I’ve made several seamless top-down sweaters, and I’ve made a number of seamless bottom-up circular yoke sweaters. But I don’t remember ever making a seamless circular yoke sweater from the top-down.

In this second sweater adventure, I’ll be using the same yarn as in sweater number one: Knit Picks’ CotLin, a DK-weight cotton-linen blend in the following colorways from the Reflections value pack:

• Crest
• Tide
• Wave
• Stream
• Eclipse

Since I already know the gauges I’ll get, both before and after laundering, I can jump right in to calculating numbers.

Basis of the Design

I’m using Elizabeth Zimmermann’s EPS as described in “Newsletter #1” in The Opinionated Knitter to determine the yoke shaping, though I have to change decreases to increases since I’ll be working the opposite direction.

Let me first review the way a bottom-up circular yoke sweater would be worked. Once the body and sleeves have been worked separately to the underarm, a percentage of the stitches are put on holders for the underarms: a section on each sleeve, and two sections on opposite sides of the body. The remaining stitches are put on a circ for working the yoke in the round. At various points on the way to the top of the yoke, rounds of decreases narrow the funnel-like shape until only the neck opening is left. There are several schedules for exactly where the decrease rounds are placed and what the decrease rates in each are. Once the neck is reached, some short rows can be done on the back neck to raise it a bit, which also helps lower the front neck for the wearer’s comfort. In the original design, the decrease rounds were halfway between the underarm and neck, then another quarter of that distance, and finally right along the neckline, after which came the short rows and neck ribbing. I’m using Meg’s version of the percentages for each decrease round rather than EZ’s, because of the tension issues that didn’t always block out to her satisfaction. Since cotton/linen will have more blocking problems than wool, it seems prudent to use the alternate schedule.

Here are the various milestones working bottom-up:

1. work body and both sleeves to underarm as three separate pieces
2. put on holders stitches from the sleeves and body for the underarms (to be grafted together in the finishing), and put the remaining stitches on a single circ
3. work half the yoke depth evenly, then do the first decrease round of 25 percent
4. work a quarter of the yoke depth evenly, then do the second decrease round of 33 percent
5. work a quarter of the yoke depth evenly, which gets to the neck at the top of the yoke, then do the final decrease round of 40 percent
6. work short rows on the back neck
7. work the neck ribbing and bind off

Since I’m working top-down, I have to work the list in reverse order and invert what has to happen:

1. cast on and work the neck ribbing
2. work short rows on the back neck
3. work to a quarter of the yoke depth evenly (as measured from the top of the back neck), then work the first increase round
4. work a quarter of the yoke depth evenly (as measured from the top of the back neck), then work the second increase round
5. work half the yoke depth (as measured from the top of the back neck), to get to the sleeve/body split
6. put the two sets of sleeve stitches and the body stitches all on separate needles
7. cast on for the underarms on each piece
8. work body and both sleeves to their bottom edges as three separate pieces

Naturally, I’m not going to do all the steps exactly this way! I’m going to more or less start with step 2, delaying step 1 until the finishing.

Neckline

In most sleeve/shoulder shapes of EPS yoke sweaters, the neck circumference is 40 percent of the chest circumference. But in this non-resilient yarn, ribbing doesn’t behave the way it does in the wool I’ve used for the last decade. It really doesn’t want to snap back, at least not as much or as well. So I’m going to make the neck a bit bigger than EZ’s 40 percent.

The final neck stitch count at BO on the CotLin U-Neck was 128, so with its chest stitch count of 226, the neck there was 57 percent. Now, part of that much-higher-than-normal percentage comes from the fact that it’s not a normal crew neck. The shaping at the bottom of the front neck is the same as normal crew neck’s, but it’s moved down several inches. If I’d gone with true EPS numbers, my crew neck should have been 40 percent of 226, or just 92 stitches.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my noggin is jumbo-sized, so I’m going to split the difference of the true EPS value of 92 sts and the 128 on my U-neck. If I go with 50 percent, that’s 113 sts, which I’ll round down to 112 so I have a multiple of 4 for my preferred 2×2 ribbing.

