The Knitting Fiend

The news is distracting me, but I’ve knit a bit further.

Both the front and the back have reached the first shape point for the underarms. I’ll be increasing at a rate of 1 stitch ever 2 rows until the body is wide enough. Then, I’ll join and knit until the whole sweater is long enough, (unless I decide to knit the sleeves first, which is likely.)

In case you are wondering, the horrible white yarn and the mauve yarn are both waste yarn. As usual, I used a cheater’s provisional cast on. This method has the disadvantage of looking ugly while knitting, but it makes it so easy to pick up stitches later for the neck. It also makes it really easy to work short rows for the front neck; I just cast on, and then slowly knit across the required stitches. I’ll eventually pick up the stitches, remove the waste yarn, and knit up the collar.

If you are wondering, the part shown at the bottom of the photo is the front. When the sweater is completed, I’ll show you that the short row front neck is a bit lower than the back.

I have to admit knitting this particular design is a bit pesky. Any rational designer creating commercial patterns would go out of their way to pick aran patterns where the longer row repeat is the product of some integer and any smaller row repeat.

Well, my longer row repeat is 24. The shortest one is 8. Well, 8 * 3 = 24. So, that’s find. But the other row repeat is 20 rows. That means I can’t plop a ruler on my graph paper to keep track of my location on the chart.

Thank you 3M for inventing post it notes!