More Before and After

By now I am sure that the before and after blocking shots are getting to be a little old. One of the things I was struggling with a little bit was how I was going to deal with the fronts of the sweater. How to make the corner and edging for the corner work out correctly.

It turns out that my new Knitted Rug book came to the rescue. One of the rugs in the book (unfortunately a quick Google search did not turn up a picture) uses the same cable pattern for it's edging. Donna Druchanas solved the problem by doing shortrows around the corner. It looked pretty good in her pictures, so it got me to thinking that maybe I could employ the same trick. The only question for me was whether or not the whole row/height gauge thing would work out correctly after blocking, and whether my previously observed blocking dynamics would be the same after the shortrows were employeed.

There was nothing for it but to do some test knitting and see. So I designed the fronts, figured out how many rows I needed for the band and did my experiment.

Short Row Corner Before

Short Row Corner After (Almost -- still a bit damp)

I had several false starts with the short rows and dealing with gapping, but tonight I finally got it straight after remembering about the whole wrapping thing. Makes a big difference in the final fabric that wrapping business does. From what I can tell, everything is blocking the way I expected it to and hte short row corner is going to work out just fine. After it's finished drying, I'm going to pick up the stitches along the top of the band edge and just continue knitting from there, starting a new cable motif on the next right side row.

The armhole shaping will be the same as for the back (no surprise there) the neckline shaping will be based on standard crew neck styling. The collar will have some kind of cabling that complements the sleeve and sweater bands, but I haven't quite decided how I want to do that yet.