Knitting update!
Over the past week, I have made a lot of progress on the sweater! I am through the collar and am now starting on the yoke which is the top part of the sweater. This is one of the trickier sections of the sweater because you have to use two different stitches and alternate rows between just knitting and adding increases. I used the video linked below to learn how to do the stitches I didn’t know how to do. There are a few different materials that you need for this sweater which is something that I want to focus on this week.
Look at my progress!
For this sweater, you need two different sizes of needles and also two different lengths of cords. To make this sweater and other sweaters in this style you need to do something called knit in the round, which means you are not knitting back and forth on straight needles, but using needles that are connected through a cord or cable. By using this kind of needle you can work on a garment and make it as a tube rather than making individual pieces and stitching them together. For this sweater, you don’t only use one set of needles and one cable though, there are two different needle sizes and two different cable lengths. You begin on a smaller needle size to create the collar and then increase your needle size to create the rest of the sweater. The same thing happens with the cable length, you start with a smaller cable length but as you knit the yoke and add stitches you then transfer to a longer cable to make room for all the stitches. You have to be aware of when you need to switch and then also use specific tools to change needle size and cable length. There is this pin that comes with the cable that you have to use to tighten and loosen the cable from the needles to make sure that they stay attached. Which is an interesting piece of technology that someone had to think of and then create to solve this issue that people were having where the cable was getting loose from the needles and then the yarn was getting caught in between the needles and the cable. It is really cool to being using all this technology and these tools that have been developed over centuries and hold that history in your hands.