There are a few techniques that really make a difference when it comes to the quality of your finished piece, as well as the experience you have of knitting it. When you master these “extra” skills, you will be putting the icing on the Knitting Superstar cake.

#1 – Choose the Right Size of Garment to Knit

Earlier in this course I discussed the concept of ease. Ease makes a huge difference in how your garments fit and look on you. In addition to understanding ease, I’d like you to consider how the fabric you are making will hang. How stretchy is the stitch pattern? Cables pull a garment in, and hold it close to the body. Ribbing is very stretchy, but it will only hold its shape if the garment is knitted out of a yarn that holds its shape, like wool.

How do you want the garment to fit? Socks, for instance, need to be smaller than your feet in order to stretch and stay on your feet comfortable. Hats, too, need to be a bit smaller than your head – say 10% smaller in both cases. I feel the same way about sweaters. If you like your sweaters to stretch when you put them on, make the sweater a little smaller than you are. The opposite is true as well.

#2 – Understand Your Measurements

The Craft Yarn Council has put together a great website to refer to when you are measuring your body for knitting. The website discusses ease and also measuring for children.

It is important to measure your body correctly, and this is easier said than done. Just have two friends measure your shoulder-to-shoulder distance – the numbers will probably be different!

That’s why I like to rely on measuring my favorite sweaters when I’m in a pinch, and I recommend that you try it and see if it works for you!

#3 – Choose the Right Yarn for Your Projects

The Knitter’s Book of Yarn by Clara Parkes is the best resource for understanding what yarn to choose and why. Yarn is made out of so many different kinds of fiber, from plant to animal to man- made, that using yarn without knowing what it’s made of or how that fiber behaves is like cooking a meal without knowing a thing about the ingredients you use.

If you copy the recipe exactly, it will probably turn out right, but you won’t be able to improvise or progress as a cook until you understand the flavors and textures in your ingredients, as well as how they behave when cooked. I’ve done this – I’ve gone to the grocery store, and when they don’t have Swiss chard for my recipe, I’m completely flummoxed, even though I’m staring at bins and bins of rainbow chard, beet greens, and turnip greens.

Don’t do this! Don’t be a clueless pattern robot, destined to follow the path set by you for another. There are thousands of delicious yarns out there, waiting to be knitted. In order to help you in your yarn choices, here are some rules of thumb, along with tips for choosing yarn:

• Check the suggested gauge on the yarn label – it will be a range of numbers that represents the stitches per inch you can expect to get using the suggested needle size. Your yarn label also gives you other information about the yarn. It indicates how many stitches and how many rows you can expect to get in a 10 x 10 cm (4×4 inch) square of Stockinette Stitch knitting, using a certain size of needle.
• The stitch gauge is much more important to get right than the row gauge. As long as your pattern calls for the same gauge as you get when you make YOUR swatch, you are okay to substitute the yarns, because they will be generally the same weight.
• You can’t go wrong with wool. Wool’s too itchy, you say? Not anymore. Try a superfine merino wool or blend, such as Berroco Pure Merino, or Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino or Sublime Extra Fine Merino Wool DK. Merino wool is very soft, bouncy, and many of the blends are machine-washable, too! By bouncy I just mean that it holds its shape very well. Think of curly hair, how it bounces back. Merino wool does the same thing.
• Single-ply yarns (yarns that are just one thick strand of fiber spun together), such as Blue Sky Alpacas Bulky Natural are very soft, but also pill a great deal. They will not wear well for socks or other heavy-duty garments. Now, I am wearing hand knit single-ply socks as I am writing this, and they are heavenly and delicious, but also scarily fuzzy and not something I’d give as a gift.
• Choose the right color yarn for YOU. Not the model in the pattern book. This is a disappointing lesson to learn after you’ve spent 2 months or more making a sweater. How do you know it’s the right color for you? Hold it up to your face. Does it make you look fabulous? Think of your closet. Do you have lots of other fabulous pieces that you love in the same color? Chances are, it’s a good color for you.

#4 – Measure Your Gauge for Sweaters, Socks, and Mittens

These three things are a bummer when they don’t fit right. Because small discrepancies in gauge are multiplied over the 60-200 stitches of your garment, it doesn’t take much for a slightly incorrect gauge to cause your garments to come out too big or too small. For instance, if you are half a stitch off per inch on the gauge for your socks, they will easily be an inch too big or too small – no amount of stretching or shrinking can fix this.

Save yourself the tears: knit a small square of Stockinette stitch, at least 3 inches wide and 2-3 inches tall. If you are going to make more than one swatch to test different needle sizes, don’t bother weaving in your ends: make knots in the tail that correspond with the needle size you used to make the swatch. Three knots in the tail = a size 3 needle. Brilliant!

