I love it. I wish I could give suggestions but you are doing amazing. Hopefully one day I will be able to do something like this.
I did not see all the pictures but now that I do, oh wow. This is amazing work.. I think it’s beautiful. You give me something to aim for
Oh thanks so much.
I’ve just pulled all the seams out and frogged the neck so it’s back in pieces again. I’m going to try the higher neck. If it looks bad, well, I’ll frog again.
This is actually not hard to knit at all, it was hard to work out how to make neat increases and decreases, but the farbic itself is reasonably basic. I’m sure you can make something like this too.
Thanks. I aim for it
Just stopping by with an update to this.
Frogging and reknitting was done last week but I didn’t have the strength to try on until today.
I shortened the sleeves by a repeat, about 5 cm, they are better now.
I raised the neck by a repeat. Hmm…not great.
It looks sort of fine, it’s not as high as a crew neck, it still has the v shape, the measurements are fine, but… I don’t like it.
It looks sort of awkward at this height and, worse than that, the neckband feels sort of tight in the row end stitch (it feels like a too tight bind off, but this is not a bind off, it is a row end). The neckhole is not too small to get on and off but that tight line feels wrong. All the rest of the fabric is soft and flexible.
So, hmmm… don’t know what to do.
It seems I need the v to begin half way between the lower and higher positions - don’t know how to do that. Or I need to lower it to where it was and as @Mel61 suggested find a new way to decrease less frequently. No idea how. Or scrap this V neck idea and go for a totally different shape - don’t know what.
Urgh, the trials of knitting! I have put a lot of time and effort into this design and into working out increase and decrease shaping to flow nicely with the cables.
Sorry to hear that after so much work. Would it be possible to trial modifications on a smaller sample/ swatch rather than the whole sweater? Good luck!
Thanks.
I’m putting it aside for a few days, my brain might do some subconscious problem solving without any effort from me. We’ll see.
Just a thought - if you decrease the neck steeply over 1.5 repeats of the horseshoe cable, rather than two, you’d get a stepper neck and wider shoulder. Then you could do a nifty patty Lyons decrease of the wider cable end at the shoulder to reduce the cable flare.
Link attached
Thank you so much for taking the time to find and link this.
I have already used this technique across all the bind offs (shoulders, back, also sleeve tops and saddle ends). It works wonderfully for keeping the cable columns the correct width and appearing ‘straight’. There is just one stitch on the saddle where the k2tog bind off is bending the column rather than straightening it, it over-compensates, and when i redo the short rows on the saddles I’ll fix this by working a regular bind off for 2 sts on that little section.
So, the neck.
As I already have the k2tog bind off, the v shaping remains the same problem.
One thing I noticed in Patty Lyons tutorial you linked is to aim to end the cable half way between crosses. I tried out different rows to see which row looked best for the bind off (to keep the fabric as even as possible and control those cables). I could have gone 2 rows longer for a similar result, it means i could have chosen this final row differently which would move the neck by 2 rows.
I agree with you though, the neck needs to be more like 1.5 repeat which means shifting some 6 rows.
I’ve been splitting the neck on a cable cross because i thought this was the nicestest way to send the cable across then up the neck, but maybe i need to see what happens if i split it half way between cables and just look at what happens to the shape.
Sigh, this is why I’m not a knitwear designer! Ha ha!
I suspect most designers have to go through a similar process!!!
But you ARE a knitwear designer! Just because you don’t sell your designs, doesn’t mean you didn’t do all the work!
Yes, they do a lot more than this for many designs. My notes are indecipherable scribbles and theirs would need to be spot on written correctly… and all the sizing alterations too! Phew.
When I set out on this sweater it was because i saw a sweater I kind of liked but was totally put off by the neck, ironically my redesign has its own neck issues.
That’s really kind. I’m not sure half done, stuffed in the drawer, counts as a successful design.
But, I am not totally giving up.
Or trying not to.
It’s ticking over in my head.
I’ve done half a dozen swatch trials of some stranded colour work for the next project to distract me from this one. All frogged of course.
Maybe not this one, not yet, but you’ve done others and have a finished “product” to show for it.
You’re very encouraging, thank you.
OK.
Brain did some work in the background and gave me a couple of ideas to try. Some didn’t work once I had a swatch on the needles and I’ve frogged 4 or 5 trials BUT…
I cast on yesterday, new swatch, here are 2 possible solutions.
The V looks uneven because each side is worked differently so I’ve popped a red line in to try to show the centre. Obviously this is just a swatch, no saddles or sleeves.
V splits/begins 4 rows later than the original/low version, so not 1.5 crosses to the top but nearly (1.5 would be 6 rows after the cross rather than 4 rows).
Trial 1 extends the shoulder by about 2 cm.
Trial 2 extends the shoulder by about 6cm.
Any thoughts?
In the original the neckband was quite thin (one of the 6 stitch cables) and i remember thinking that, design wise, it didn’t look meaty enough for the chunkiness of the cables, it looked kind of weak.
On these new trials I’ve doubled the neckband width, 12 sts, the full cable and its crosses. I think this is more balanced visually, the neckband doesn’t look so overpowered by the rest of the sweater.
Not sure if i would continue the cable cross right around the neck, might be too bulky and make my shoulders look lumpy, so maybe flat from the saddle around to the back neck, or maybe with crosses. I don’t know.
I think either solution works, so it might come down to how you feel about the heavy cable going all the way around. I think it looks good, but as you say it might be too thick.
But I think how you’ve split for the V-neck looks quite good, and would solve the original issue of having too deep of a V.
