Top-Down Design Tutorial 5: Necklines

When I wrote the post on choosing the basic garment plan, I omitted drop-shoulder sweaters. Drop-shoulder sweaters are essentially constructed of rectangles with no shaping. They fit horribly and I never knit them. They're easy to design, however, so you see a lot of them in knitting patterns and knitting magazines.

I'm going to similarly omit a neckline that I never use: the boat neck. It's essentially a horizontal slit at the shoulders big enough to admit the head. It doesn't fit well, shows bra straps, and slides around on the shoulders. It is the easiest of necklines to design, and so many beginner knitting patterns include it.

My advice: don't waste your time on drop-shoulder sweaters and boat necks. If you're going to put all those hours of your life into a sweater, make it a sweater that will fit and flatter the wearer.

For necklines, you have three basic choices: round, square, or triangular.

A square neckline is usually a poor choice for knits. Knit garments tend to stretch, and a square neck tends to bag and sag. Knit fabric does not have the crispness of woven fabric that makes a square neck a fine choice for many garments. You can sometimes get away with a square neckline in a lightweight, stiff, nonresilient (or very springy) yarn knit at a firm tension and edged with a slip-stitch, twisted stitch, or crocheted edging. Conversely, you can use a square neck in a very drapy fabric that makes the sagging and bagging a feature. In most cases, however, a square neckline in a handknit garment is a disappointment.

A round neckline is a much better utility player. Here the characteristics of knit fabric work harmoniously with the shape of the neckline. The stretchiness and forgivingness of knitting smooths over any irregularities in the round edge. Round necklines can be wide, narrow, high, or low. A high, narrow round neckline is the classic crew neck. A high, wide neckline is a portrait neckline. A low round neckline, whether wide or narrow, is a scoop neckline. All of these necklines work great for knit garments.

The triangular neckline also works well for knit garments. These appear as short sharp triangles in the classic V-neck sweater or as the long, graceful shawl collar in a garment that opens in the front.

When planning a neckline, you can either copy a neckline from a garment or pattern that you like or you can wing it from your measurements. Both methods work well.

For many years, my neckline placement was often surprising. I copied and measured, and the necklines were often inches shorter than I expected them to be. The fronts of my sweaters rode up.

What I didn't realize was that sweaters hung from the backs of my shoulders, not the middle of my shoulders. The front of the sweater thus started close to the back of my neck, rotating the neck of the sweater back and up.

To find your own hanger point, hang a towel over your shoulders. and feel for the line where the towel hangs. Measure your necklines from that line, and the depth will be close to right.

Another thing to think of when planning necklines is the width of the neckline trim. The neckline of the initial garment needs to be deeper and wider than the neckline of the finished garment in order to allow for the neckline trim.

If you're copying a neckline from an existing garment, measure the width of the neckline at the shoulders, the depth of the neckline, and the width of the neckline at the deepest point. Choose the shape of your neckline, and proceed as if designing the neckline from scratch.

If you're designing the neckline from scratch, choose the neckline width at the shoulders, the depth of the neckline, and the width of the neckline at the deepest point. Settle on a neckline shape, and you're good to go. You can use a string or ribbon around the neck to try various neckline shapes before taking your measurements.

In top-down sweaters, the neckline is shaped with increases at the left and right edges of the neckline. The total number of increases is equal to the stitch gauge of the knitted fabric times the width of the neckline at the shoulders. The depth of the neckline times the row gauge gives you the number of rows to space these increases across.

For a triangular neckline, the increases are spaced equally across the rows. Don't worry if the math on this (or any other aspect of knitting) doesn't come out even; just use the nearest whole numbers that make sense.

For a round neckline, the increases occur more frequently as you go down. For about a quarter of the depth, you don't increase at all. For the second quarter of the depth, you increase every fourth row. For the third quarter, you step it up to every other row, and then step it up again to every row for the last quarter. The final group of stitches are then cast on at the bottom of the neck. You'll need to adjust these sections so the number of stitches come out right, but what you're looking for is a progression in increases from the shoulder to the deepest part of the neck.

