Sweaters

I’ve been knitting on and off on my top-down saddle shoulder sweater and was certain that I must be at the hem. But when I stretched out the stitches on a piece of string, I found that I still have 3″ to go on the body and a few inches for each sleeve.

I’m so close that this will become a priority so I might be able to wear it before the weather gets too warm. Once the body and sleeves are done, I’ll decide about the collar and send away for a perfectly matched zipper. Stay tuned.

After a few evenings of concentrated knitting, I am finally approaching the hem of my Briar Rose Glory Days cardigan.

Right now, the body measures close to 10″. I think I want the total body length to be about 13″, but I’ll have to check a sweater that has a similar fit to be sure. In any case, I need to decide if there will be a bit a regular rib (k3, p1) at the end and whether or not I’ll go ahead with an I-cord bind-off.
A nip of a strong beverage may help me decide.

It seems that I’m on a knitting treadmill–I knit and knit but don’t see any apparent progress on the body of my Briar Rose Glory Days sweater.

But this is giving me lots of time to think about the edgings. I still think I’d like a standard fold-over collar at the neck and a zipper closure. But now I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be cool to trim it all with I-cord. I can use the I-cord bind-off on the sleeves and lower body. For the fronts, I can pick up stitches along the selvedges, then work the I-cord bind off to make a nice edging against the zipper. But I haven’t quite gotten my head around how the collar will fit it. Should I work an I-cord edging on the collar as well, or would that be too much?
At lease, at this rate, I won’t have to make a decision for a while.

Not only have I reached the point where I was before ripping out, I’ve successfully worked the upper part of one sleeve. The sleeve is worked by picking up stitches around the armhole (including the held saddle stitches), then working short-rows to fill in the cap. The advantage of working sleeves this way is that you don’t have to sew any seams. Just look at that beautiful transition between body and sleeve!

I’ve gone back to my Briar Rose sweater and am almost back to where I had to rip out. This time you’ll notice that the live stitches of both shoulder straps are facing the armholes as they should. I’m so proud.

I haven’t minded retracing my steps on this one because I enjoy the combination of yarn and stitch pattern. I’m also motivated to get it finished before I have to put all my sweaters away for the summer.

The fronts are little tricky because you have to remember to work short-rows to shape the shoulders at the same time as new stitches are cast on at the neck edge, all while maintaining the stitch pattern. Fortunately, the stitch pattern repeats over just four stitches and there are only three steps to the short-rows and five steps to the neck shaping so it’s all over pretty quickly.

I’ve joined the fronts and back here. In order to maintain pattern continuity around the sides, I cast on 11 stitches (instead of 12) at the base of each armhole. That gave me a total of 241 stitches (instead of the 240 called for in the second chart of number on page 200), which is a multiple of 4 stitches +1.