And It Grew

The linen tee design is progressing apace! And oh, look—it has sleeves now!

So far, astonishingly, no fiascoes have broken out. I have had to recalculate armhole and neck numbers (because, erm, I’m new at this), but I’m good to go, and thankfully I haven’t had to rip and reknit anything. While the trend is towards top-down sweaters, bottom-up was definitely the right choice for this tee—I was able to do minimal calculations before getting started on the body, and then do the math for the fiddly bits in between knit sessions.

As you can see, it’s going to be a raglan! I’m hoping the lace sleeve cap will taper over the shoulder and towards the neck, and create some eye-catching detail there. Originally I thought the tee would have to be knit in pieces and seamed because the number of decreases was different for the sleeve vs. the body, so I knit an entire sleeve including the cap, separate from the body. The edges ended up being a bit sloppy and I’d made some mistakes in calculating the decrease rate, so I put the sleeve in timeout to work on the body.

When I went back to my spreadsheets, I decided to bite the bullet and write the pattern seamlessly, using compound shaping to spread out the two different numbers of decreases smoothly. I’m much happier with the result (and super, super happy that I don’t have to seam anything…) Doing the tee seamlessly also give me a little space to make a fun detail out of the shoulder decreases, which is a big bonus.

I’m estimating this tee will be done sometime next week, at which point I’ll do a photo shoot and send the pattern over to the tech editor. Once that’s done, it’ll be time to call test knitters, so keep your eyes peeled if you’re interested!