Understanding Ease

Many garment patterns refer to ease – positive or negative ease affects how you knit and want to wear a garment.

Simply put, ease is how tight or loose a garment is on your body. A garment with a lot of positive ease fits loosely and a garment with negative ease will be tight and stretch over you.

For socks, it’s typically recommended that you size your sock with -10% ease. So if your foot is 8in around, you’ll want to knit slightly smaller – 7.2inches to make the sock stretch over your foot.

Hats are also knit at negative ease – too loose of a brim and the hat falls off your head!

Garment patterns typically list the suggested ease in the pattern and size accordingly. If you’re not sure if ease is included in the pattern, you can divide the number of stitches in the body by the number of sts/in in the gauge. For example, a sweater where you have 240 sts at at the bust and are working 24sts/4in gauge, then that would be (240/24)*4 = 40 inches (or more simply, 24sts/4in = 6sts/in. Then 240/6 = 40 inches). You can then measure your bust size to determine if that matches your size +- the inches of ease you want in your sweater.