Faking it is a major part of sweater design. Get the numbers somewhere in the neighborhood of where you want to be and then juggle things so they work with the stitch pattern and the stitch and row gauge.

Top-Down Design Tutorial 4: Choosing the Basic Garment Plan

I can knit any sweater from the top-down by using one of three basic garment plans: raglan, circular yoke, or shoulder-down.

The Peach Vine Pullover, a shoulder-down design

With a raglan or round-yoke sweater, you cast on the neck and knit the body and sleeves in a continuous circle (or back and forth if you're knitting a cardigan), increasing as you go. In a raglan, the increases are placed at the points where the body divides from the sleeves. In a round-yoked sweater, the increases are evenly spaced around the yoke.

For a shoulder-down sweater, you cast on the back, knit a couple of inches, pick up the front shoulders, knit the front down a couple of inches, pick up along the edges for the sleeves, and then knit the body and sleeves in much the same way that you would for a raglan.

Dragon Princess Shell, a shoulder-down design

In general, a raglan or round-yoked sweater will have a less fitted, more casual appearance than a shoulder-down sweater. A shoulder-down sweater hangs from the shoulders in a straight vertical line while a raglan or round-yoked sweater radiates out from the neck.

Hunter Rib Sweatshirt, a raglan

Raglan and round-necked sweaters are easier to design and knit than shoulder-down sweaters. A raglan has strong diagonal increase lines from shoulder to underarm. These lines can be a design point in a stitch pattern with a strong vertical element. You can put cables inside the raglan lines to emphasize this diagonal line. In other stitch patterns, the raglan lines create an unwelcome discontinuity.

Spanish Tile Cable Sweater, a raglan

Raglans are an especially good choice with ribbing and other stitch patterns that tend to stretch horizontally more than vertically. With stitch patterns that tend to stretch vertically, the shoulders and neckline will tend to stretch out of shape with a raglan.

Raglans are a good choice with wool and firmly knit cotton yarns, but might not be such a good choice with linen or silk blends or other yarns that tend to stretch out of shape.

The pony sweater, knit as a raglan

And with a round-yoke

Round yokes are used mostly when the pattern has a strong horizontal element that you want to continue uniformly around the yoke and you have the occasional plain round where you can stick a bunch of increases. Between the 3-5 increase rounds, you work the pattern uninterrupted. Round yokes are often used with color work, but can also be used to good effect in brocade, lace, or other pattern stitches.

The round yoke of Malcolm's Cat Sweater

A shoulder-down design works well with vertical patterns that you want to continue straight up to the shoulder and with designs where the sleeves have a different pattern than the body. If you want to knit a sleeveless garment such as a vest, shell, or tank top, you'll need to use the shoulder-down approach.

A shoulder-down tank top

A shoulder-down design has better stability in the shoulders, neckline, and sleeve caps. This makes it a good choice for nonresilient yarns, particularly those knit at a loose gauge. Shoulder-down designs are by far the trickiest top-down design to plan and knit, but they also yield the best fit.

When I first started knitting top-down, I knit everything as a raglan. Most sweaters work fine as raglans, and I knit them exclusively for almost 20 years. The first shoulder-down sweater I knit was a tank top, followed by a few saddle-shouldered sweaters with shoulder straps. Over time, I came to prefer the fit of shoulder-down sweaters and now knit more of them than anything else.

A plaid pattern, knit shoulder-down

I didn't learn about round-yoked sweaters until fairly late in the game. Traditionally, they're used in Icelandic sweaters, and I didn't do much color work. Now I use the round-yoked design any time I have a strong horizontal element in the yoke that I want to work continuously. They're somewhat more work to plan than a raglan, great fun to knit, and the resulting color work is usually quite popular.

The plaid design used in the previous sweater, modified to work with a round yoke

Top-Down Design Tutorial 3: Designing from the Yarn

Sometimes the yarn dictates the design for the sweater.

I have remnants of four colors of Amazon DK cotton: a variegated green/purple/blue, purple, a vibrant blue, and a light green. I don't have enough of any one of them to make a sweater, but I have enough of all four colors to make something smashing.

