Understanding Ease in crochet garments – positive and negative ease explained

Ease is given as a measurement added on to the body part it relates to.

For example, you may see that a chest measurement on a sweater has 10cm positive ease (more about positive and negative ease in a moment). This means that the circumference of the finished item is 10cm longer than the circumference of the chest it is designed to fit.

Most commonly, you will see ease described in crochet patterns as relating to the chest or bust measurement, but the same principle applies for any body part. Whether it’s the bicep, neck, head, wrist or ankle, a designer should always be aware of the amount of ease in any part of their pattern.

Positive vs negative ease

Ease should always be described as positive, negative or zero.

Positive ease means that the finished item is larger than the body part it is designed to fit.

As with the previous example, a sweater with 10cm positive ease is 10cm larger (over the total chest measurement) than the chest size it is designed for. So a sweater designed to fit a 90cm chest will measure 100cm around the chest when completed and blocked.

Negative ease means that the finished item is smaller than the body part it is designed for.

With negative ease, the wearable needs to be stretched to fit. It is most commonly seen in socks and hats, which need to stretch in order to stay in place. You may also see negative ease used in tight fitting garments.

Hats are typically made with around 5cm (2”) negative ease, so a hat designed to fit a 55cm head will measure 50cm when complete.

Zero ease simply means that the finished item is the same size as the body it’s designed to fit. There is no difference in size between the finished item and the body part it is designed to fit.

Below you see the Fisherman’s winter hat which is made with a lot of negative ease (around 10cm). The fabric is super stretchy so negative ease is essential to keep it on the head.

How does ease impact fit?

When choosing a crochet pattern, the amount of ease used will give you useful information about how an item will fit on your body.

But how do you know what 10cm ease (for example) looks like?

The designer’s images should hopefully be representative, but the table below gives you a general guidance on what kind of ‘fit’ different levels of ease offer.

These are general guidelines given by the Craft Yarn Council.

Using ease to choose a pattern size

Understanding what the amount of ease means in terms of fit is a really useful aid in choosing the correct size to make from a crochet pattern.

When choosing sizes, always look at the measurements rather than a standard size category. The more measurements provided in a pattern or pattern schematic, the more accurately you will be able to asses how it will fit.

If you are crocheting an item for yourself, measure yourself around the bust and bicep as a minimum. For me as a designer, these are the first two areas I think about in terms of fit and have the largest bearing on how a garment looks.

Note that the ease may not be the same throughout the garment. For example, a sweater may be a classic fit in the body with about 10cm positive ease and may have oversized sleeves with say 30cm positive ease.

The Light fandango sweater (the pink sweater shown in the header image) has a large amount of positive ease in the chest but very little ease around the sleeves. In contrast you can see the so what sweater pattern below, which is oversized and has a lot of positive ease around both the body and the sleeves.

Ease and garment length

This is not something I’ve really seen discussed before, but I wanted to touch on it separately.

As a designer, I apply ease to body length the same way I would to the chest. I might want to create a cardigan that sits just below the bottom of the hip so I might add 5cm to the shoulder to hip measurement to achieve this.

If a garment is constructed top down or bottom up, where the length is built in rows then it is easier to modify (generally speaking) so when choosing your size, length is likely less of a dealbreaker.

It’s still useful to look at the measurements to understand how that length works for you. If a sweater is cropped but you prefer it longer, take a look at the pattern to see how easy it is to change the length. Many designs these days include basic guidance on making adjustments.

It’s hard for a single design to serve all body shapes and preferences so understanding how to adjust a pattern is a useful skill to have in your took box. I discuss this in more detail in my ebook, how to crochet clothes that fit, and this article discusses alterations for top down garments.

Little tangent there. Let’s get back to ease!

Ease and Grading

First off, a quick reminder that grading, in this context, is the process of producing a pattern for multiple sizes.

Without turning this into a post about the grading process, essentially, it starts with working out what size you want each part of the garment to be (by adding the specific ease to the body measurement) and then using gauge to calculate how many stitches and rows you need to crochet to achieve that size.

This is done over multiple sizes and I use a spreadsheet to hold all the calculations.

