How to increase and keep pattern stitch?

#1

Hi everyone! Hoping someone can help unfog my brain…

I am planning a sweater using an overall pattern stitch (the mock honeycomb found here). I am hoping to knit this in the round and I know I will need to do increases and decreases throughout the sweater design. My question is, how do you do increases and decreases and maintain an overall pattern? This is a repeating 4 stitch pattern and I think any increases/decreases will either shift the pattern (making it look funny) or leave me with sections that don’t “fit” into the pattern? Or…maybe…I am just over worrying it? Guess I’m just looking for some reassurance that this all “works out” over the piece, or a general explanation of how I should think about it in order to make it work?

TIA for any help or guidance any can give me! Chris

#2

Do the increases on the ends of the rows, make sure there’s a `selvedge’ st to do them on, place a marker to begin and end the pattern stitch. When you have 5 sts in front of/after the markers, start the st repeat on the 4 sts, move the markers so they’re one st from the edge.

#3

Hi! Yes, just throwing the increases/decreases in while continuing the pattern unthinkingly will throw things off. There will probably be a little bit of “off pattern” where you do the changes, but it will look all right since those are usually under the arms or something. Here is how I would think of it.

If you are doing increases keep all the patterns that you have going, going the same way, I mean so that they continue to line up the way they have been lining up. Then say you add one stitch at each end of a round (or a row if you divide and work back and forth), put in your increase and keep the two new stitches just in stockinette. As you add more, keep them in stockinette until you have 4. When you have 4 added stitches on one side, incorporate them into the pattern.

Decreases work the same way but in reverse. If you take out a stitch, keep everything else in pattern, but work the 3 stitches that are now one short of what is needed for a pattern, in stockinette.

I can’t tell you exactly what you would have to do, it will depend on the number of dec/incs that you do, but that is the principle.

#4

See! I knew if I asked you guys you would clear the anxiety from my brain. That makes perfect sense, and really isn’t as scary a prospect as I was building it up to be. Thank you both so much for your responses, you’ve increased my confidence in planning this by leaps and bounds!