I have a few yarns lying around to try out and am now busily knitting swatches in stockinette stitch and garter stitch, followed by swatches. "Do you always knit swatches?" Katharina asked me incredulously during our cozy knitting chat with Carina on Saturday, as I rummaged my many swatches out of the bag. Nope. To be honest, I've always been one of those who prefer to knit straight away, can hardly wait and think "it'll fit".

Unfortunately, it does not always fit. I've had to find out and ribbon more than once.

But stitch tests are really something great! There are entire blogs dedicated to stitch tests. For me, this is new territory. Not the stitch test itself, but the joy of it. I couldn't understand that until now. Just like the joy of knitting socks. Until a few months ago, I still smiled at socks, and now I'm in danger of increasing my sock box enormously. Oh horror!

Now I'm even so much in the gauge mania that I knit each sample right away twice, then wash and stretch one and compare it afterwards with the unwashed one. Crazy, isn't it? So maybe you're doing this too and smiling at my lines, but for me this is pretty new and it's really fun!

Clara Parkes has infected me. I can warmly recommend her two books to you, unfortunately they are (as far as I know) not yet published in German.I always open The Knitter's Book of Yarnand like to browse through it. However, I think she could have left out the pattern part. By the way, she also made a super great Craftsy course, which I always like to listen to while knitting. So as a podcast alternative.

How do you do it? Do you also like to knit stitch samples? And if so, how many and in what form?