The key point here is that to decide on the final size of a garment you want to make, you need to add (or deduct) your chosen amount of ease to the body measurement.

It follows that you need to know exactly how much ease you are working with in advance to be able to do this.

My spreadsheets always start with the same format: Body size, gauge, ease – the foundations of sizing any pattern.

Once you have these key numbers, you are good to go!

I have a separate post on how to make the calculations here, if you want to get sidetracked!

For the budding designers amongst you, I have it on my list to write about my approach to grading, so keep your eyes peeled for that. But be aware that understanding ease is a key part of it, so I wanted to address that first.

Fixed vs proportionate (relative) ease

The distinction between the concepts of fixed and proportional ease is something I have been intuitively aware of for a while but have only recently learned how to verbalise these ideas.

The next section of this post digs deep into how one approaches ease across different sizes, and includes my own recent journey of ease related enlightenment! (Grab a cuppa if you haven’t already!)

Fixed ease

Fixed ease is where a set amount of ease is chosen across a specific body part, over all sizes.

So in the example we have been using, that might be 10cm positive ease on a chest measurement. For an 80cm chest, the finished item would have a 90cm chest, for a 140cm chest, the finished item would measure 150cm around the chest.

For clarity, fixed ease, the way I use the term, does not mean having the same amount of ease in every part of the design. It’s about having the same amount of ease in one specific area across multiple sizes of the same design.

The use of fixed ease is standard amongst crochet an knit designers. Most patterns use a specific amount of ease (10cm is the example I’ve been using in this post) and apply that to every size of a pattern, from XS to 5XL. This is the approach outlined in the ‘ease and fit’ guidance table above.

The majority of my patterns have been sized this way, however, lately, as I endeavour to improve the fit of my garment designs and to create more size inclusive patterns, I have been thinking about a different approach, which is proportional ease.

Proportionate or relative ease

Relative or proportionate ease is where the amount of ease is calculated as a percentage (a set proportion) of the overall measurement.

Lets say I want a positive ease of 10% on a chest measurement. For an 80cm chest with 10% ease, the finished item would have a finished chest of 88cm (8cm positive ease), for a 140cm chest, the finished measurement would be 154cm (14cm positive ease).

As you can see the two approaches lead to different amounts of ease across sizes. I have been very curious about the impact this would have on over all fit between sizes.

If you’ll permit me, I want to share the rabbit hole I’ve been down on this consideration of how to apply ease and the personal conclusions I’ve come to about which is the ‘best’ approach.

Ease and ‘clearance’ from the body

I’ll start by reminding you that ease can be described as the amount of clearance a garment has from the body.

As I grade patterns with fixed ease, I began to wonder whether the same amount of ease could really create the same amount of clearance from the body and therefore the same kind of fit.

My intuitive maths brain asked how can 10cm over a bust of 70cm really be the same as 10cm out of 140cm. Surely the latter would lead to a tighter fit?

Likewise with something like a hat. How could 5cm of negative ease on a newborn head be the same fit as 5cm negative ease on a large adults head? Won’t that poor baby’s hat would be too tight?

Surely calculating ease proportionately is a more sensible approach?

These questions had niggling at me for a while. I couldn’t find any real resources to give me a definitive answer on the matter.

The closest I got was in a design your own knit beanie course from the master of hats, Wooly Wormhead who suggested using around 12% negative ease for a hat (depending on the amount of stretch in the fabric). This reassured me that I wasn’t the first person to think about using percentages.

Eventually I asked the question in one of my tech editing facebook groups which is full of seasoned knit and crochet tech editors and designers.

The overwhelming feeling was the fixed ease was a better approach to achieve the same fit across sizes. Though there were some on favour of proportional ease when applied with understanding.

Two articles were recommended to me (both Knitting related) and I share them here should you wish to dig deeper on the subject. Firstly, a more detailed description of fixed versus relative ease from Julie at work and this article – a case against proportionate ease in designing garments – from Kristina McGrath.

There were some designers in the group who preferred using relative ease, especially in specific circumstances such as adding frills.

The strong voices against proportionate ease surprised me and I knew I needed to dig deeper to understand why relative ease was so out of favour.

So I decided to take a look at the numbers… and I’m not going to lie. It blew my tiny mind!

