Thankfully, before I started on this massive project, I received some very good advice from designer friends who have been there, done that. Without their frank and helpful tips, I don’t think I could have stayed very calm or grounded during these last few months. Don’t get me wrong, I still had a freak out (or two), but for the most part I stayed cool, calm, and collected.

Before I get ahead of myself though, there is still a lot of work to go! Even though it was my half deadline, half of the projects aren’t finished. I think it will be a little easier to buckle down over the winter months however. Summer days have a certain siren song that soggy, wet, snowy, cold, grey winter days just can’t match. Time to go light the fire and brew up a big pot of tea, it’s gonna be a long winter!

The past few months have been busy for me, both at the sweater company where I spend my days and on the hand knitting front. Busy is always better than boring I suppose! And speaking of boring, most of what has been keeping me busy I can’t share yet! Boo! I promise the news will be worth the wait.

In between working through all of my deadlines, I have been counting down the days to Rhinebeck for the Sheep and Wool festival. A bunch of my knitting buddies decided to rent a house this year and I am super duper excited. This will be the first year I will be able to attend the festival both days, so it should make the event much more enjoyable and relaxing. Going up to Rhinebeck will also provide a little break and much needed mini-vacation!

It’s not the best picture in the world, but you get the idea. Here’s a details shot:

And now we can compare the sketch to the final product. How did I do?

I decided to leave the pockets off after all. Part of it was laziness, part of it was not wanting to add any bulkiness to the sweater. I also didn’t want to mess up the pretty lines of the lace pattern.

I’m in the process of writing the pattern now, so once it’s finished I will be putting it up for sale here on the site. (For anyone who was wondering!)

And now we enter into one of our last installments on the making of the garment. My next topics will briefly touch on the pattern writing process. I say briefly because a lot of it is the same as making up the first sample, just repeating it how ever many times for the total amount of sizes. Since this project has been put on hold for a few months, I’m so thankful that I wrote down everything I did here! It will make it much quicker to piece all of my info together. Anywho, let’s get to it!

Finishing

When I put up my survey for neoknits a few months back, it was interesting to see that a lot of your “perfect patterns” would have more detailed finishing instructions. Finishing a sweater seems to be the other boogyman of the knitting world, right behind math. Yet, it’s the most important part of any project. You can knit the most beautiful thing in the world, ripping back for every mistake, but if you don’t take the time and care to seam it up properly, disaster can strike even the most unsuspecting garment! With the right tools, reference books, and a little bit of patience you’ll be on your way to finishing your sweaters without tears in no time.

When getting ready to seam up a project, after everything is blocked properly of course, I line up the two seams and secure them every 2″ or so with removable stitch holders. You could probably even use knitters safety pins. This makes it easier to handle the pieces and insures you won’t have 2″ extra on one of the seams.

I know there are several finishing books out now, but my personal favorite is The Knitters Book of Finishing Techniques by Nancie M. Wiseman. It has very clear pictures and it also gives Pros and Cons for using each technique. If you struggle with finishing your sweaters and don’t like the results you are getting I would highly suggest buying a finishing book for your library. It just might be a sweater saver!

Now the sweater just needs some buttons and it will be all ready to go! Sorry to make you wait for finished pics, but we need to develop that patience for finishing your projects somehow! Every little bit helps ;)

So on to buttonbands!

I don’t really use a set number when figuring out how many stitches to pick up. Usually I divide the number of rows by the numbers of stitches to get a ratio, but sometimes I don’t. For this project, I decided to go with the ratio of 4 to 5. So out of every 5 sts, I pick up 4 of them.

For this design, I was able to pick up stitches continually from right bottom hem to left bottom hem, which makes things a lot easier! Whenever I hit a change (placket to neck, front neck to back neck) I placed a stitch marker so I can easily count the stitches to fill into the pattern.

Once stitches had been counted, I needed to figure out the placement of the buttonholes before proceeding. I counted up and had 92 sts from left front hem to the beginning of the V neck. So……..

First you figure out how many stitches your button will need to pass through and how many buttons total will be used. I need 5 buttons and 5 sts for each button, so that will take up 25 sts (5×5).

I also need a few stitches at the top and bottom of the placket. You can’t start buttonholes right at the edge! So I choose 4 for the top and 4 for the bottom.

Now we need to figure out how many stitches are in between each buttonhole. So we take 92 sts – 25 sts = 67 sts – 8 sts = 59 sts. Now we divide that by the number of spaces: 59/4= 14.75. Hmm, not an even number. So we add 2 sts to the top and 1 st to the bottom to make it an even 14.

So we have 6 sts for the bottom, 5 sts for each buttonhole, 14 sts between each and 5 sts on top!

Now that I have that info, I can figure out how many rows I’ll need (9). And I decide to use a 1 row buttonhole, so I place it after the 4th row to keep things looking even.

Next up: Pockets? We’ll see!

I know there are people of both the wet block camp and steam block camp out there, but personally, I belong to the steam block camp – for the most part anyway. There is just something about putting your brand new sweater in a tub of water that really scares me! In fact, washing my sweaters brings about so much anxiety that it’s really not funny.

