While I have a general plan of attack for my seamless, top-down, raglan V-neck sweater, I do need to be sure of the details so that at each point along the way, all the different steps will work together properly. I need to

• tweak the starting point of the Hawthorne Vest’s Mistake-Stitch Rib stitch repeat so that three columns of knit stitches show down both sides of the V-neck, rather than the two that were visible on the vest (essentially I want the wrong side of the vest edging to now be the right side)
• mirror-image the Mistake-Stitch Rib on the front-neck bands
• mirror-image the back-neck edging around the back neck’s center stitch, so that the front edgings emerge from each end of the back neck properly aligned
• add an extra stitch along the outer edge of each front-neck extension, to give me a place to knit up stitches without losing my desired edging width (I prefer to knit up the way Meg Swansen does: going down through the fabric between adjacent stitches, rather than going sideways under one or both legs of a stitch)
• add an extra stitch on each end of the back neck, to again give me a place to knit up stitches without losing my desired back-neck edging width
• determine the number of rows of the back-neck edging and of the front-neck extensions I need work, to best match the widths of the tops of the sleeves at that distance from the neck edge and, perhaps more importantly, to position the sleeves so that the free edge of the back neck is in the correct place relative to the widths of tops of the sleeves (which are actually formed by the front-neck edges’ extensions)
• figure out which sleeve will actually need to have its stitches purled up rather than knitted up, since I’ll be working in opposite directions when creating the stitches for the two sleeves (that is, when I create new stitches for one sleeve, I’ll be working a RS row, so I’ll necessarily be working a WS row when I create the new stitches for the other sleeve. If I were willing to break the yarn an extra time, I could start at the inner edge of one front neck, work across it, rotate, create new stitches for the first sleeve, rotate, work across the live back stitches, rotate, create new stitches for the second sleeve, rotate, and work across the other front neck, all on the same row. But I’m challenging myself to minimize the number of times I break the yarn.)
• figure out if it would be best to actually purl up, rather than knit up, the back neck from the CO edges of the front-neck extensions (I think so, so that when I turn to start the back-neck edging, I start with a RS row 1.)
• stop each front-neck extension correctly on either a right- or wrong-side row, so that when I finally get back to working its live stitches from their holder, I will be set up to directly work the proper, subsequent wrong- or right-side row
• determine the number of stitches I have in each section once I’ve got the entire set of stitches on the needle after knitting (and purling!) up the sleeves’ stitches, so that I can compare them to the scheduled number of stitches and resume the raglan increases in each section at the proper time

I also plan to do an interesting thing at the bottom of the V-neck, which I’ll detail in a future post.

Swatching in the Round

Oh, and I also had to determine the needle size I’d need to use for the sleeves and body, which will be worked in the round. Since one’s flat gauge typically differs from one’s ITR gauge with the exact same needles and yarn, I had to make at least one more swatch. (I never bothered with ITR swatches for the third adventure, since I worked that garment entirely in the flat.)

Based on my experience with swatching flat and ITR for the first sweater adventure, my first attempt ITR was on a 3.25 mm needle. The prewashed gauges were 24.5 sts and 32.5 rounds per 4 inches, and the postwashing values were 25 sts and 36 rounds per 4 inches. That is quite close enough to my flat gauges on 3.00 mm needles!!! Yay, I am DONE SWATCHING!!

Neck-Edging Plan #1

While I’m able to do quite a bit of knitting in my head to see how various options will work out in a given situation, sometimes I just hit a wall and can’t be sure my mental image is correct. I may be using a familiar technique in a new way or simply using a new-to-me technique. Or, as in this case, I’m combining so many small details that I just can’t keep track of all of them at once. Therefore, this is my first plan rather than the final plan. (And once I get working with needles and yarn, I may of course find I need to tweak this plan to create plan #2, or even have to abandon this idea entirely. One step at a time!)

I want the two front bands to be 11 sts wide, and I need the free edge of the back neck between them to be 35 sts wide. (These are final widths, so they don’t include the extra stitches I need to add to give me places to knit up along the edges.) That means the entire back-neck edging will be 57 sts wide in the finished sweater.

I created rectangles representing these widths and overlaid them on my bird’s-eye layout of the four pieces of my sweater.

Then I played around with how tall each rectangle was, which is the same as adjusting the number of rows I’ll work for each piece of the neckline edging, until the combined heights matched up as well as possible with the, er, width of the sleeves along those vertical edges. (Remember, the sleeves’s rows are turned 90 degrees relative to the front and back, because raglan shaping worked seamlessly essentially “turns a corner” at each raglan line. That means that in the image, a horizontal line follows the front/back rows and the sleeve stitches, while a vertical line follows the front/back stitches and the sleeve rows.)

I also wanted to make each rectangle as short as possible, which would allow me to start the raglan increases sooner rather than later. But I also needed to make sure that however many rows I worked, the total, er, height would be centered in the sleeves’, er, width. So I couldn’t do a whole bunch of rows on the front extensions and just a few rows on the back neck, because then the sleeves would not be centered properly between the front and back. Nor could I simply do an equal number of rows on the fronts and on the back, because again, the sleeves would wind up off-center.

So the first iteration keeps the total height reasonably short but also makes sure the vertical edges are centered on the sleeves.

The front extensions’ rectangles are 19 rows tall, and the back neck’s is 10 rows tall. I may have to tweak either or both of these numbers based on RS/WS issues associated with knitting (or purling!) up stitches along the edges for the sleeves as I work to get the entire set of yoke stitches on the needle.

If I mentally extend those vertical edges upward and downward, I see that I’ll be working raglan increases just in the sleeves for several rows, then I’ll eventually start making the raglan increases on the fronts and the back as well.

This is where my mental knitting ability is breaking down, because I can’t be sure how the fabric will wind up reacting to the fact that the sleeve raglan increases will start quite some number of rows before the front and back raglan increases start. I think it will be OK, because the fronts and back will already be the equivalent width of having worked that many increases, but then again, the fabric may sort of hump up because I’ll be making only the sleeve increases for about an inch. I just can’t see it clearly in my mind.

Sigh.

Now to mentally work through plan #1 step by step, before I pick up needles and yarn.