I am making a blanket and sweater for a baby- in Ice Cream Roving by Lion Brand- Anyway, I have never made a baby sweater (or anything that self stripes) So how do I go about making sure that my colors/stripes match up when doing the sleeves? (obviously the color sequence should also match across the bottom part of the body of the sweater too.)
Sleeves and Striping yarn
It depends on the regularity of the repeat sequence in the yarn. If the yarn cycles from color A to B to C with a consistent length of each color, you can pull out the yarn strand until you get to the same color on both sources of yarn for the sleeves. You can match that to the color that starts the body but since the sleeves are usually smaller than the body of the sweater, the stripes are going to be longer in the sleeves than in the body. You’d have to keep cutting the sleeve yarn and adjusting the stripes to exactly match the stripe pattern in the body of the sweater.
Sock knitters who want identical socks match up the stripes but don’t have the problem of sleeves vs sweater body.
Is the sweater knit in the round? If not then there will also be a mismatch of the colours at the side seams of front and back.
For what it’s worth I rather like the asymmetrical looks some people manage to achieve with self striping yarn, I think sometimes people purposely make the sleeves, or 2 fronts of a cardigan NOT match as a design feature.
Having said that, I went to extra effort to disguise the side seam colour changes in a self striping sweater I made.
So, I am making the Quick Oats pattern (Again by Taiga Hilliard- I love her patterns- almost no seaming!) Anyway, it says to add a button hole every tenth row after row 20, so my tenth row would actually be row 22- which is an increase anyway- So do I just make the button hole and continue on with how the pattern is worked on that row? I am just a little unsure of how to make the button hole on that row and continue with the pattern.
The buttonhole is going to involve only the garter stitch band so you can think of it as separate from the yoke pattern. It’ll help to add a marker between the buttonhole band and the yoke since it all looks like a continuous garter stitch pattern at that point.