So I start by grabbing my sweater parts, pins, blocking board and measuring tape. I lay everything out matching the measurements from my sketch book to the sweater and pin everything down. The blocking board makes this process an absolute charm, by the way! I used to pin everything out on a towel on the floor, which worked, but I hated it and it took double the time. In fact, honestly, before the blocking board I have to admit I didn’t really do too much proper blocking to size. It would get a shot of steam from the iron to smooth the edges for seaming, and that was about it. Don’t have a blocking board? You know how you never know what you want for your b-day/Christmas/Hanukkah/other holiday? Exactly! :)

After steaming, the pieces will be a tiny bit damp, so I let them dry for a bit before unpinning them. And after unpinning, I still let them sit for a half hour or more just in case the knitting wants to pull back to shape on it’s own. Trust me, being patient will pay off in the end! As with swatching, proper blocking is very important for a pleasant outcome of your garment.

I cast on a total of 95 sts for the back, so we’ll start by dividing that in half which gives me 47.5 stitches. Don’t like that, so I go down to 47. 47 doesn’t work with the 2×2 ribbing, so I go down one more to 46. But I also have to account for a button placket here, which will be 1.25″ wide which would take up about 6 stitches. The 6 stitches then are divided in half (the placket sits evenly over the center front) so we now have43 sts to work with. Again, this doesn’t work with the 2×2 rib, so let’s try 42. Now I need to check and see if the 42 stitches work with my lace pattern (42-4=38, 38/7=5.42……) nope. So I figure out that I either need 39 stitches or 46 stitches. I decide to go with 46, even though it’s 1/2 of my total back. It’s always better to go bigger with a button placket since they tend to pull.

So I cast on, work my rib and pattern til I have 15″ worked. It’s now time to figure out the neck decrease frequency.

On the half, I have 24 neck stitches to decrease and 14.5″ to work them, or 116 rows. If we divide 116 by 24 we get 4.8333333…. hmm, not so even. So what do I do? Well, we have a special formula for uneven, unruly numbers like this.

1. I take the 2 even numbers that are closest to the 4.8333 – which are 4 and 6 (these are your frequency numbers).
2. Next I multiply the total number of decreases by the first number which is 4 (24×4=96)
3. Now subtract 96 from the total number of rows (116-96=20)
4. Divide 20 by 2 (20/2=10)
5. Multiply second decrease number (6) by 10 (6×10=60 rows)
6. Subtract 60 from 116 (116-60=56 rows)
7. Divide 56 rows by 4 (56/4=14)
8. Divide 60 rows by 6 (60/6=10)

So after all that, I determined that my decrease frequency is every 4th row 14 times, then every 6th row 10 times. I’m sure this might not make much sense, but if you pick up Maggie Righetti’s book Sweater Design in Plain English, it will make MUCH more sense.

At the same time I’m doing all this neck decrease business, I’m also following all the underarm shaping and shoulder shaping as established on the back. And here’s what I end up with:

A left front! ok, there was supposed to be a picture here, but things have been a bit crazy around these parts lately! I don’t want to delay the post any longer, so please us your ultra creative mind to picture a left front :) (I actually wrote this on 3/15!)

This is it for the math for awhile – at least until I get to the button placket. The second front will be knit up exactly as the first. To make absolutely sure they actually do knit up the same, I keep a small 3×4 notebook handy to mark all of my decreases and rows. It’s especially important in this case since I am working in pattern and would like it to match up evenly at the side seams and across the front. The little book also helps when you put the project down for a day or week or year or two. It’s always easy to pick up where you left off.

Instead of using a set formula for the increases, I drew out a chart to make sure the shape is what I wanted. I wanted the increases to be worked over 2″, which according to my row gauge is 16 rows total.

So I got out the trusty graph paper and started drawing. Here’s what I came up with:

So I’m increasing a total of 11 stitches over 15 rows (1 stitch every other row 4 times, then 1 stitch every row 7 times) – close enough to my 16 total.

After working my underarm increases, I now need to figure out how many stitches to cast on for the sleeve at both ends of the back.

I want the sleeves to be about 10 1/4″ long from the shoulder to the cuff. So 10.25 x 2 (sleeves) =20.5″ + 9″ (neck) = 29.5″ wide. Then I subtract the body 29.5″ – 18″ = 11.5″ for the underarm seams. But I have 2 underarm seams, so I need to divide by 2 = 5.75″ for each side or 31 stitches wide (5.75 x 5.5=31).

I already increased 11 stitches for the underarm shaping, so I can subtract that from the 31, so we have 20 stitches to increase.

But before I cast 20 more stitches on for the sleeve, I need to make sure the total number of stitches follows our stitch repeat numbers (7 sts + 4). 99 sts + 22 sts + 40 sts = 161 sts total. 161-4=157, 157/7= 22.428…… = not going to work! So I messed around a bit with the numbers and figured out I needed to add 15 sts on each side (99 + 22 + 30=151 sts. 151 -4=147, 147/7=21 repeats). The sleeve will be about 1″ shorter on each side, but having the numbers work out makes it easier to place the repeats correctly so I can live with that.