Slip-stitch color patterns (often called tweed patterns) are often an attractive way to combine different colors of yarn. Tweed patterns are also a good choice for cotton; the slip stitches make a firmer, less stretchy fabric than other kinds of stitch patterns, and so the tweed patterns help the finished garment hold its shape.

I first weighed my yarn to discover that I have 137 grams of the variegated yarn, 132 of the purple, 51 grams of the green, and 53 of the blue. I then weighed my needles so I could weigh my swatch as I went to determine the amount of yarn I'd need for a particular yardage in a particular stitch pattern.

I started swatching:

Left to right: Progressive Tweed, Syncopated Tweed, Three-Color Basket Tweed, Surprise Pattern.

The Progressive Tweed is a 4-color slip-stitch pattern. It uses even amounts of each of the four yarns. I thought I might be able to use it for part of the garment and make the rest in a two-color or one-color stitch pattern.

Progressive Tweed (14 grams)

32 stitches (5.675 inches) x 50 rows (5.5 inches)

My yardage calculations indicated that I have enough of the four colors to knit either the back or the front of a sweater, or perhaps to put some short sleeves on a sweater knit in another stitch pattern.

I decided that what I needed to do was to focus on 3-color tweed patterns, alternating the blue and green yarns for color C. First up was Syncopated Tweed:

Syncopated Tweed (6 grams)

32 stitches (6.25 inches) x 24 rows (3 inches)

Syncopated Tweed has a nice diagonal motion that I like. It also yields 20-25% more yardage than Progressive Tweed for the same amount of yarn. The variegated yarn also played well in this pattern.

Next up was Three-Color Basket Tweed, a pattern that intrigued me because of the long slip-stitches:

Three-Color Basket Tweed (6 grams)

33 stitches (6.5 inches) x 18 rows (1.675 inches)

I like this pattern, but it uses twice as much of color A as it does of colors B and C. The calculations and juggling required to make this work with these yarns seems like more trouble than it is worth. This stitch pattern also eats yarn, something I can't afford on this particular project.

On to Surprise Pattern:

Surprise Pattern (8 grams)

33 stitches (6.5 inches) x 24 rows (3.375 inches)

Just no.

At this point, even though I had several other candidates ripe for swatching (and a few that had been discarded after reading them carefully and realizing that they wouldn't work with the yarn), I decided that Syncopated Tweed had won the swatching contest and was The Stitch Pattern for this project.

I Dream of Jeanie with the Silver Stole

My Jeanie: Jaggerspun sport-weight Zephyr wool-silk yarn in a very light gray with a a metallic silver carry.

Here she is in all her glory:

The stole was designed for a thinner yarn than I chose, so I dropped the two side cables and used 4 intertwining cables for the mid-section instead of 6, for a stole of about the same width as the original design. I knit the length according to instructions. My Jeanie blocked to 20.5" x 82" (not counting fringe), about perfect for width and a good foot longer than specified by the design.

Jeanie was fun to knit, with the interesting exchange cables and the drop stitches and the edge stitches knit through the back loop. The pattern took longer to learn than usual, however. It just took time to figure out what the chart was trying to do.

One of the fun things about the design is dropping the stitches, both in the midst of knitting and at the very end. Here's the stole with the big ladders undropped:

And then dropped:

And another blocking picture:

The other thing I changed was to carry the exchange cables down into a fringe instead of finishing with a plain cable knit sideways. I like the way this worked with the overall design, and I also like the way it looks when the stole is worn.

Top-Down Hanover

This is my top-down adaptation of Jean Frost's Hanover sweater from her Jackets book.

I re-drafted the sweater so it was top-down and suited the Peace Fleece I wanted to use. I added bust darts and waist shaping to suit my figure.

I also re-drafted the leaf motif for the waist and sleeves. Unfortunately, the top-down version really didn't yield the same result, so I ripped out the bottom of the body and sleeves and re-knit them bottom-up.

Grafting the leaf motif-bottom onto the top-down top in shadow rib was a bit hair-raising, but I managed to do it without mishap.

When I first look at something I've grafted, I can always see the line, but I eventually forget that it's there and never notice it when I'm washing or wearing the sweater.

