As a designer, I often find that I am at war with myself over how to proceed. That is because my (impatience) process is much more organic than disciplined. Although I may have a concept in mind, it usually isn’t fully formed. This frequently results in ripping back or even starting over. This certainly has been the case with my Capstone project.
I had been on track to finish up this summer, and my highly textured sweater was really looking lovely — except where I had been forced to rip back in a couple of places and found that the yarn wasn’t holding up well. That suggested this sweater wasn’t going to wear well.
The seam for the textured sweater also bothered me, and I thought I might have to add i-cord to disguise the join, and that seemed like a whole additional world of pain.
Bulky seam and fuzzy yarn
Chart for Plan B 
Swatch 
And another swatch
So I went on to Plan B, and what started out as a reasonably straightforward shawl-collared cardigan suddenly bloomed with two-color cables, intarsia, lace — out of control! I wanted then (as now) to have the sweater be a true expression of my skill as an expert knitter.
All of this required a considerable sit-down with myself to “talk” through the issues, and I came to the conclusion that I needed to focus on the basic purpose of the Capstone project: make a sweater that is impeccably knit, has set-in sleeves, is seamed (rather than knit in the round), and fits me perfectly. There is no requirement for over-the-top creativity. As the former program director liked to say, “this is A sweater, not THE sweater.” Simple actually is better.
I’m (of course) not willing to let it go at that. As I talked this over with my mentor, Beth Altimari, I described to her the process I had gone through to figure out how to work the shawl collar at the same time as the body of the fronts. My reason for doing that rather than picking up stitches around the front opening was that I wanted to use seed stitch. In order to increase the size of the collar around the neck so that it would turn over nicely, short rows would be necessary. I wasn’t happy with how that looked in seed stitch, and was looking for another way.
As you can see from the swatch above, it wasn’t a straight-forward knit. The basic idea is that instead of creating a slope on the front of the sweater to reduce the number of stitches between the front opening and the shoulder seam, you decrease the sweater body and then add to the collar. The goal is to create a straight line up the front of the garment while making the collar increase along a diagonal line. For every sweater I found constructed that way, the technique was to work across the collar stitches (in this instance in seed stitch) and then add one of the body stitches to the collar where you ordinarily would have the slope decrease. When you get to the shoulder seam you work the bind-offs as usual, and then continue working the collar stitches to be sewn to the back of the neck. Here the patterns I found said to do a 3-needle bind-off. My preference is to graft the seam so that in effect there is no seam at all.
It was just one of those days where inspiration literally hit me in a flash. The key was in keeping the number of stitches the same across the front while both decreasing the number of stitches in the body and increasing those in the collar. With intarsia, using the “accepted” method produced a stair step that wasn’t attractive. HOWEVER, if you increase at the edge of the collar right before you change colors in the intarsia, and then do a decrease 1 stitch in from the color change (in the body), it looks visually the same as a collar picked up along the front edge.
Granted, I’m probably not the first person to think of this idea, but since I haven’t seen it elsewhere, I’ll claim it as an “unvention.”
[Unvention is the name I’ve seen other knitters give to innovations they can’t prove have never been done before.]
I also allowed myself to be convinced that this bolder color combination is more reflective of my personality than the grey and light blue. So we’re back to plan B (again), and I’m casting on with much more confidence than before. No cables. No lace. Just a simple cardigan with a clever collar. Maybe my new favorite sweater.
Do it yourself!
Just a quick note about this design. You can adapt it to any pattern for a v-neck cardigan knit in pieces. When you cast on for the fronts, add the number of stitches to the front at the center line to equal the width of the band + body on the sweater from the finished schematic. Mine provided for a 2″ button band, so I needed to add 8 stitches to each front. It’s easier to work seed stitch over an uneven number, so I added 9 to bring it to 9 for the front/collar bands.
Work the bottom edge in seed stitch to the correct depth for the pattern ribbing. If you are using two colors, make sure that the first row of the sweater body is a wrong side row. That means you will purl back to the center with the color for the body of the sweater, and then work the button band in seed stitch.
Watch for the row where you begin the decreases for the front slope. For that, and every front decrease row, you will work an increase on the last seed stitch (KFB or KBF), change to the body color, K1 in the body color, then make the decrease with the next two stitches. When you get to the shoulder bind-offs, discontinue making increases to the collar.
The shoulder bind-offs are usually done across two rows with a plain row in between. On the second bind-off row, do not bind off the last stitch of the shoulder Instead, work it together with the first stitch of the collar (either K2tog, or SSK — or the same decrease on done with purl stitches depending on whether you are on the right or wrong side). Make sure this decrease places the body sweater stitch under the collar stitch so that it won’t show (I made the wrong choice in the swatch above and it shows too much for me). The reason for the decrease stitch rather than bind-off is to prevent a hole between the two colors. Also, in working intarsia, the secret to a good join between the colors is to always bring the new color under the old color and keep the tension a little tight at that intersection.
If you have any problems adapting your sweater pattern, let me know by email and I’ll do my best to help.