Knitting -- bottom-up raglan

I won't be posting Sunday, the first day of Passover, so I thought I would put this out there today

Some time back I gave hints on working a top-down raglan jumper, which is good for using up leftover yarn.

Bottom-up raglan is good for yoke sweaters. The increases working top down leave fairly obvious traces, and have to be coordinated with the ribbing of the neck to look neat and tidy. Working a motif across the increases can be funky unless the pattern is specifically designed to work with a top-down raglan. In a bottom-up raglan, you do invisible decreases at strategic rounds and then one or two final decrease rounds above the pattern to fit the neck.

You will need a circular needle with a 24 inch tether for the body and one with at least a 32 inch tether for when you join the sleeves on. You need DP needles to start each sleeve and a circular with a 16 inch tether for when you have too many sleeve stitches for your DPs.

Work the body normally to the armpits. At the back middle, start working in the 32 inch circular; when you get to the left side, put the stitches of the first armpit on a holder.

Now knit one sleeve to the armpit, bottom up, and put the stitches of the armpit on a holder. Now pick up the rest of the sleeve stitches with the 32 inch circular needle.

Work across the body and put the armpit stitches on the other side on a holder.

Work the other sleeve like the first one and put the free stitches onto the 32 inch needle.

At this point you have to deal with two things.

One is that you now have as many as 480 stitches to work with. It’s heavy. You need strong hands even if you are using fingering weight yarn.

Second, the stitches at the armpits are tight. They have a habit of getting dropped. Work carefully at the armpits for 4 rows, making sure not to miss any stitches that drop.

Then decrease evenly around so you end up with a multiple of the number of stitches at the bottom of the pattern where it is the widest. If you have a yoke pattern, decrease where the pattern indicates from here on out, using a SSPO.

If you are not working a pattern, use the number of stitches left, the number of stitches you want in the neck, and the number of rows from here to the neck to figure out how many decrease rows you need and how many stitches you have to decrease. I keep telling you, knitting requires math.

For example, when I use fingering weight for myself, sleeves have 120 stitches of which 16 are the armpit, and the body has 300 stitches, 14 of which on each side are armpits. (The difference in stitch numbers helps loosen things up, making dropped stitches less likely.)

When I have sleeves and body on the same needle, I have 480 stitches on the needle. In the 5^th round, I decrease every 12 stitches for 24 stitches lost. I need 65 rounds between armpit and neck, and 132 stitches at the neck. The math says to repeat the 12-stitch decrease round every 4 rounds. The last round before the neck ribbing has to have no decreases and be 132 stitches around so the last decreases should be no higher than the next to last round. A mid-back elevation goes before the last decreases. Knit the armpits together and close off the cuffs, tie in the tails of yarn and you're done.

The Periwinkle pattern on DROPS is a bottom-up raglan.  I also found a bottom-up raglan on Dale Garn (409-04). Both are something like the floral pattern on the Lofoten Yarn website.

This yoke is 60 rows high and used about 220 yards of the blue fingering weight yarn. If you are knitting for a chest size less than 40 inches, you'll need less yarn for the yoke. Also those two dark bands between the little bottom motif and the floral, between the floral and the top motif, have no decreases in them. You could leave out some of those rounds if you have less than 220 yards of your second color; to get the yoke the right height you would work more of the white between the yoke and neck. 

You could also use up multiple colors of leftover yarn in either Nordic or Fair Isle motifs. So once again, raglan is your go-to technique for using leftovers.

If you want to design your own pattern for the yoke, go to the Periwinkle pattern and make a reproduction of their chart -- blank of course -- in your spreadsheet, including the bars where the decreases go. This requires a multiple of 20 stitches where you START decreasing and comes out to a multiple of TEN stitches at the top. Plug in blocks for your design, check the look in a mockup in the spreadsheet, and away you go. Also notice that the chart for the smaller sizes will be useful with worsted or bulky yarn, while the chart for the larger sizes works well with fingering and sport/DK.

I suspect that working bottom up raglan in brioche is a good idea. Working in two colors, be careful that the body and sleeves have their armpits on the same half of the pattern so that the join doesn’t wreck things. And notice that, since you are putting the sleeve stitches on the same needle with the body stitches, you continue working in the round so you don't have to worry about purling.

You think I've done it all now? Nope. I still have some major projects to go.