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.

One way to make phony seams in seamless garments is to slip the “seam” stitch every other round. EZ’s way, done as an afterthought, allows us to just knit, knit, knit around without worrying about whether we’re on a regular round or a slipping round. And believe me, having one less thing to keep track of makes knitting easier, even if it’s just plain old stockinette.

Working the “Afterthought Seam”

Some people will work their phony seams even in the ribbing at the bottoms of the body and sleeves, but I choose to not do so. When I work bottom-up, I make the phony seam once I get to the underarm and stop it above the ribbing. Working top-down in the CotLin U-Neck, I worked the phony seams on both sleeves and on the body during the final stockinette round before the ribbing.

I drop the seam stitch, which was the central one of the three between the orange markers (the gold pins mark the increase rounds)

all the way to the underarm, being careful to stop a row (or even two) early, so as to not drop past the line across the underarm. (Crossing that line means I’d be working with stitches formed in the opposite direction, which could lead to needless complications.)

Then I put a crochet hook in the live stitch at the bottom of the column. This hook will need to be able to deal with two strands of the yarn at once, so it’s a bit larger than the one I keep handy for simply hooking back up an ordinary dropped stitch.

I * put the hook under the bottom-most two rungs

and pull them both through the loop on the hook.

Then I put the hook under the bottom-most rung

and pull it through both of the loops on the hook.

I repeat from * all the way back up through the remaining rungs, being careful to capture the rungs in the correct order.

When all the rungs have been hooked back up, the loop(s) on the hook are transferred back to the source needle, then the knitting continues.

Depending on how many rows are in each part of the WIP, I may have to put two loops (rather than one) on the needle, then work them as a single stitch. If I didn’t want to do that, then I just hook up the last two rungs one at a time, exactly in the same way as repairing a dropped stitch with a crochet hook.

The Result

The subtle line of stitches in the phony seam has only two-thirds the number of rows as the fabric on either side. That column will become a natural fold line when laying the FO out for blocking or even for folding the dry garment for storage.