I must have known about this little trick, because I used it on sweaters I made before I found it in Cat Bordhi’s New Pathways for Sock Knitters: Book One. It’s an incredibly easy way to handle the knitsch that happens when we bind off any project worked in the round.
Monthly Archives: August 2019
Working: The Neck Ribbing
Because I know from my swatching that 7 rounds are enough to counteract rolling in this yarn, I’ll do that many rounds on the neck, compared to the 10 I did on the sleeves and bottom edge.
Knit-Up Stitch Counts
Starting at the back/right sleeve raglan join, I will knit up one for one on the back, sleeves, and bottom center of the front neck. Those are the easy places.
Working: Finishing the Body
Once I had the body’s phony seams done and completed the final stockinette round, I switched to 2×2 ribbing to match the sleeve cuffs as well as the neck ribbing I’ll add. Since I had 266 body stitches, I needed to either increase or decrease 2 sts to have a multiple of 4 for my ribbing. On the sleeves, which were snug, I increased 2, but on the body, which had a bit of ease, I decided to decrease 2.
Technique: Phony Seams
Because the sweaters I’ve made in the last ten or so years have been regular wool, requiring hand-washing and drying flat, I’ve added Elizabeth Zimmermann’s phony seams to the sleeves and bodies. Phony seams make laying out garments quicker because the fabric will naturally fold at those points.
Working: Sleeve Cuffs
Because I knew how many stitches I could make with each skein, I determined that when I started color 4, I could go ahead and complete the sleeves with their cuff ribbing, rather than working the body’s color 4 and hoping I had enough yarn to work the sleeves with what was left.
Working: Avoiding Yarn Chicken, Part 2
I updated my garment chart with the body increases so that I could count how many stitches I would need to make with each colorway, just for some assurance that I wouldn’t be playing yarn chicken with any of them. I also updated the sleeves to show the two stitches I’d need to increase to accommodate the 2×2 ribbing on the cuffs. I used blank table rows between each group of colorway rows to make it easy to select the table cells containing the stitch symbols for each colorway.