Hi and welcome back! By now you have finished the shoulder increases and are ready to complete the body. You’ll know you’re done knitting your yoke when you’ve met a couple of criteria: 1) You’ve worked enough increase rounds to attain the targeted number of stitches in each of your sleeve and body sections, giving you your desired dimensions (when factoring in the anticipated cast-on underarm stitches). And 2) The yoke is long enough to reach the target spot, somewhere south of your armpit, where you’ll be casting on the underarm stitches.
Separating the sleeves
Holding stitches comes up rather often in knitting. Two popular examples are the sleeves on a top down sweater (like ours), or the thumb stitches on a mitten. In this case, we are going to hold our sleeve stitches and continue to work the rest of the body. When the body is complete, we will pick up the sleeves stitches and finish the sleeves.
You will need a few supplies handy: A tapestry needle and 1/8″ satin ribbon. I like to use ribbon instead of yarn because it’s more slippery than yarn which makes it easier to try your sweater on while you are knitting. Follow these directions and slip your sleeves stitches to ribbon at the appropriate time.
Here’s how to slip & hold those stitches:
- Thread some ribbon on your darning needle
- Run the needle through all of the stitches
- Pull your yarn through the stitches, making sure all of the stitches are still on the yarn (don’t pull it all the way through).
- Voila, stitches have been place on hold! You can tie the ends of the waste yarn together (so it doesn’t slip out). Later on, when you want to continue knitting from these ‘held’ or ‘live’ stitches, simply slip them back onto needles, and pull the waste yarn out.
After your stitches are held, you will cast on more stitches for the under arm using the backwards loop cast on method.
It’s time for a lot of knitting! The sleeves are on hold, the body will be worked down to the hem, then the sleeves are each picked up and worked last.
Side Shaping
With pockets : After you knit 5″ you will begin the increases for the pockets. Using you M1R and M1L on either side of you side seam markers, increase 2 times, 8 rows apart as explained in the pattern.
Without pockets : The side shaping in this design is used to allow room for the pockets. I have decided to eliminate the pockets completely, therefore will be knitting without increasing to the bottom ribbing. The bottom ribbing in 2 x 2 ribbing which means the number of stitches should be divisible by 4. Since I have 122 stitches on my needles right now, I will increase by 2 stitches evenly across the bottom on the row prior to the start of the ribbing.
Next entry- Pocket construction!
We would love to see your progress! Share your pics on Instagram using our hashtags- #ccyagnes & #firstsweater
~Kris
