Help on sweater pattern--Ingrid, other gurus, please help

How-to Questions
1

I began knitting a sweater pattern in Sally Melville’s Book, The Knit Stitch, the Knit-Down, Made-to-Measure Jumper. The sweater has an easy stitch pattern like this:

RS rows—Knit all rows.
WS rows—K2, * yf, slip 1 st purl-wise, yb, k4, repeat from *
	         until 3 sts rem, yf, sl 1 purl-wise, yb, k2.

OK, I got through the neck part, where you CO 35 and work the pattern for however many inches you want the neck to be (crew or turtle). Simple enough. Then I get to the shoulder increase. For a 15” shoulder, the instructions say then to CO 4 stitches at the beginning of the next 2 rows, 3 sts at beg of next 6 rows.

My question is this: During this shoulder increase part, do I continue in the stitch pattern? It doesn’t explicitly say to, but it would seem to look strange if you don’t. If you do continue in it, you’d need to do some math to make it work with the newly cast-on stitches, depending on how many you’re casting on at the beginning of the rows.

Can anyone help on this? Thanks.

2

You’re right. You need to knit those new cast-on stitches in pattern. At the end of a row, it’s easy since you just continue as is they were there all along.

For the ones at the beginning of the row, you’ll have to count backwards from what you have so you can start on the right stitch.

So if you start with this

kkskkkkskkkkskkkkskk

it will expand after the first 4 stitch increases to

[color=red]kskk[/color]kkskkkkskkkkskkkkskk[color=red]kksk[/color]

By the time all the increases are done, I’m sure you’ll be back to starting with a k2 and ending with a k2.

If it’s confusing, write yourself a little chart to figure out what to start with.

3

I figured that must be the case, but I wish they would explicitly say so for us sweater newbs! However, a little math doesn’t scare me, so I’ll just have to annotate my book with my henscratch in the margins. Thanks for the guidance and the breakdown!