Crochet squares

[Nell]

I am making a sweater made up of 54- 5x5" crochet squares all different patterns. One of the patterns is a Half double crochet square (US). When I make my chain it is 5 inches long so I proceed to make the rest of the square until I reach 5" width. When I finish with the square the width is 5" but the length has stretched to 5.25" inches. Will this small increase throw everything off? I have to make 21 squares in that particular pattern and have made 11 squares already, all the same exact size. Slightly over 5x5". I have made 3 squares in a waffle stitch pattern and all those came out to 5x5" like they were supposed to. Just wondering will the extra length on the other squares be a big deal?

[Granny Square]

To make sure I understand, you are making squares working back and forth in rows, and it is the chain 'direction' that has gotten too wide?  Because if it is too tall, from chain to last row, just unravel from the last row.

You can't necessarily chain 5" and get a 5" fabric; some lace patterns actually pull up the chains into the lace and you'd end up with less than 5" across, and a more solid pattern, like straight HDC, is likely to stretch each chain a tiny bit so might end up more than 5".  

Half an inch would be a big deal to me to have 1 square buckling up and spoiling the look of the sweater.  You could fudge half an inch over a much longer distance, but not only over 5", that's 10% of the distance.  

I'd rip out that square back to the chain and start over, you may have to make a couple more rippings and re-doings to get it right.  How many HDC stitches = the half inch that you are off, 2 or 3?  Start again with that amount fewer stitches.

Everybody has different stitch tensions, height and width, including designers.  Doris Chan has an interesting blog post about this, I wish I'd read this before trying to make a top-down raglan sweater of her design, and ended up with armholes that would fit a baby, but not me (raglans are harder to tweak for height by just adding rows, without it looking peculiar).  Doris makes tall stitches, she 'lifts' the initial loop high; I make short stitches, and 'yank' them down.  It could be that you are a lifter and the designer of the sweater is a rider or a yanker.