Measure twice, knit once

This illustration is from Laura Bryant and Barry Klein's Body Measurement Chart. They provide blank spaces for each of the measurements shown above—you'll be all set to knit any garment for yourself. I want to fill out one of these for each of the people I knit for, too!

Measuring yourself is never super fun (unless you've recently lost weight!), but knowing your measurements is essential to knitting sweaters that fit.

My knitting group got together a couple of years ago and had a measuring party—we buddied up and took each others' measurements and wrote them all down. We need to do that again since it's been awhile. Here's hoping my measurements have stayed the same or even gotten a tiny bit smaller!

After seeing episode 703 of Knitting Daily TV, I'm armed with lots of great information and tips to make the measurements more exact. Designers and authors Laura Bryant and Barry Klein join host Shay Pendray to share their tricks for taking accurate measurements, along with lots of info about that mysterious element: ease.

Laura measures and tries on several sweaters and demonstrates how positive ease (a garment that measures a little larger than a person's measurements) and negative ease (a garment that measures a little smaller than a person's measurements) affect how the garment looks.

It might be counter-intuitive, but the garment with negative ease is much more flattering. I love this visual evidence-so many of us make our sweaters too big! Once when my knitting group was trying on sweaters for one of the the Interweave Knits galleries, almost everyone thought a certain sweater wasn't going to fit them. When it did I could see the light bulbs go on—"I think I've been making my sweaters too big" was the quote of the evening.

Laura and Barry have made a handy chart available for download, too. It's from their book The New Knitter's Template, and it provides blank spaces for every measurement you'll ever need. Here's the clip from episode 703:

Did you know you can download individual episodes of Knitting Daily TV? Download episode 703 and organize a measuring party with your knitting group! You'll have a ball watching the episode and then measuring each other.

Cheers,