One last thing – before you measure your gauge, keep this in mind: if you are going to knit your project in the round, knit your swatch in the round. If you are going to block your final garment (and you are, aren’t you?), block your swatch before you measure it. It just makes good sense.

One happy situation that may result from your staunch discipline to making swatches and measuring your gauge is that you will probably be the only one at knit night that does this. You will therefore garner quite a bit of well-deserved respect from your peers (and so will your perfectly- fit sweater). It’s like wearing a helmet on a bike – sometimes it’s cool to be careful, even if no one wants to do it.

#5 – Use Correct Tension and Finger Positioning

Maintaining a comfortable tension, or grip, on your yarn is really key to enjoying the knitting experience. These two videos demonstrate a few positions and tips that can help your yarn flow smoothly and evenly through your fingers.

Tensioning your yarn. It’s important that you find a way of holding the yarn and letting it feed over the index finger that feels comfortable to you. It might take a little practice to get used to, so stick with it.

Let The Yarn Flow Through Your Fingers

Letting the yarn flow through your fingers. Many knitters keep a death grip on their yarn, to the detriment of their fingers and the knitted piece. Here’s how to let the yarn flow smoothly without making your stitches too loose.

#6 – Use Your Fingers to Help You Knit

Your fingers and hands, if used correctly, can speed you up for three reasons. First, they can prevent stitches from popping off the tips of your needles, and you can go faster if you’re not afraid of that happening. Second, they hold the stitch firmly in place, so you can knit into it quickly and easily. Third, they push the new stitches up to the tip of your needle so they are ready to be knitted. The combination is dynamite!

#7 – Make Correct Increases and Decreases

Increases and decreases are the secret to making shapely, fitted garments: bell sleeves, round necklines, and knee-socks, to name a few. However, many knitters are not well-versed in the different ways to increase and decrease.

There are lots of good ways! Experimenting on a practice swatch is a stress-free way to try out all the different moves and see what they look like.

Grab a ball of light-colored yarn and practice the different shaping techniques along with me as you watch the videos on Increasing and Decreasing in your Video Knitting Dictionary.

#8 – Recognize and Fix Mistakes (At Your Discretion)

With three bonus sections of this course devoted entirely to recognizing, appreciating, and fixing mistakes, you will be in no doubt that I really value this skill. Why?

See this Top-Ten List. In order to troubleshoot any mistakes you may have made, you can refer to the videos in this section to identify and fix the problem. However, I want to make it perfectly clear that you only have to fix your mistakes if you feel like it.

You are the master of your own knitting, and being able to see a mistake and let it go (if you can’t see if from a galloping horse…), is a mark of bravery, perspective, and discretion. Try it once, on something that it really won’t matter if there’s a small mistake, like a baby bootie or a child’s toy, just to see if you can do it. For everything else, head to the bonus section on fixing mistakes if you get heartburn.

#9 – Count Your Stitches and Rows Correctly and Easily

If you can count your rows correctly and your stitches fast, your project will be so much easier! Watch these videos for tips on how to do it.

Keeping track of your knitting means marking your pattern as well as your rows, as you knit. Here’s how.

Count Stitches by Fives

Counting by fives is the absolutely fastest way to count stitches. I am amazed by how long knitters, even experts, take, to count their stitches! Changing how you count takes practice, but this video contains a scientific secret that will give you the motivation to try this new way.

#10 – Block Everything You Knit

This tip is a tribute to my knitting friend Kelli, who sweetly leaned in one knit night and said in an incredibly serious voice, “Block everything you knit. Everything.”

Yarn makes a long journey from sheep (or plant fiber, or silk worm, or test tube) to garment.

This transformation is most dramatic for wool and other animal-hair yarns.

Along the way, it gets combed, spun, twisted into skeins, wound into balls, and then pulled into thousands of tiny interlocking loops called stitches, to become your garment.

One last step must happen to your yarn, though, for your project to really look its best. You must get it wet.

Fibers, when soaked, have the chance to absorb a ton of water, and when they do, they relax into their new shape, your garment.

Small differences in tension, edges that won’t lay flat or are too tight, places where you pulled a little too tight… any small mistakes like these can be smoothed out, straightened, and disguised by blocking.

Blocking lets your garment go, “Ahhhhhh,” and so will all the other knitters when they see your perfectly flat sweaters, gently rounded socks, and the straight and flat edges of your scarves. And who doesn’t want that? Besides, it’s really easy. Here’s how to do it.

These are the 10 techniques that, when mastered, will put a smile on your face and a star in your knitting crown. Practice adding them into your repertoire little by little, perhaps trying one new technique for each project you start.