I finished my Hanover the first week of May and have been squabbling with 16-year-old Matisse over who gets to wear it when, but I haven't gotten around to putting the zipper in yet.

It'll be so awesome with a zipper.

Top-Down Design Tutorial 2: Whatcha gonna knit?

Sometimes it starts with a vision:

I want to knit my daughter a sweater that's kind of like a Napoleonic-era British naval captain's jacket but not nearly so fussy.

I want to knit my daughter a sweater that's like a 1940's suit jacket with a kicky peplum and cables down the front.

I want to knit a comfy zippered sweatshirt that doesn't fit like a sack.

I want to knit my grandmother an elegant tailored jacket that's suitable for the weather in Arizona.

And sometimes it starts with the yarn.

What shall I make with this nubbly blue linen that I got on sale and which has now aged nicely in my stash?

Has the time come to knit up this delicious gray tweed Peace Fleece? If so, what shall I knit with it?

It amazes me how hard it can be to get the right sweater idea together with the right yarn. I mean, it's all just yarn, right? You should be able to find the right kind of yarn in just the shade of the right color to match the sweater vision dancing in your brain. And you should be able to imagine the exact sweater that will make a particularly luscious yarn sing.

In real life, though, it doesn't work like that. Finding the right yarn with the right properties for the project I have in mind is amazingly difficult, considering all the yarns out there in the world. Finding the right project for a particular type of yarn can be equally difficult. Once the yarn and the pattern come together, the stitch pattern still needs to be worked out. Yarn, design, and stitch patterns all need to come together into one living, breathing whole.

When I look through yarn catalogs or knitting magazines, the yarn and the projects often seem mismatched. Sometimes, the poor yarn has been knit too tightly (so it can't breathe) or too loosely (so it loses its personality). Sometimes the yarn is being asked to do something that cotton or wool simply can't do well. Sometimes the stitch pattern doesn't work with the yarn; sometimes the yarn can't stand up to the design; sometimes the mix of yarn, stitch pattern, and design is just too much.

Not only does the yarn need to suit the design, but the yarn and the design also need to suit the prospective wearer. I can't count the number of times a knitter has come up to me, admired one of my children's sweaters, and then sighed to me, "But how do you get them to wear them?"

That usually isn't a problem. I have trouble getting the boys not to drag their sweaters through the dirt, stretch out the necks of their sweaters, and just please stop growing so fast so I don't have to lengthen the arms on that sweater again. I don't, however, have any problem getting them to wear their sweaters. They love them, even the shapeless dishrag of a sweater that I made out of the nubbly blue linen and wish I could bury somewhere far far out of sight.

This knitter takes dictation. I don't knit my children the sweaters I want them to wear; I knit them the sweaters they ask me to knit. If this means sweaters with the Linux Tux or a unicorn on the front, so be it. If this means a sweater in dishwater-purple and a zipper, I can handle that. If this means that I have to rip out the fancy color work in the yoke because the child in question can't stand that particular shade of gold, to the frog pond it is.

So, basically, design isn't about me at all. It's about the fiber, the wearer, and the purpose of the sweater. What is the sweater going to be asked to do? Where is it going to be asked to go?

I want my sweaters to look natural, inevitable, almost as if they just grew on the back of the wearer. I want them to fit their jobs, to do what sweaters are supposed to do. I don't want them to scream "I'm a terrific sweater! Look at me!"

I want them to whisper it.

Top-Down Design Tutorial 1: Measuring Up

I knit sweaters differently from everyone I know. I knit them in one piece, top-down. Lots of people knit raglan sweaters this way, but I knit every sweater like this: raglans, sweaters with set-in sleeves, tank tops, shells, and saddle-shouldered sweaters.

I like to knit from the top so I can try the sweater on as it progresses. I find it easier to get the sleeve and body length right knitting from the top, and I love the fact that I can easily lengthen or shorten the body or the sleeves if I want to.

I also design all of my own sweaters and/or adapt designs so that I can knit them top-down, in the yarn I want to use, to fit the body of the intended wearer. If I'm going to spend many hours of my life making a sweater, I want it to look and feel good.