The maths of ease

Focusing back on this idea of maintaining an equal amount of clearance from the body in obtaining a consistent fit – which is the ultimate goal.

I intuited that a proportionate approach would be the only way to achieve this (and stop that hat being too small for the babies head)

But then I did the actual maths.

And it turns out was quite wrong…

I’m going to illustrate this with a quick diagram.

Below I have drawn a smaller circle inside a larger one. Let’s say this represents the chest size of a garment where A (the smaller circle) is the body and B (the larger circle) is equivalent to the finished garment.

The circumference of B is 10cm larger than the circumference of A – i.e. we have a garment with 10cm positive ease.

The difference in radius between these two circles is ‘C’ the clearance, and it’s this that I want to keep consistent, ensuring the fit or the garment remains the same across sizes.

To check whether and by how much C changed with different circumferences, I did the maths using a 70cm bust and a 140cm bust each with 10cm positive ease.

I compared the difference in the radius (C) of the smaller and larger circles (70cm circumference vs 80cm circumference and 140cm vs 150cm circumference)

And the amounts were exactly the same…

C was constant.

No matter the size of the first circle (and I tried many many different sizes), a circle with a circumference 10cm larger always had a radius exactly 1.59cm larger.

So for 10cm of fixed positive ease you will always get 1.59cm of ‘clearance’ from the body – regardless of the size.

For me this is totally counterintuitive, but I trust the numbers so I just need to accept it’s some kind of clever Pi related witchcraft!

The maths has answered my question, pretty definitively, that fixed ease achieves a consistent body clearance across sizes.

Because it surprised me so much, I got really curious and so did the same sums using 20cm positive ease. This time, regardless of size, the clearance always came to 3.18cm (twice what it was for 10cm ease).

My mind was blown but also delighted to have mathematical reassurance that adding fixed ease is the appropriate way to achieve a standard clearance.

For me it is also incredibly useful to know that for every 10cm of ease I get 1.59cm (almost half and inch) clearance around the body*. Personally that’s something I find easier to visualise when thinking about ease in terms of fit, than just 10cm overall (which as you now know, led me somewhat down the garden path!).

*Note, that the body is clearly not a perfect circle but I find this imagery easier to relate to!

I put together my own quick chart below. This outlines how much clearance you get with varying amounts of fixed ease, in case this approach helps you too.

So, does all this mean that there is no room for proportional ease?

I don’t think so.

For a start, designs may not always want the exact same amount of clearance for different sizes. A lot depends on the specific design at hand.

It’s an area I want to keep researching and I think that, as with the hat example, relative ease can be a helpful approach when thinking about fabrics that stretch.

I also think that proportion is a good way to come up with a starting point for ease.

It appears that proportional ease is more commonly used in sewing patterns, so I will be continuing my research around that area and will certainly come back and update this post with any further discoveries!

One last thing to think about crochet ease

Before I leave you, I want to share one last consideration when it comes to ease in crochet garments.

And that is the impact of the thickness of the fabric itself.

Depending on the type of item you’re making, crochet fabric can be quite thick so, especially if you’re working with quite small margins, you need to think about whether you’re taking your measurements on the inside or outside of your circle.

If you’re working with 10cm positive ease (1.59cm clearance) and using super chunky yarn which creates a fabric that is 1cm thick, then your clearance is going to drop.

I haven’t done the maths on this to work out a succinct way to accommodate it, but it’s still something to bear in mind.

I learned a long time ago that given all the variations in crochet across gauge, some concepts you just need to be aware of and make an gut decision on… just leave your intuition to the side and crunch the numbers when it comes to the magic of Pi… 😉

I hope you’ve found this deep dive interesting and it has left you clearer about the concept of ease.

If maths isn’t your thing, please don’t let that part get you bogged down in the weeds. I’ve mostly included that for the designers and curious amongst you (and because I found it fascinating!).

If you’re making from a pattern and want to understand ease in order to choose your size, or to understand how a garment will fit, just refer to the two tables I’ve included which are super succinct summaries.

If you have any questions or thoughts on this topic, please do feel free to drop them in the comments below.

Happy Hooking

Dx

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