Remember that sweater dress I was working on so diligently until a month or so ago? Houston, we have an update!
When last we left our hero, I was confusing the hell out of myself with math, three-dimensional objects, and gauge. I still think that I was right at the basic level, in that I should have used my pre-blocked gauge to come up with my numbers for the yoke (whether or not those numbers were the right numbers remains a mystery), because my yoke decreases were spaced too far apart, based on the post-blocking gauge. OH, and the body is entirely too long.
When it’s not rolling up (it is entirely stockinette, after all), the body ends at my belly button. If you’re fuzzy on the definition of an empire waist which is what I was going for, that is not it. Ideally the seam between the bodice and the skirt would hit just under my bust, but as I also recently learned, a seamless yoke sweater’s depth is measured from the neckline to the sleeve join.
Typically, that means that you’d want to measure from the point where your collarbones meet, or somewhere on that “line”, down to just below your bust. All that fabric that you’re dealing with from the neck to the sleeve join has to cover a lot of strange bits on a body—shoulders, busts, scapulae.
Since I just learned this a few weeks ago, that’s not how I measured for my yoke (to avoid confusing the issue, I’m not going to explain how I did; let’s just say I’m glad that I can try on a seamless yoke as I go and leave it at that). I was constantly trying this on as I was knitting it, so I managed to work with the odd spacing of the decreases and knit the neckline the way I wanted. I worked some short-rows along the back neck to raise that and at the shoulders, right before I bound off, so hopefully it won’t get all Flashdance on me.
Apologies for the photos; the seasonal transition here has left very little light in the afternoons, and for whatever reason my camera lens did not want to focus with the remote. It may have been too dark, I don’t know.
Anyway, the next step is to soak the bodice as it is and see what happens to the fabric, then figure out where to “end” the bodice and rip out the cast on, then work back. And then there’s that pesky collar embellishment I’m still pondering.
