The spring constant of my knitting

 The blue square is my first completed project with help from Mrs B. Note the change in direction along the diagonal. This helps it to hold its shape better. I used a Newtonmeter to investigate.

 Here's my original knitting with no direction change. It took 3N to stretch it by 9cm. That's 0.33 Newtons per cm which is its spring constant.

Pulling the other way was 1N to stretch 9cm. That's 0.11 Newtons per cm. The spring constant used to be called the stiffness of the material when I studied Engineering. Stiffer materials are harder to stretch. So the knitting is 3 times harder to pull across the rows than along the rows. By having a clever square with rows in perpendicular directions, that difference will be removed and the knitting is equally strong in both directions.