for mid-gauge machines and blue is for chunky. They have different scales and are designed to measure different quantities of stitches and rows. It’s important to get this right in order to get an accurate swatch measurement.
• Green (standard) measures over 40 stitches and 60 rows.
• Yellow (mid-gauge) measures over 30 stitches and 40 rows.
• Blue (chunky) measures over 20 stitches and 30 rows.
I drew up a little table which I’ve printed off several times and laminated. I keep one with each machine and I’m happy for you to print it. With best wishes, Sally Butcher
Sally is one of our Knitting Buddies and she runs a club in Bodmin, Cornwall. She also has video demonstrations on her Facebook page, showing techniques on the SK280, LK150 and SK155 Silver Reed machines. The link is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSDxy6pQHAs4gd5XBztYWmw and it’s called Sally Butcher’s Kalamunda Krafts Machine Knitting.