Someone recently sent me email asking me to teach her how I knit the way I do. I've idly considered writing a "designing sweaters to be knit from the top-down so they fit nicely" tutorial, and now I'm going to actually try to do it.

The first step when designing a sweater is to catch your intended wearer (hereafter referred to as "victim") and measure her body.

I'm going to be heretical here for a moment and say that, if you are the intended wearer, you can measure yourself. You don't need to wait for an obliging friend or impatient spouse or child to do it for you. You can get accurate-enough measurements wielding your own tape measure.

The measurements you need to take might include:

Chest width: the distance across the chest at the underarm, above the bust. This is one of the most important measurements for the entire sweater. If the chest and the shoulders fit, the sweater will look and feel good. If the sweater is wider than the chest width, it will look sloppy. If the sweater is narrower than the chest width, it will pull across the shoulders. (On me: 13")

Back of neck: the distance across the back of the neck of the sweater, from the point where neck definitively turns into shoulder on each side. This is wider than the actual neck of the person. If you can't visualize this, measure across the back neck of a top that fits well. (On me: 5.5-6.5")

Shoulder width: the distance from the edge of the neck to the most sticky-up bone at the start of the shoulder. This does not include the ball of the shoulder, which is covered by the sleeve, just the part of the shoulder that will be covered by the body of the sweater. (On me, 3-3.5")

Slope of shoulder: the amount that the shoulders drop vertically in their run. Run a tape measure down the spine and eyeball a line to the top of the shoulder. (On me, about 2")

Underarm depth: the distance from the back neck to the true underarm. Run a tape down the spine and eyeball a line to the underarm. If measuring yourself, collarbone to middle of the armpit works pretty well. This is one of the most important measurements you can make. A lot of raglans place the underarm too deep, which leads to a sloppy fit. (On me, 7.5")

Underarm width: the distance across the armpit. This is used to determine how many stitches to cast on at the underarm. (On me, 3")

High chest: a tape wrapped tightly around the body at the underarms, above the bust. Don't skip this one if you want a good fit. This is a truer measure of yoke size than the full bust. (On me, 33")

Full bust: a tape wrapped snugly around the fullest part of the chest, over the bra. A must measurement for women, but not for men or children. Not-so-busty women can skip this one, too. (On me, 37")

Rib cage: a tape snugly around the rib cage under the bust. Another measurement for women, but not men or children. (On me, 33")

Bust tip: the distance between left bust tip and right bust tip (pretty much between the nipples. Used on women to place bust short rows. (On me, 8.5").

Vertical bust: the distance that the bust lifts the front of the sweater. You can either measure this by stretching a tape over the bust, stretching a tape over the same distance down the side of the body, and taking the different between the two (good for body-skimming sweaters) or wearing a loose t-shirt and measuring the actual difference between length of the part over the bust and the part on the side of the body. Also an important measure for those with pot bellies, since a pot belly can lift the front of a sweater much the same way a bust does. (On me, about 2")

Waist: wrap a tape snugly around the natural waist. Again, a measurement for women but not so important for slim men and children. Also a useful measurement for anyone with a pot belly.(On me, 30")

High hip: wrap a tape around the top of the hips, right over the hip bone. This is often a flattering length for women. (On me, 35")

Full hip: wrap a tape around the fullest part of the hips. A must if you're making a tunic-length or thigh-length garment. (On me, 38")

Full bust length: run a tape down the spine and measure to the full bust. This is likely to be a shaping maximum. (On me, 8")

Waist length: run a tape down the spine and measure to the natural waist. This is likely to be a shaping maximum or minimum spot. (On me, 16")

High hip length: run a tape down the spine and measure to the high hip. (On me, 20")

Full hip length: run a tape down the spine and measure to the fullest part of the hip. (On me, 24")

Body length: run a tape down the spine to the desired final sweater length.

Bicep: wrap a tape around the upper arm at the fullest point. (On me, 11")

Wrist: wrap a tape around the wrist. (On me, 6.5")

Sleeve length: run a tape from an inch below the underarm to the desired sleeve length for the sweater. You'll try on the sleeves anyway as you work, but this will give you a basis for planning sleeve decreases.