The Knitting Fiend

A milestone reached! I’ve joined the front and back and I’m now knitting circular.

As you can see, I am compulsive about checking dimensions as I work. I designed this to fit Jim’s shoulders; he needs the sweater to measure between 16.5″ and 17″ across. Some of you may have suspected this when you saw the “design a sleeve cap calculator“. ( Aren’t blogs a good way to keep track of what you are doing? )

Anyway, the sweater shoulders look just right. Of course, the rest of the directions for designing the armhole match my design for Jim’s sweater. Well, except for the fact that the program gives directions to knit from the bottom up, and I’m knitting from the top down. No problem though; I just follow them backwards and increase stitches where it says decrease. So, I began with 88 stitches for the shoulders, knit to the first shape point (which happened to measure 8.5″ from the center of the shoulder), then increased 1 stitch on both the right hand and left hand edges of the row every other row three times. This widens the work a bit. Then, I increased 4 stitches one each edge all at once just before joining everything on one big circular needle.

Now, as it happens you can increase anyway you want to increase. The increases are at the edge, so you could add stitches by doing a backward look cast on. I’m fairly certain that’s the method my mom taught me when I was a kid; I’d do the same if I were teaching a child. After all, the backwards loop method takes slightly less coordination than others, and doesn’t risk splitting the yarn.

However, now that I knit better than when I was 6 years old, I prefer to increase at least 1 stitch away from the edge. It looks a bit neater. (Although, the appearance barely matters under an armhole. After all the wearer’s arm will obscure this bit of the sweater.)

To increase 1 stitch in from the edge, I modify the technique described in “paired increases for raglans”. Of course, since the stitches facing me were purls, I purled. The principle of purling into the bar of the stitch below isn’t any different than knitting into the stitch. You just lift the bar as to purl, and purl. Of course, since I only need to increase 1 stitch on each edge, I also didn’t increase on both sides of a single stitch. When increasing on the right edge, I increased before the second stitch from the edge. That is to say, I worked the edge stitch (which happened to be a purl), then I increased 1 stitch in the bar of the stitch below the next stitch, then I worked the next stitch (which was usually a purl in this case.)

When increasing on the left edge, I knit after the second stitch from the edge. (Why didn’t I take a photo? Beats me.)

Anyway, once I’ve done these increases for the back, I broke the yarn put the back on the string, and then knit the front. I did the corresponding increases on the front. In both cases, I finished by knitting a wrong side facing row; in fact, for this case, I made sure I had the exact same number of rows. That way, the cable pattern for the front and back is at the same point in the sequence!

I was ready to join. I join all sweaters knit top down the same way. The first step is to put the front and back on a single long circular needle; that’s illustrated for a raglan here.

Since this is a pullover, and not a cardigan, I arranged to have the tips of the needles at the side seam so I could avoid interrupting the aran pattern in the center front. (Think of how that would look. Ick!) When I do this sort of thing, it doesn’t matter whether I begin to knit the front or back first. However, notice I’d knit the top front after the back? I had a ball of yarn waiting to knit the front. Applying the principle of “don’t break yarn if you don’t have to”, I turned the work toward me and began to knit across the front– following my aran chart.

When I reached the underarm, I knew I needed to add 4 stitches for the front under arm, and 4 for the back under arm. So, using a spare double pointed needle, I cast on 8 stitches in waste yarn and knit a row. Then, I broke the yarn. Then, just knit across these 8 stitches. (This is exactly the way I increased for the underarms for my bolero raglan.)

Then, I just knit across the back. When I reached the next underarm, I added 8 stitches again. I placed a stitch marker to mark the beginning or a round, and began to knit the next row. Luckily, I’ve picked a stitch pattern where every other row is “knit stitches as they present themselves. Or nearly. I may discuss this a bit more.)

But, at that point, I’d I joined all pieces together! I’ve now knit about 4 rounds, and taken a photo.

I’ll be doing some nearly mindless knitting next. I’m a slow knitter, so I’ll need to think of things to blog about. Maybe I’ll figure out how to make nice charts of these stitches in some electronic format. Then, I can explain in words and charts.