Swatching: A Cautionary Tale
When you meet me in a fiber circle, and you ask me a question whose answer would best be answered with a swatch (be it a knitted or a woven swatch), I will most likely answer that you should swatch.
(This is pretty much any question related to changing the pattern, yarn, needle size, or gauge, making up a pattern, changing the sett, or felting). My consistent, faithful, unwavering commitment to recommending swatches has earned me, in certain circles, the dubious moniker: “The Swatch-Nazi.”*
Swatching is particularly important when you’re wet-felting, so that you can ascertain if the piece will felt dimensionally (that is, it will retain its shape, but decrease in size), or will draw in more than shrink (that is, become a long, thin rectangle), or will shrink more than draw in (become a short, fat rectangle).
For the Owl Bag project, I made a small swatch.
This swatch is wildly too small. When I felted it, it shrank more than it drew in (short, fat rectangle). As I didn’t realize that this was an issue, I based my initial numbers on the swatch’s shrinkage, and ended up with a much longer, thinner owl bag than I had planned on.
Enter the full-sized swatch. While you don’t have to weave (or knit, or crochet) an entire project to make a “full sized” swatch, it is considerably easier and consumes far less yarn to make a “full sized” swatch than it is to make a mini swatch, be wrong, make the project, make a full-sized swatch, and then remake the whole project. Here is my second swatch, which is the full width of the project (11 inches on the loom) squared.
(In case you’re wondering why this swatch seems to have sprouted a teeny chest full of hair, it’s because I was playing around with the idea of giving the owl a “feathered” chest, and pulled a lot of individual strands through my plain woven cloth, much like a 70s latch-hook rug. I did not like the mass they felted into — too much like 70s porn star chest hair– and soon gave that up).
This full sized swatch felted dimensionally — that is, it kept the original dimensions, and resulted in the bag I set out to make in the first place — the short, fat owl bag:
On a lemons-into-lemonade front, I kept good notes on both owls, and made the pattern to reflect a choice of sizes.
* I’m certain I would probably prefer “Swatch Evangelist” or “Careful Fiber Artist,” but there’s a certain consonant-heavy assonance to “Swatch Nazi” that harkens back to Jerry Seinfeld’s Soup-Nazi, and I thus choose to think of it as a term of endearment.