Yes, the s-word. Most of us don’t like swatching, because it feels like a waste of time. In some cases, it probably is. There are plenty of projects that don’t need swatching, as long as we’re willing to live with the consequences. Shawls and scarves don’t need swatching, unless we’re concerned about yarn chicken or really want the FOs to be a particular size or have a particular drape. Even hats, gloves, and mittens don’t need swatching, if we’re willing to find heads or hands that will fit in them—and if we’re not super-concerned about the warmth of the items if our fabric is a little looser that it ought to be.

But for items that should fit a particular person, for projects with yarns we’ve never used before, for projects that require fabric with a particular hand or drape, for yarns that might change the first time they get wet—well, these are all cases where even a longish time spent in swatching will save us time in the long run.

Since I had never used either CotLin or Hawthorne, the first order of business was to work up some swatches. First, I needed to figure out what size needles would give me an appropriate fabric for a sweater. Second, I needed to see how the two yarns would react to being machine washed and dried, which is how I plan to launder the FOs. The cotton/linen blend CotLin, especially, I suspected would change, and I determined to actually wash and dry it until it stopped changing (some of the denim-style yarns apparently can continue changing for multiple wash cycles).

The other issue for the cotton/linen yarn is that the non-resilience of the fibers themselves means that the worked-up fabric will not behave the same as the regular wool I had been using for a decade. Since the stitches don’t stick to one another the way they do in wool, cotton stitches are more prone to being worked on by gravity acting on the FO. If the FO was going to lengthen of its own accord while I wore it, which means the circumference would necessarily decrease, I needed to know about those changes so that my stitch and row counts could be determined accordingly.

(As a side note, I once, in my haste and excitement, forgot to wash the swatch of a regular wool I used to make a sweater. The finished sweater fit perfectly, and when I washed it the first time, the circumference grew by a full 10 percent. While I, too, have grown circumferentially since I finished that project, it’s not been by 10 percent, so the sweater is, shall we say, oversized. I used the leftovers to make nearly all the swatches for my charting book, and I learned that that particular yarn must be dekinked before it can be reused after frogging. The sweater is a cable-covered Aran, which uses more yarn than a plain stockinette sweater would, so I’ve been quite reluctant to frog the thing because of the effort that would be needed before I could rework the yarn. Sigh.)

I also wanted to avoid yarn chicken, as the value packs I bought were set up to be worked as fades, so I needed to know about how many stitches I could expect to make with each skein. I could then plan where to change from one yarn to the next and still have a sweater that was as long as I wanted for a flattering fit.