Now that I know I will have enough yarn to make the sweater, I need to figure out exactly where to change to the next colorway. Since I’m working top-down, all the shaping starts right after CO, so I expect the first color to be used for quite a few more rows than the other colors will be, simply because those initial rows are so short.
Tag Archives: CotLin U-Neck
Designing: Avoiding Yarn Chicken
Since my CotLin value pack has two sets of colorways that constitute two fades, I need to figure out when to change to the next colorway. I have no stomach for yarn chicken, so I’ll go to extremes to figure out how many stitches I can get from each skein, and I’ll allow a cushion in case my numbers are off. As a first step, I need to figure out how much fabric, in terms of square inches, my sweater will be.
Designing: Stitch and Row Counts
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.
Swatching: Finding the Needle Size
From long experience, I know that I’m a loose knitter. Uh, let me rephrase that. I know that I knit fairly loosely, because I pull on the yarn with hardly any force at all as I form each stitch. For worsted weight, I typically use a size 4/3.50 mm needle to get the typical 5 spi.
Designing: Fitted Garments in Plant Fibers
One other issue that I ran across in my re-reading of Maggie Righetti’s Sweater Design in Plain English is that the lack of resiliency in plant fibers (along with certain animal fibers, like silk) means that garments must have zero or even negative ease (top of page 62).
Designing: Picking a Silhouette
Because I have very square shoulders, I long ago learned that I look best in raglan and circular yokes. One bottom-up seamless sweater had three different sleeve/shoulder shapings before it was done, the winner being a raglan.