Monthly Archives: January 2012

I’m up to the front halves of the Boyden cardi. Each half is worked on it’s own after the underarm divide and then the back is worked last. I knit the plain front first since it was easiest. Everything went smoothly although I did add one extra decrease to the armscye to make the front a bit more narrow by the time it got to the shoulder. One extra k2tog is nothing in a field of stockinette.

But on the cabled front it’s a wee bit trickier because the cable is snug up against the shoulder shaping by the top of the work. An extra decrease on the shoulder edge means I need to nudge my cable chart over by one stitch – preferably WITHOUT ripping the whole thing back again!

Good news is moving the cable panel over is really pretty simple. Let me show you my neat trick.* First I will point out that my goal here is to have the correct number of stitches when I get to the top of the shoulder. I’m fudging the decrease for the sample to create the same look that the final pattern will give in a much more straightforward way.

Yes in an ideal world all the decreases would happen in a neat line along the edge of the armscye. But this is not an ideal situation. Instead of working the last decrease at the armscye edge where it would start eating into the cable itself, I worked the decrease in the stockinette stitches immediately the right of the cable. And then I hid this decrease under the cable crossover that happens at that point so in the photos you won’t see a random decrease breaking up that field of stitches.

Where the chart calls for a 2×2 cable cross I slip THREE purl stitches behind the cable instead:

(yes, I’m cabling without a cable needle, if you’re confused pretend those 3 stitches on the left needle are actually on a cable needle)

And then, I knit two of them together:

Which leaves me with the correct number of stitches between my cables in the chart! And the correct number of stitches on the armscye edge. AND the correct number in the stockinette portion of the shoulder. Everything is correct. I just used a sneaky alternative method of getting there. If you were inspecting the garment in hopes of reverse engineering it you might notice that there are only 5 decreases along the armscye edge where there ought to be 6. But for everyone else’s eyes this fudge is completely invisible! And completely inconsequential if you’re going to be knitting from the pattern.

*please excuse the crappy cell phone photos. The lighting on the bus is not great. At least I was doing this in the morning not in the dark of the evening commute.