Designing My Sweater: Day 2

It's looking good so far!

I got a lot done today. I tend to have a one-track mind when I'm working on something I've never done before. I think it's because I don't want to forget what I'm doing and how to do it. At any rate, I'm ready to knit on the button bands next. I might have done the sleeves next, but I realized a little late that my two balls of this yarn are different dye lots. I really have to use the same yarn for the button bands, since they're so visible and right smack in the middle of the sweater.

These skeins were given to me and in the same bag, so I assumed they were the same dye lot. This one had no ball band, but it's obviously a different dye lot than my other skein. Now I wish I had started with the full skein! Oh well, I'm hoping it won't be so obvious if I have to work the sleeves in the second skein.

Here are my design notes from today:

I switched to the larger needles (size 4) and increased 6 stitches on each front section and 12 stitches on the back section by increasing every 6 stitches, working in stockinette stitch.

I began the v-neck shaping when the sweater measured 7” from cast-on. I’m decreasing 28 stitches (on each front) over 70 rows, so that equals out to 4 stitches (on each front) every 10 rows. [NOTE that this figure does not take armhole shaping into account, so it didn't work like I thought it would. I actually quit decreasing at Row 60 and probably should have quit a little sooner or, better yet, spaced the decreases out a bit more.]

I split for the armholes at 10” from the cast-on edge. When I joined the yarn to the back and other front, I was ready for a wrong-side row (row 21 of v-neck decreases).

Since I’m working this seamlessly, I only bound off 4 stitches for the armhole and then decreased at the armhole edge 8 times (continuing the v-neck shaping at the same time) before armhole shaping was complete.

I quit the v-neck shaping at Row 60 and just knit straight stockinette stitch until Row 70. There were 11 stitchess left, and I “graded” the shoulder with short rows (using w&t): leaving off 3 sts on the first row and 2 on the next rows until I had 2 sts left. Then I purled back through all of the sts one last time, picking up the wraps as I went. I put these live sts on waste yarn to graft later.

I repeated this for the second front, reversing the shaping.

I did decreases on the back section as the pattern states. I did a total of 8 paired decreases for the armholes after the initial bind-offs. At Row 70, I started shaping the shoulders (and quite knitting the center stitches) and then grafted them to the matching fronts.