Gauge Swatch tips

 It's helpful when you make a gauge swatch to mark what size needle you used somehow. I have 3 ideas for how to do this. First, once you finish your swatch, you can tie knots in one of the ends of your yarn. So if you used a size US 6 needle, you would put 6 knots onto one of the ends.  

The second idea is that you can do a row of k2tog, yo - where you put the number of yarn overs that match your needle size. So if you used a US 8 needle, you would add 8 k2tog, yo's to a row. I suggest doing this close to the top or the bottom of your swatch, so that it doesn't affect your measurement.

The third option is to add a row of purl stitches onto the right side of your swatch to equal your needle size. So again if you're using a size US 8 needle you would knit 8 stitches on a purl row. With this technique again, I suggest doing this close to the top or the bottom of your swatch.

On the third swatch, you can also see where I put a row of purl stitches to mark where I changed to a different needle size. In this swatch I was testing what the fabric felt and looked like with 3 different sized needles, so I wanted a visual separation between them.

Any of these techniques will come in handy when you want to go back to a swatch and figure out what needle you used to get that gauge with that yarn.