In the beginning, all sweaters are the same. Well… that is if you knit bottom up. Today, I’ll explain how I came to cast on a mystery sweater, and how you can too! Once you master this, you won’t need to decide what the armholes and neckline are until you have knit about 1/4 to 1/3 your sweater!
The stitch pattern
Remember I said I was going to knit Jim a drop sleeve sweater using two particular stitch patterns? Notice this stitch pattern doesn’t look like either of these? Well… on Thursday, at knitting club, I showed the swatch to my Heather. We decided I should elongate “Welted Leaves”. Then, after finishing one repeat, I decided I liked it so much, I decided to just forget all about Crosses and Diamonds or whatever that stitch pattern in Barbara Walker’s book was! 
I bet you are wondering: Didn’t you need to knit another swatch? I know that nearly all knit-purl combinations will have similar stitch gauges, so the swatch I already knit would do. Plus, this is a fairly loose style, 1″ or 2″ off in the chest won’t matter much.
So, now, I’m using a knit stitch pattern of my own making. On the needles it looks a bit rumply, but this will smooth out some.
Will it be a drop sleeve sweater
Oh… and I don’t know whether this will be a drop sleeve sweater. Over the weekend I was glancing at a book about knitting ganseys by Beth Brown Reinsel, and I thought: “Hhmm… this could be a gansey… Or at least, sort of a gansey. After all, underarm gussets do make hand knit sweaters more comfortable.”
Lucky for me, I know that drop sleeve sweaters are shaped just like Ganseys until I’ve knit to within 2″ of the underarms before I decide whether or not to add the underarm gussets. So, for now it’s either a drop sleeve sweater or a “sort of” gansey ! What will it be like? Beats me.
How to start a mystery sweater in the round.
If you like to not know what you are making when you start, you follow these steps:
- Figure out the number of stitches for the body. You need the sweater to fit the guys chest. Jim likes his sweaters t 40″ around. Mutiply by the stitch gauge: I had 5 stitches /inch– and round if required for your stitch pattern. So, I get 40 * 5 = 200 stitches. This will be the number of stitches for the body.
- Figure out the number of stitches for the ribbing: If your guy has a fat butt or a gut, this should be the same as for the body. If your guy has a slim butt, subtract 10% of those; 10% is 20 stitches. I get 200-20=180 stitches. Round to a multiple of 2. This is the number of stitches for your ribbing.
Using circular needles one size smaller than cast on 180; join being careful not to twist. Work knit 1, purl 1 ribbing for 1″ to 3″ (depending on how much you like.)
- Knit the ribbing: Change to larger needles. On next round, change to main needles, and increase to the number of stitches for the body (that’s 200 stitches in this example.) If necessary, do a bit of thinking to center your stitch pattern, and begin to work. Knit circular until you are about 2″ from where the underarms start.
- Think about the rest of the design as you knit: If you knit slowly — like I do you’ll have about a week to decide what to do at the underarms. But, you do need to stop and decide when you get near the underarms. (No, that’s a lie. You can put the body on a holder, start a sleeve and work to the elbow! )
Blog Tip:
The blog- about -blogging blogs are on fire about “BlogRush”. It’s supposed to be a method to get yourself more traffic to our blogs. It will probably even work at your knitting blog
if you join quickly.
The reason joining quickly is important is that the blogs displayed by this admittedly ugly widget depend on a) how many times it displays on your blog, b) how often it displays on your recruits’ blogs and c) how many times it display on their recruits’ blogs down to the 10th generation of recruits.
So, if you join now, you have a chance of getting lots of traffic. I suggest you join, try displaying it on your sidebar for a week, and then, if it doesn’t work deleting it (because, let’s face it, it’s ugly! Plus, who knows if we’ll get traffic from knitters.)
I joined. I checked “hobby” — because “knitting” isn’t a choice . . . yet. Give it a try by clicking join Blog Rush.
Hi everyone. Yes. I disappeared for a while. I was tired of knitting. But, I’m back.
