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.
Category Archives: Sweater Adventures
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.
Working: Body Shaping
Since I’m using less yarn than I estimated from the weights and stitch counts of my swatches, I am definitely going to do some increases down the body as I work the final three colors. With the five-inch difference between chest and hips, it’s asking a lot of an unshaped sweater to make that large an accommodation.
Working: The Sleeves
Because I’m working a fade, there was really no point in waiting to do the sleeves until I finished the body, which might be the usual way to work when a top-down sweater is all one color.
Both sets of sleeve stitches were still on ribbons from working the body, so working with one sleeve at a time, I had to get the held stitches and the stitches from the PCO on two circs.
Working: Splitting the Sleeves from the Body
Round 87 is the biggest moment of the entire project, where I split the sleeve and body stitches and do the underarm cast-ons.
I had decided to duplicate my techniques from bottom-up seamless sweaters as much as possible in this top-down project, and when working bottom-up, I leave the underarm stitches of body and sleeves live for later grafting (weaving, Kitchener stitch), which completes the seamlessness of the FO. On this particular garment, worked with zero ease and in a non-resilient yarn, having seamless underarms should help me put it on and take it off in addition to being much more comfortable in the actual wearing.