Three Heads are Better than One!

So, a few weeks ago Judie, Lynne and I got together to practice short-row shaping and try to understand the technique used in the Hoods Up! pattern.

Short-row shaping makes a nice neat line of stitches at the underarm or shoulder that improves the look and finish of a garment.  Take a few minutes and have a look at this video by Diana Sullivan that shows one method of short-row shaping for the shoulder.  When we cast off stitches at the shoulder to achieve the slope it creates "stair steps" that can be tricky to seam neatly.  With short-row shaping, there is a smooth line or curve that makes seaming easy.  This is particularly important with the Hoods Up! pattern as the seam is on the outside.

So the question that we were struggling with in order to understand short-row shaping was - why knit the hold stitches loosely and then do a chain cast off - why not just do a latch tool cast off?  Our approach - experiment!

The picture on the left is what happens when you latch tool cast off the stitches you have gradually put on hold over a number of rows.  The "purl bump" as I call it is on the right side (more about that later), and there is a hole where knitting across the back, above the underarm, resumes.  You can also see that the works draws in a little bit.







The picture here to the left shows the next slope that we did, using the chain cast off recommended in short-row shaping, but without manually knitting the short-rowed stitches loosely first.  This caused two problems - first it left the working yarn abandoned at the beginning of the row and not where we needed it to be.  Second, it caused a noticeable pucker and the edge is very tight, not really what you want at your underarm and also not consistent with the tension of the rest of the garment.






Let's go back to that purl bump created by the latch tool cast of for minute.  We did two smaller swatches cast off with the latch tool method in a contrast yarn so we could examine that a bit better.  The top swatch in the photo at right was how we would normally do a latch tool cast off, and indeed it shows as a purl bump on the right side.  Had I thought to flip the swatch over and show the "wrong" side, the white chain would be obvious.  The swatch on the bottom was done still with latch tool cast off, but trying to draw the yarn through the loops from front to back instead of back to front.  The chain was achieved, but it was a very awkward motion.   In the photo below you can see Lynne concentrating hard as Judie looks on.  As your intrepid reporter/photo journalist, I (Nancy), manage to stay behind the camera.

What on earth got us off on such a tangent, you might ask?  Well, for starters, that is pretty much what happens when the three of us are in the same room talking about knitting.  But also, Judie remembered seeing an article about this and had sent us the picture on the right a while back.  We do know that it is from the publication Machine Knitting Monthly but we aren't entirely sure which issue - possibly March 2014 though.  (If anyone knows or can confirm that please let us know in the comments below!)

Even though the illustration is hand knitting and a crochet hook, it could be translated to machine and a latch tool, but we'd love to see the original article (the snippet above is all we have).  Trying to get the "chain" on the "right side" was tricky and meant that the working yarn did not go around the gate pegs.  I can't even explain it - you would just have to experiment like we did.

The other reason we ended up on such a side road is because after we did the big pink swatch at the top of this article it became evident very quickly that the manually knit loose stitches and chain cast off that Mary Anne describes in the short-rowing technique is definitely the correct method with the best results.   And this will lead me nicely into the next blog entry where I tell you all about knitting the first piece of the hoodie - the back!  And short-rowing for the underarms and shoulders.  Watch for that entry very shortly.

And please, send us your comments, feedback, praise, etc.   Have you started your hoodie?  We know Pat has and thank her very much for the questions which we hope the next post will help with.

Nancy