Finally figured out why my tension was all over the place

I had almost the same moment of truth last winter. My ribbing looked fine and then went slack on every other section, and I coud not figure out why for weeks. Turned out I was loosening my grip on purl rows without noticing, beacuse I'd started knitting on the couch instead of at my desk and my hand was resting differently. Once I went back to sitting upright for anything with purls in it, the fabric evened right out.

The thing that finally clued me in was taking a video of my hands on my phone and watching it back. Seeing myself knit from the outside was so much more revealing than trying to feel what my fingers were doing mid-row. I also started keeping the same swatch on the needles as a tension check, and if it starts looking off I know I've drifted back into sloppy habits, ussually when I'm tired at the end of the evening. My hands knit tighter when I'm relaxed and looser when I'm concentrating, which took me way too long to figure out.

Funny how the fix can be the opposite of going back to old habits. I spent years with even tension in English style, then taught myself continental when my wrist started aching. First month everything was uneven because my left hand hadn't learned where to hold the yarn yet. Instead of forcing my old grip back, I just accepted the awkward phase and knit a whole pair of boring stockinette socks as practice. By the second sock my fingers had settled on thier own and now my gauge is actually more consistent than before, since I'm not wrapping at all.

So if watching yourself knit doesn't reveal an obvious change like yours did, sometimes the answer is just picking one way and letting your hands drill it in over a project or two. My rule now is never switch methods mid-project, even for a small section, because my hands drift within a couple of rows.

Also a humid summer here once had me convinced my cotton was the problem, but swatching the same yarn months later gave me the same stitches, so at least in my case the weather was never guilty.

My grandmother taught me back in the 70s and she made me tension the yarn over the index finger, not the pinky. Took me decades to realize half the knitters I meet do it the other way and we'd both swear ours is the only right one. These days if my gauge goes wonky I check the finger first, then wheather I've slid down into the comfy chair, and only after that do I start blaming the yarn. Funny how the old habits are the ones that come back when your hands get tired.