These four sweater adventures used yarn from three value packs of two different lines of Knit Picks yarn. The first two sweaters came from the CotLin Reflections VP, containing 12 colorways. The CotLin U-Neck and the CotLin Circular Yoke both used 5 unique colorways, and I used the remaining 2 colorways for swatching. The third sweater, the Hawthorne Vest, used the Hawthorne Bramble VP, with 5 colorways. I’m now down to the final VP, the Hawthorne Fog Bank VP, with 7 colorways.

I’ll use the colorways in the order shown above, based on the following points:

• Since the Hawthorne Vest had the same darkest colorway, Goddess, a kettle-dyed tonal dark purple, next to my face, I’ll put it at the bottom of this garment.
• Putting the colorways in lightest-to-darkest order means that the lightest colorway, Blueberry Speckle, will be at the neckline.
• The remaining colorways consist of another kettle-dyed or tonal, Slate, and three strong variegateds, Willamette, Abernathy, and Alameda. Goose Hollow is technically a variegated, but its hues are much more similar to one another compared to the other three’s more-varied hues, so I’m considering it to be more or less a tonal, like Slate and Goddess.
• Since Goose Hollow is mainly blue with traces of purple, I’ll put Alameda’s stronger variations of blues and purples between Goose Hollow and Goddess.
• Willamette has the same pops of bright turquoise as in Blueberry Speckle, and it also has various shades of gray, so I’ll put Willamette after Blueberry Speckle, followed by Slate.
• Those decisions give me Blueberry Speckle, Willamette, and Slate from the top down, with Goose Hollow, Alameda, and Goddess at the bottom, leaving only Abernathy for the center colorway of the 7. Color-wise, it should fit nicely between Slate and Goose Hollow, because its blues and purples are somewhat gray-ish. I could have swapped the positions of Willamette and Abernathy based on their hues, but Willamette has lots of a very light gray, so I think it would be better as the second from the top, rather than the fourth.

As I was swatching for this second pair of sweater adventures, I burned through lots of the 10-g samples of every Hawthorne colorway from a spring co-op. However, I serendipitously managed to not use any of the samples of these 7 colorways, so I’ll be adding those small hanks to the full-size ones from the VP. Those extra 70 grams will help me make the sleeves as long as possible.

The Garment Silhouette

In this final adventure, I want to marry the neckline from the third sweater adventure, the Hawthorne Vest, shown here after completing the first colorway

to a seamless, top-down, raglan, V-neck, sleeved sweater.

Sure. No problem. 🙄

I went round and round in trying to figure out how to achieve this combination, and I’m still not sure I can explain it properly in words, despite pondering it for a week and spending the better part of three days drafting this series of blog posts.

The way I worked the neckline on the vest was greatly simplified because there was absolutely no shaping whatsoever—and, of course, there were no sleeves to deal with. I cast on the back at the shoulder seam/neckline, then simply worked downward until I needed to stop based on the quantity of yarn that would be required to work the fronts to the same row as the back. Then I knitted up the first front along the shoulder seam of the back and worked it to the same row number. I repeated the same process along the other shoulder seam to start the second front, resulting in the picture above.

Easy-peasy.

But for this final sweater, I need to somehow attach just the neck edging of that garment to the standard yoke shaping of a raglan sweater, shown here in a bird’s-eye view as separate pieces that would need to be seamed along the raglans. (The back neck is 35 stitches wide, the tops of the sleeves are 6 sts wide, and the two sides of the front neckline each start out with just 1 st.)

I created this image with LibreOffice Draw, determining the stitch and row counts using my desired measurements, my stitch and row gauges, and the technique from the “All-in-One-Piece-from-the-Neck-Down Pullover” in Maggie Righetti’s excellent Sweater Design in Plain English. (That design uses the compound-angle raglans from the preceding chapter’s “Timeless Adult Raglan Cardigan.”) The raglan shapings at the neckline and at the underarms are done every other row, with the remainder of the raglan shapings done every fourth row. I chose to do the V-neck increases every fourth row as well, just to keep things simple for the actual knitting. Since I set the drawing program’s grid intervals to my stitch and row gauges (well, as close as I could), the pieces are shown fairly close to scale. I’ll be working seamlessly, so there won’t be gaps along the raglans, but I have no idea how to show an understandable 3-D design in a 2-D drawing.

The previous image shows the full extent of the fabric as if it were done all in stockinette. Of course, all-stockinette fabric would curl unacceptably around the neck opening, so that’s what the vest’s neck edging will counteract. What I essentially want to do is chop off part of this stockinette fabric and attach in its place the entire neck edging from the vest. Except, of course, I want to work it all at the same time, rather than working the neck treatment after the rest of the sweater is completed!!! Adventure, indeed!

If I were going to knit up stitches around the neck edge and work neck rounds that way, there wouldn’t be any problem. But the issue is that I again want the front neck’s edgings to look like it springs out of the back neck’s, exactly as shown in the vest’s WIP picture above. The upshot is that when I work the neck edging of the seamless top-down sweater the same way as on the vest, the very tops of the sleeves will be worked in the “wrong” direction compared to the rest of the sleeves, because of the way one works a seamless raglan V-neck from the top down. In essence, I will substitute the width of the stitches of the front-neck extensions plus some of the back-neck edging for the top umpteen rows of the sleeves, based on my stitch and row gauges.

That’s clear as mud, right???

The Logistics

I also want to minimize the number of times I need to break the yarn of the first colorway, so here’s the basic plan.

1. I’ll work the two front-neck extensions separately for some number of rows, leaving the live stitches on holders. That means I’ll break the yarn only twice, as the rest of the steps, and indeed the rest of the top part of the yoke, can be done without needing to break the yarn at all.
2. I’ll knit up across the CO edge of one front-neck extension, CO the stitches for the free edge of the back neck, and knit up across the CO edge of the second front-neck extension.
3. I work some number of back-neck edging rows, so that when I finally do knit up along the edges to create the sleeve stitches, the two sleeves will be in the right places relative to the back neck’s free edge.
4. Instead of turning in the usual way at the end of the last row on the back neck, I’ll, er, rotate the work, keeping the same side of the WIP facing me, so that I can knit up along the ends of the rows of the back-neck edging and the front-neck extension for the sleeve on that side of my body.
5. I’ll again rotate the WIP, then work across the live front-neck extension stitches from the holder.
6. At the end of the front-neck extension, I’ll turn in the usual way so that I’m looking at the opposite side of the WIP, then work to the end of the needle, which means working across that front edging, what are now the stitches some way down from the top of that sleeve, and across the back, continuing, if necessary, to work the back-neck edging stitch pattern if it isn’t yet as deep as I want.
7. I’ll then rotate, not turn, the WIP so that I can knit up stitches along the other edge of the back neck and the other front-neck extension for the top of the sleeve on the other side of my body.
8. I’ll again rotate the WIP to work the other front-neck extension’s live stitches previously left on a holder.

At that point, I’ll have the stitches of one front, one sleeve, the back, the other sleeve, and the other front all on the needle in the proper order, so I’ll turn and work the rest of the sweater in the normal seamless, top-down, raglan way.

Just a few details need to be worked out.