I finished the Law & Order sweater! Finally. I say "finally" not because this project took me a long time--I worked on it for just over a month--but because I have knit and re-knit the yoke several times over the past week. It was a somewhat tricky thing to figure out because I wanted to raise up the back neck slightly with short rows, which are a challenge when knitting in the round. This was a particular challenge primarily because I wanted the faux shoulder shaping seams to stay even, and I put the beginning-of-round at the back left shoulder. That puts an extra row into the left shoulder seam stitches that never really gets resolved. I ended up doing the left shoulder shaping decreases on the wrong side for the left shoulder seams that fall between the short-row turns and the beginning-of-round marker.
Anyway, I'm mostly happy with the FO. It is wet blocking now, so we'll see how it looks when I try it on after it's dry. I ended up finishing the neck with a 2-stitch i-cord bind-off, which might be a bit too delicate compared to the 4x2 rib at the cuffs and hem. I'm not sure. Everyone tells me it looks good as-is, and I definitely don't want to put 4x2 rib at the neck opening--I want the center front cable to go right up to the edging. It just might have been better if I'd done something comparably delicate at the wrists and hem. I'm hoping it will be dry by tomorrow, so I can get feedback from the Purlygirls at knitting tomorrow evening.
My next step with this project is to write it up as a pattern and then to re-knit it by following my own directions. I'm thinking of doing that in a quite different yarn, perhaps Rowan's Felted Tweed. That way, when I finalize the pattern and put it out there, people can see how the different yarn properties affect the FO. Of course, then I'll have two copies of the same sweater, but that's not exactly a hardship. :-)
The biggest question that I have now is about scaling the pattern up and down for different sizes. I'm not sure how to do that. This is essentially an EPS sweater with a raglan-variation for the yoke treatment, so hopefully it'll be easy to sort out. The thing that'll be difficult is figuring out where to place the cables.
Once I'm done with the writing, re-knitting, and scaling up and down of the pattern, I'll start looking for test knitters!
1 comments:
Dressmakers call resizing a pattern for different sizes "grading." Google "pattern grading" and you'll probably come up with a lot of info and maybe some standard size increments. For example, you might find out that the upper arm circumference increases by 1/4" with each size. Then you can come up with the dimensions for other sizes by adding or subtracting the increments. Or, you could buy a standard "sloper" pattern and compare how its measurements differ between sizes in different areas of the garment. Good luck!
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