Can I make ruffles from the bottom up?

How-to Questions
1

I’m going to knit up a quick shrug, and I want to make ruffles on the cuffs.

All the patterns I’ve seen with ruffles start at the top and then double your stitches with increases and then keep knitting to the bind off.

This would work fine for the cuff at the end of the shrug, but what about the one at the beginning?

What I want to do is start with twice as many stitches, knit for the length of the ruffle, and then decrease to half the number of stitches and then just keep knitting the sleeve. I’ve never seen a pattern do it this way, so will it work? Or is there something inherently difficult/ugly in doing all those decreases in one row?

I’m going to use a boucle yarn, so if there is a small difference in how the increased ruffle will look from the decreased ruffle, it really wouldn’t show too much, but I just want to be sure I’m not overlooking something.

Thanks!!!

2

It should work, you may have to plan on doing 2 sets of decs though, not just one. Why don’t you do a couple samples - cast on about 60 sts and do the decreases, first try just halving the sts so you end up with 30 sts, knit a few inches, then inc for a ruffle on the other end. On the other, co 60 sts, dec to 30 then to 15, and inc the same on the other end. See which one you lile.

3

I’ve started with ruffles, casting on 8 times as many stitches as I wanted, knit 1 row, k2tog across the next row (down to 4 times as many stitches as I need), knit 1 row, k2tog across next row (down to 2 times as many stitches), knit 1 row, k2tog across next row (down to the right number of stitches). you won’t notice that it’s a ruffle until you’re a row or two into your planned number of stitches, since the needle keeps them rather flat.

4

Yeah, that’s why I recommended she do a couple samples to see how they would look on both ends, with a few inches of less sts between them.

5

I have a book of kid knits called Barefoot Knits, and I did a skirt from the book that started with the ruffle. I can’t remember the exact directions at the moment, but basically it started with 3x the number of stitches for the body, knit in garter for, oh, about 2"? And then did a single row of double decrease.

ETA: if you want to see how it looks, my ravelry project page is here.