But I’m not actually going to start the sweater by casting on and working the neck ribbing. Nope. I’m paranoid, so I’m going to start with the stockinette main fabric instead. If a sweater has fit issues, they can sometimes be fixed by altering the neck ribbing. I’m going to give myself that flexibility.

Since I’m starting with the stockinette, I’ll actually work the neck ribbing in the opposite direction from the rest of the entire sweater, just like on the U-Neck. I’ll also do the same thing here that I did there: set up some P3 ribs, then decrease some (or all) of them to P2 partway through. Since this neckline will be a truly round neck, I’ll set up all the purl ribs as P3, which will give me maximum flexibility for altering the neckline.

With 112 sts at the BO, I’ll have 28 P2 ribs at the end. Each of those ribs will start, though, as P3, for a total of 140 sts at the base of the ribbing.

The decreases that I eventually wind up doing in the ribbing, however many they may be, will be the third yoke shaping round.

A Provisional Cast-On…

I’m also going to do a waste-yarn provisional cast-on on this sweater, because when I knitted up for the ribbing around the neck opening on the CotLin U-Neck, there was a bit of a ridge on the inside. I can’t really feel it while I’m wearing the sweater, and I’m not even sure other knitters, let alone muggles, would be able to tell there’s a fairly substantial hump behind the ribbing. But if I start the stockinette with a PCO, then when I want to add the neck trim, I can undo the PCO and work immediately with live stitches, rather than knitting up through the edge of the fabric.

I’m not calling this series “Sweater Adventures” for no reason!

When a PCO is removed, it yields one less stitch than was cast on, so my PCO will need to have 141 stitches, one more than I need for the neck ribbing that will start out as 2×3 on 140 sts.

Short-Row Issues…

Since I do want to drop the front neck about an inch relative to the back neck, I need to do short rows. I have no idea how short rows will interact with a PCO, as far as the possibility of holes at the turning points goes. I can do quite a bit of mental knitting, to see how various techniques will potentially come out in needles and yarn, but when I try to imagine this particular scenario, I get no mental image whatsoever. I simply can’t see what’s going to happen.

My usual short-row technique is wrap and turn (yes, I can already hear the groaning from those who hate it), but how can I do W&T around PCO sts? I can’t, that much is obvious. Could I use a different short-row technique? I don’t know. I’d have to refresh my memory of them to see if one would work better—or at all—in this particular situation.

Or…

What if that first actual increase round I’ll work a quarter of the way down the yoke was far enough away for me to squeeze the short rows in before it, preferably with a few plain rounds before and after the “wedge” the short rows form? If a quarter of the yoke depth is, say, 20 rounds, then I could do up to 16 short rows with 2 plain rounds both before and after the short rows while getting the needed quarter of the yoke depth at the back neck. Those plain rounds give me two advantages:

• I’ll have project yarn stitches, not waste PCO stitches, on the needles to do my preferred W&T short rows. Those plain rounds also form a safety net of sorts, a buffer between the craziness of short rows and the live stitches I’ll use for the neck ribbing after removing the PCO. If I drop a stitch while removing the PCO, I don’t want it to try to move through the short-row area, so having 2 plain stockinette rounds between the ribbing and the short rows should (!) keep me out of trouble.
• A couple of plain rounds beyond the short-row area means I’m not also dealing with the last short row’s wrap when I start increasing (all the other short-row wraps will have been dealt with as each successively longer “short” row works past the previous turning point). This situation isn’t nearly as scary as the first point, since I’ll be working in the same direction as the short rows were worked. Still, I’m a klutz, so every little thing I can do to prevent difficulties helps.

I’m liking this idea a lot, but will the number of yoke rounds I have to work with, combined with the number of short rows I want—or need—allow me to do it?

We’ll have to see.

…And a Really LONG Cast-On Tail

The other crazy thing I’m going to do is leave a long-enough cast-on tail so that when I do finally remove the PCO to work the ribbing, I already have sufficient yarn ready and waiting. That means that I eliminate at least one tail that needs dealing with in the finishing. And since I kept pretty good records of the yarn usage for various stages of the CotLin U-Neck, I have a very good estimate of how much yarn I’ll need in the “CO tail mini-ball.” That should be fun!