After casting on the extra stitches, I was able to veg out for awhile and knit even for 7 1/2″. Once I hit that point, it was time to think about the shoulder shaping.

I decided I wanted to try some short row shaping on the shoulders since I’ve never done it in a design before. Well, I wanted to do short row shaping, but with the lace pattern going on, I ended up with a lot more stitches than I was supposed to, so out it came! I did a traditional bind off instead and slipped the first stitch of each bind off row to avoid the ugly “stair step” edge you get if you don’t do this. To figure out how many stitches I needed to decrease, I subtracted the neck opening stitches from the sleeve stitches and have 51 stitches to decrease on each shoulder over 14 rows. Because I can only decrease one side per row, I actually only have 7 rows to decrease over. So 51/7= 7 with a remainder of 2. So I’ll be binding off 7 stitches 7 times and then have 2 sts at the end left over.

There will also be a bit of back neck shaping involved which will involve separating the back at a certain point, but I think it’s safe to say that I’m pretty sure you just want to see a progress picture by now:

Thanks to everyone who made a suggestion in my time of crisis! I decided on the Rowan DK Wool from elann.com for the baby goods. I love Rowan and hey, it was cheap! If it wasn’t a budget project, I probably would have gone for the Zara, but I’m sure there will be a next time!

When we last left off, I had explained a little bit about the math that needed to be done to get me up to the waist point. I also had to make a decision about the chest and if I wanted to decrease or increase at this point.

I decided to increase for the bust and I changed a few measurements around. So here’s the updated schematic:

For the bust to measure 18″, I need 99 sts. There are 95 sts on my needle, so I need to increase 4 sts total – 2 sts on each side (99-95=4, 4/2=2). Now I just need to figure out the spacing of those increases.

I have 2 increases to make and 24 rows to work them. To keep a nice slope, you need to space the increases out evenly or your side seams can look a bit odd. In this case, since I only have 2 sts to increase and it’s actually pretty easy to figure out. I increase the 1st stitch after completing 15″ of the body, then I increase 1 stitch more 24 rows later.

Not too much math involved on the increases on this sample, but what if I wanted to increase more stitches over the same 3″?

Just for example’s sake, let’s say I needed 4 increases on each side instead of 2 and had the same 24 rows to work with. I would divide 24 rows into 3 intervals (space between each inc) and would get 8. So I would need to increase 1 stitch every 8 rows 4 times. This works out perfectly and each increase is on the right side (since it’s an even number). It doesn’t always work out so easily and sometimes the numbers need to be fudged a bit, but we’ll leave that for a later lesson – like the neck decreases.

Next up: shaping the underarm seams and shoulder decreasing

So we’re back to the trusty schematic. I’ve added in a few more numbers since we last saw it:

To start, I needed to decide whether to make the sweater in one piece or three. I decided to make it in three pieces for two reasons: #1 Seams add more stability to a garment and #2 it would be difficult to continue in one piece when I got to the sleeve section.

With that decided, I can now begin to figure out my numbers.

To sum up the process in very simple terms, I need to multiply all the horizontal measurements by the stitch gauge and all the vertical measurements by the row gauge. But with this sweater, it’s not quite that easy.

For example – Bottom hem: I want it to be 17 1/2″ wide. Multiply 17.5 x 5.5 (st gauge)=96.25 sts. I round this down to 96 sts, but this still doesn’t work. My lace stitch pattern is a multiple of 7 + 4 sts. This means that my cast on number must be evenly divided by 7 and then 4 sts need to be added to keep the pattern centered. So I play with my number and come up with 95 sts to cast on (95-4=91 then 91/7=13).

So I have 95 sts to cast on, right? Well, not really. I decided to start the hem with a 2×2 rib whose stitch multiple is 4 + 2 sts. In order to center the rib up correctly, I couldn’t do a correct pattern repeat. I decided on 96 sts (k1, (p2, k2) to last 3 sts, p2, k1). When I get to the pattern portion of the body, I’ll just need to decrease 1 st to get back to 95 sts for the correct pattern repeat. I make a note of this on my schematic so I don’t forget.

Next I usually figure out the decrease and increase frequency along the side seams, but since this body is fairly straight, I haven’t really decided on the decrease points yet. I decided to cast on and think about where these points may be as I go along.

I cast on for the back on Sunday night and I have about 11″ done so far. I haven’t quite figured out where I want to start my shaping yet. I’m also wondering if I should start increasing instead of decreasing as I originally planned……..hmm. I better decide soon though, I really don’t feel like ripping back because I’ve gone too far!

Stay tuned for more sweater progress and math! Can I hear everyone say “yay! math!”?

P.S. Speaking of numbers changing – at about 5″ in I realized that my row gauge was actually 8 rows per inch instead of 7. I did recheck my gauge swatch in the beginning, but it just goes to show that you can’t always rely on them 100%. Always check your knitting!