I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun with my Top-Down Unpattern! Usually, I find reading a new pattern rather intimidating, but in this case, I get to play a fill-in game. The pattern is filled with blank spaces that allow you to dream up the ideal sweater within the constraints of a top-down, set-in sleeve garment.
Today, my swatch
had dried, so I was able to figure out my stitch and row gage, both circular
and flat, which were suprisingly similar. Then the fun began! Following my guide, I selected my template
garments from my knitting wardrobe and measured them. Since it is a top-down
pattern, I had to start by figuring out all the neck and shoulder measurements
that I wanted, and it was a liberating experience!
Usually, when I'm knitting with a pattern, I feel I’m kind of flying
by the seat of my pants—most patterns aren’t written exactly to my
measurements, so I have to modify them as I go along. This time, I was prompted
to reflect on exactly the look I wanted, which was interesting in itself. I tried on different V-neck sweaters to determine
how wide I wanted the back neck opening to be, and I compared my shoulder- to
shoulder measurement to the one I had knitted into some favorite sweaters with
set-in sleeves. Not surprisingly, the ones that fitted me the best had the same
shoulder-to shoulder measurement as my actual body, as in this retro sweater:
Usually, it
is a huge pain to achieve the correct shoulder measurements, because I am
knitting from the bottom up. Most standard sweater patterns, like the one
above, aren’t written to sit right on my shoulders, which means that as I go
along, following the pattern, I have to make the armholes deeper than written
to get a smaller shoulder to shoulder measurement so that it will sit right on
my shoulders. Even though I knit this sweater in an extra small, I still had to reduce far more in the armhole than the pattern called for to get my shoulder-to-shoulder measurement of fourteen inches. This modification created more problems
for me later on with the fit of the sleeves, which were written for the original armhole dimensions! But this time, I am using a flexible pattern that allows me to program my perfect measurement into the
template, and cast on exactly the number of stitches that will get me that. I
am so excited, I am off to start the shoulders now!!