The siren song of the Cable Down Raglan in the latest IK has been calling to me since I first saw the design a few weeks ago, and I finally gave in earlier this week. After weighing the choices available at Three Bags Full, I selected Lang Soft Shetland, a yarn that is new to me and to the store. It's lives up to its name, being much softer than any other shetland wool I've experienced, and is allegedly machine washable.
After hunkering down with the pattern, yarn, and my new Knit Picks needles, I quickly found gauge on a size 7 and began. The sweater, as its name indicates, is knit from the top down, and I soon found that I was unsatisfied with the way the raglan increases are worked in the design. The pattern calls for bar increases (knit in the front & back of the stitch) on either side of the markers placed at the raglan lines.
The bar increase, while being probably the easiest to work, is my least favorite increase. Because you end up with a little bar there, marring the beauty of your lovely stockinette stitch. Also, because you can only make them in one direction, at least as far as I know - that is to say, you can only make the bar appear on the left part of the two stitches, not on the right. I have a thing about mirroring increases and decreases. When I knit sleeves, for example, and they tell you to increase at each end of every however many rows, I work a regular make 1 (picking up the strand between the stitches and knitting into the back of it) at one end - a left-slanting M1; and I work a right-slanting M1 at the other end by picking up the strand from the back instead of the front, and then knitting into the front of it.
Anyway, I did try to just knit the sweater as the pattern suggested, but found I just couldn't stand those bar increases. After about 8 or 10 rows I ripped back to the neck edging to try again.
Next I experimented with lifted increases. I thought these might be good, since you can make them in either direction and you can make them in either purl or knit, which is important for this pattern since half the increases are on a knit background and half on a purl. I think lifted increases are highly underrated, and I recommend trying them if you've never used them before.
But not for this sweater. Nope, didn't like them at all. More ripping back.
Then I remembered a top-down raglan that I worked on back in my School Products days, a little baby cardi that I knit under the direction of Berta Karapetyan, designer and old school Russian knitter. For that sweater, we started out using M1 increases on either side of a center stitch that would create the pretty raglan lines. But having those M1s in such close proximity pulled the center stitch so that on every other row (the increase rows), the stitch was tiny. It was unattractive. So Berta had me do the increases by making a backward loop on the needle, like you would for that simple cast on that many of us learned at the beginning of our knitting careers. You can make the loop either way, for directional decreases just like a like, and it wouldn't pull like the M1.
This, I figured, had to be the solution. And it worked... eventually. See, I have this problem with transitions from knit to purl. It doesn't happen with purl to knit transitions, but for some reason on knit to purl transitions, my stitches on either side of the knit-purl line come out really loose. It's something that's been bugging me for years, and after trying many ways of tightening up those stitches, I recently made some headway into solving it by wrapping the stitches in the other direction.
So here's what that experiment yielded:
See how on the raglan to the left of the cable, the stitches are really loose at the top? Then they get better? Well, after I finally figured out how to do it right, I decided, yup, to rip back and do it right from the beginning.
Now I'm finally on track. I think. At least, I'm not ripping back to the neck again. Sheesh.
A few weeks ago I finished my Rowan Fern sweater - this is the one I knit twice after knitting the wrong size the first time. (I've always been a cock-eyed optimist.) Here is Take 2 (click for bigger).
