While the previous post listing stitch and row counts is a good first pass, the final counts need to allow for the fact that I’m trying to keep all the Mistake-Stitch Ribbing

• mirror-image where the edgings are vertical
• aligned and continuous when a vertical edging joins a horizontal edging

The second bullet point refers to where

• the vertical armhole edges meet the horizontal underarms
• the vertical front bands meet the horizontal bottom edge
• the vertical front bands meet the back neck edge

Since a pattern disruption is common at a garment’s shoulder seams, the last bullet point isn’t as crucial to me as the first two, but I’ll still see if it’s possible to have them match.

Charting the Project

As is usual with me, a chart of the entire garment will let me determine my exact stitch counts as the garment widths change from shoulder to bottom edge. I can also use the chart to line up my edgings and show exactly where the horizontal bits of Mistake-Stitch Rib start and end.

I had hoped to make the V-neck a bit deeper by doing the shaping every six rows rather than the more usual every four rows, but doing so made the V-neck extend nearly to the bottom edge of the vest, given how short the vest will be based on the amount of yarn I have, so I re-charted the V-neck shaping to occur every fourth row.

The chart shows 41,278 stitches, including the cast-ons and bind-offs, in the completed vest. My swatch on 3.00 mm needles was 30 sts x 50 rows, for 1500 sts made with 17.90 g of yarn. That means I can make about 84 sts/g, so with 500 g of yarn total (assuming none of the hanks are short on weight), I should be able to make 41,900 sts. The vest as charted is cutting it pretty close as far as yarn chicken goes, but since I don’t have to set aside any yarn for working the armhole edgings at the end, then if I run out of yarn, I’ll simply make the vest a bit shorter, according to how much yarn I have left.

Notes on the Chart

I did all my usual things when constructing a knitting chart in a multi-row, multi-column table in my word processor.

Each shaping area and stitch pattern is in its own table column.

Having each bit of Mistake-Stitch Rib in its own column made it much easier to fiddle with it relative to the rest of the chart, as opposed to having, say, the back have all its stitches in a single table column, considering I kept playing with both the overall stitch counts and exactly where in the stitch repeat each section of edging started.

(I, er—cough—will confess that the chart started out with three table columns, one for the back and one for each of the fronts, which made figuring out the underarm stitch pattern merger much more difficult than it should have been. Then I had to do a lot of fiddling to put the bits along the armhole edges in their own table columns. It was only after I isolated everything in its own table column that the underarms essentially sorted themselves out.)

The table columns are set to Left- or Right-Justified text.

Using the text-formatting settings rather than spaces to move the stitch symbols to the right or left edges of their table columns means much less effort is required to move the stitch symbols to their proper relative positions.

Since I don’t use spaces, then when I select a given group of table cells, the number of characters in the selection, automagically counted by my word processor, is also the exact stitch count of that area. Double bonus!!!

The decreasing gap between the front bands and the V-neck will of course not be present in the finished vest. Keeping the band in its own table column shows how its stitches align with one another, and putting the V-neck in its own table column allowed me to change the shaping from every six rows to every four without disrupting anything else in the chart.

Stitch counts are adjusted to keep the edgings continuous.

Because I’m trying to keep the Mistake-Stitch Rib continuous where the vertical bits join the horizontal bits, I had to tweak the stitch counts.

At the underarms, I need to cast on 11 stitches, rather than 10 or 12, so that the vertical armhole edgings merge without hiccup into the horizontal band across the bottoms of the armholes.

At the bottom edge of the vest, I need to increase 2 stitches so that the front bands merge into the bottom band, again without hiccup.

I freely admit I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out why the joining of just one of the front bands to the bottom edge had a hiccup, when I’d had almost no trouble at the underarms. Then I finally realized one front band had to start the Mistake-Stitch Rib with row 2 rather than row 1, which is exactly what I had done, either inadvertently or deliberately, with the armhole edgings.

I expect the Mistake-Stitch Rib might be offset at the shoulder line, but as I stated above and in a previous post, we’re used to seeing slight disruptions of patterns at garment shoulders, so I’m not going to spend any more time fiddling.

Still Need to Decide Color Changes

Now that I’ve got the stitches and rows all laid out, I need to decide on my color-changing strategy, taking into account both the way I’ll cycle the colors and how many rows I can do with each pairing, figuring out how many total stitches of each colorway I’ll wind up working so that I can use as much of each colorway as possible while also having a pleasing arrangement of the various combinations.

I think that playing around will take quite some time, so I don’t know when that post will be published.