Knot Knecessarily Known Knitting

This was my first sweater. It wasn't knitted from a pattern, but it wasn't my own design. It was copied -- cloned -- from a commercial sweater that a college friend had handed down to me. I had worn the original until the cuffs were becoming threadbare and I was wondering if it could survive one more trip through the laundry. I decided that, well, it was knitting not brain surgery, right? With my trusty Reader's Digest Complete Guild to Needlework , I cast-on with practice yarn and knit until I thought I knew what I was doing. Today, I'd recommend Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts & Deborah Robson Knitting in the Old Way expanded edition from 2004. Like the yoke sweater, this one is cast-on in the round at the bottom and worked upwards with little or no shaping. Were I to knit it again, I'd put the patterning on both the front and back. As this is a copy of a commercial sweater, the back and sleeves are all seed-stitch. I'd also drop down onto a smaller needle for...

The top-down approach to a sweater is wonderfully and thoroughly covered by Barbara G. Walker in Knitting From the Top , originally printed in 1972 but widely available in the Schoolhouse Press reprint from 1996. A top-down yoke sweater is just a bottom-up sweater in reverse. Depending on the pattern, one direction or the other can be a better choice. In this case, you'd cast on at the neck, and work a few short rows. Then work round and round, increasing an average of 4 stitches each row (8 stitches every-other row). At the underarm, the stitches are divided. Extra stitches are cast-on at the underarm, and the body and sleeves progress individually to the end. Cast off is at the cuffs and bottom ribbing. Underarms are seamed or grafted. On my example, I've worked raglan increasing at the corners -- i.e. double-increase every-other round at each of four points. I established a small braid at the raglan lines and worked the increases behind the braids to create a lovely, decorat...

Remember that beautiful snowfall a couple months ago? Well, my North Georgia Knitting Guild presentation was supposed to be the following evening. As the name implies, that guild meets north of the city. It was a wee bit cooler there and the snow a bit heavier, so the meeting was cancelled. I'll be doing this presentation at the April meeting instead. In the meantime, I thought I'd post most of it here. This is a series of illustrated examples of how to make sweaters without knitting separate flat pieces that are then sewn together. My first example is a yoke sweater. This particular yoke sweater I knit maybe five years ago for my gaming friend Karen. Karen was going to an anime convention and wanted to dress as a particular character, Yukari. I started with a picture of the character and a little knowledge about yoke sweaters. (For more reference on this type of sweater construction, read Elizabeth Zimmermann Knitting Without Tears , reprinted 1995 or Susan Mills & Norah G...