I keep procratinating with this pattern. I have had my yarn now for weeks but have yet to knit my first stitch! Why? Because when I read the pattern, when I get up to the part where I have to do the neck line ribbing I get totally confused. Everything else is totally clear and perfectly understandable.
Is there anyone out there who would be willing to take me under their wing and be my personal tutor?
I even agonized over what yarn to buy for this top so much that I roped my LYS owner, Margie Morse Pulley into the project. (Yes, THAT Margie, the knitting book author!) So if I don't get started my yarn is just going to sit there and gather dust.
Help!
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I had the same confusion , you are not alone. I kept reading it over and over thinking "huh"? My advice to you is just to start. It becomes clearer as you go along. I promise! Basically, you make a tube, then you make sleeves ( I used 2 circs) and then you knit the top of sleeve, then tube, then other sleeve, then tube,and all is magically attached. Then you knit for a bit. The band ( this is where I got confused) is knit seperately, it's 11 stitches wide to be exact and after you knit for 5 inches it is attached to the body with the last stitch of the band and a stitch on the body using ssk.
(There are a lot of posts about how to make it all fit just right, Im planning on not doing any increases in the body and then adding the band at every row, but there are easier ways it sounds like). Hope that helps a bit. =)
If all this was just more confusing stick with my 1st suggestion, START!, and don't worry about it until you get there.
That's the one bad thing about reading patterns beforehand. Sometimes they just don't make sense. haha :) If you just start, you'll probably find that it makes sense when you get there. You may have to read the directions a few hundred times to make it right in your head, but once you have the actual work there to look at, it should be easier. :) me? i'm just staring at approximately 5" of ribbing right now. :)
what happens is that you are actually knitting the band perpendicularly to the rest of the body. so picture that you have the body and sleeves all made, three tubes forming one big tube, right? now you're knitting a separate little strip to start a tab that will go through the buckle--that's the five inches jenna has you start with. when you've knitted that, you have to attach it to the body. to do that, you pick up a stitch just behind where you're going to want the buckle to go (because the tab you've just knitted will poke through the buckle, right? still with me?), and knit a row of the band. this row attaches the band to the sweater, lengthens the band by one row, binds off the first stitch of the body of the sweater, and goes *away* from the sweater body.
in order to continue lengthening the band and binding off another stitch of the sweater body, though, you have to get to the body--right now you're 11 stitches away at the far edge of the band. so you have to rib back to the sweater body first. (remember this row--i'm going to bring it up again later.)
so after you rib back to the sweater body, you just pick up that next stitch and repeat what you just did. and repeat that a zillion times until you're all the way around the sweater, thereby lengthening the band, binding off the stitches, and attaching the band as you go. when you finish, you attach the buckle to the end and loop your tab through.
now back to all those rows in between that return you to the sweater. because every time you bind off a stitch of the body you're also having to add a row to get back and pick up the next one, you're doubling the number of stitches that go around the yoke in one row. this means that if the yoke didn't already stay on snugly before you started your neckband, it's REALLY not going to fit now--because you've doubled its size! so this is why so many people find that doing a row or two of decreases before they start the neckband helps the fit so much. there may be other fit adjustments out there of which i'm not aware, and other forces at work that i don't understand--i'm a relatively new knitter--but having made this sweater once, this is just my take on it.
i hope that helps!
What everyone said. :) I did a quickie photo illustration for the neckband construction because I also had a bit of confusion reading the pattern.
I say just cast on and start. Once you have something tangible, it might be easier to picture the finishing touches of the pattern. Good luck!
I'm about to start the neckband myself, and all of your comments are immensely helpful.
thank you everyone!!
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