How Much Ease Is Too Much? What Nobody Tells You About Fitting Your Tummy

Once upon a time, knitting pattern designers simply didn't acknowledge that women came in more than two sizes. If your full bust was over 36, you were pretty much out of luck.

That was the case when I started knitting. It sounds absurd now, but I have proof -- a pattern and schematic from a knitting magazine I bought in 1988, at Carmen's Yarn Store in Los Altos, California.

Take a look. Pretty wild, right?

So happy times have changed. We have sizes now. Lots of them.

But here's what nobody told us when that problem got solved -- the problem was never really the sizes. It's the guidance. Nobody taught us how to choose one, or what to do once we had.

And most of that confusion comes down to one word: ease.

Ease is simply the difference between a sweater's finished measurement and the body wearing it. That number can run anywhere from negative 5 inches to 20 or more. Recommended ease is something else entirely -- it's just the designer's opinion about how much bigger or smaller that finished garment should be. Which isn't quite fair to you, because as I said in this week's video, ease is a preference, not a law, and what you actually want shifts depending on where on your body you're talking about.

I've been thinking about this a lot since my dear friend Sue opened up to me, honestly and generously, about her own thinking on size and fit. If you've been in the shop, at a retreat, or watched this week's video, you've met her -- she knit her Noro Sia with 5 inches of ease instead of the 8 to 12 the pattern called for, and she looks stunning in it, both then and now, wearing the same sweater today with 17 inches of ease.

I kept texting her, trying to understand her thinking when she first chose that size. What came back wasn't really about her bust at all. It was about her tummy.

Whether you're a size 2 or a 2X, nobody wants a garment that draws attention to their tummy. Bust, maybe you don't mind. Tummy, almost never. That's not me passing judgment -- that's just how I feel about my own tummy, and it's the refrain I hear constantly from knitters who tell me they don't want to look like a sausage.

That fear is real, and it pushes a lot of knitters toward choosing far more ease than they actually need. Here's the correction, though: the answer isn't zero ease. It's also not 12 inches. You need just enough room that the fabric doesn't pull or ride up in front -- for most knitters at the larger end of a size range, that's somewhere around 1 to 4 inches of positive ease across the tummy. Not none. Not a lot. Just enough.

Construction changes what that choice actually looks like once you're wearing it, though, especially up at the shoulder.

A dropped shoulder, when there's a lot of ease built into the body to accommodate a tummy, can start to look sloppy through the shoulder -- there's nothing shaping that transition, so extra room in the body reads as extra room everywhere. Raglans handle this better, because the construction tapers the upper body and the sleeve separately from the torso, so the shoulder doesn't have to carry the same excess. And you already know what I'm going to say about set-in sleeves -- they're the most universally flattering construction there is, because once you get a clean fit through the shoulder, everything below it reads as neat, no matter how much ease you've built into the body.

So here's the actual point. If you're someone with a torso measurement larger than your bust measurement, sitting at the upper end of a pattern's size range: you likely don't need anywhere near the ease the pattern recommends. You need a size that gives you roughly 1 to 4 inches of positive ease across the tummy -- that's your starting point.

That's a lot of ifs, I know. But almost every sweater pattern needs some adjustment no matter who's knitting it. A good starting point gets you more than halfway there.

If you want to go further into how each construction style behaves -- what it forgives, what it won't -- I put together a free guide walking through exactly that. Link's below.

Warmly,
~Ellen