I’m using the “Timeless Adult Raglan Cardigan” project from Maggie Righetti’s Sweater Design in Plain English to determine the raglan shaping. Mathematically, doing the raglan shaping every other row doesn’t always work nicely, so she came up with a system where you do EOR shaping just above the underarm and at the last bit approaching the neck. But the area in between has the shaping occur every fourth row. I’m not going into all the details here, but I will summarize the results.
The front/back width is 18 inches, and the sleeve upper arm is 11 inches. That means the back neck ought to be 7 inches wide (per page 294), but that’s wider than I want, so I made the back neck 6 inches. My actual back neck to underarm (without ease) is 8 inches. That would include the ribbing I’ll add at the end, so to give me a bit of ease, I’m going to pretend like that full 8 inches does not include the final trim.
As I mentioned before, I’ll use the flat row gauge for all the calculations down to the UA, because it’s a bit tighter than my ITR row gauge. That means I’ll calculate a few more rows than I actually need, so that the yoke doesn’t wind up too short, especially considering that the row gauge will tighten up a bit with repeated laundering of the FO.
I will be working top-down, as it’s easier to align the color changes that way. The compound-angle raglan increase schedule works out to EOR 13x, E4R 11x, and EOR 7x, then CO 7 at each underarm.
For the front, I’ll start with just one stitch on each side of the neck. I want the finished front neck to be 6 inches deep, but with an inch of ribbing around the edge, that means the neck needs to be worked to 7 inches deep before I join to start working ITR. Since my row gauge is 9 rpi, I need 7 times 9 equals 63 rows before I CO for the bottom of the neckline. I’ll bump that to 64 so that I can do the CO at the end of right-side row 65, then continue in the round from there.
I plotted the raglan and neck shaping on grid paper that matches my gauges, and it looks good. Then I double-checked the raglan shaping against the sleeve. For an 11-inch upper arm circumference at 6.25 spi, I need 69 sts (technically 68.75). But the scheduled raglan incs and UA CO will add 26 plus 22 plus 14 plus 14, which is 76 sts!
I thought of just doing the same incs as on the front/back after starting each sleeve with just one stitch, but that would give me a 12-inch upper arm. I want to go by her recommendations for zero or negative ease in circumferences. So time to look for a plan B.
What if, just on the sleeves, I change the initial set of EOR incs (the ones closest to the neckline, since I’m working top-down) to E4R? In the sleeves, the raglan shaping changes to E4R 18x, EOR 7x, and CO 7 on each side for the UA. That adds 64 sts, so I start with 5 sts for each sleeve at the CO and wind up with the desired 69. I really don’t know if this will work, so fingers crossed.
The front neck will be completed on row 65, and I decided to cast on about 2 inches’ worth of stitches there. Allowing 12 sts at the bottom of the neck, then working back toward the top doing the incs EOR, I do 11 incs, starting on row 43.
Summary
I’ll CO 1 st for each front, 5 sts for each sleeve, and 36 sts for the back, a total of 48 sts.
On the front and back, I’ll do incs at the raglan points as described above, leaving the front neck edges straight vertical until row 43, when I’ll start the EOR front neck incs. In the meantime, the sleeves will do their own version of the raglan increases, syncing up with the front/back’s schedule on row 31.
I reach the bottom of the front neck on row 65, where I’ll CO the center front’s 12 sts, then switch to working in the round. (Note to self: remember to change to the 3.00 mm needle after completing the CO there.) I hit the underarms on round 87, where I’ll CO 7 sts on each side of the front/back and 14 total for each sleeve. If I use a provisional CO for whichever of the body or sleeve sts I cast on first, then I can simply remove the PCO and have live sts for the other side of the underarm, eliminating a constricting seam at a place that needs as much flexibility as possible.