I may have over thought this week's pattern. I wanted to make a raglan-shaped baby's cardigan in garter stitch, knit from the center-left-front to the center-right-front.
Sounds easy, right?
Well, I got a bit involved in my math and decided that I needed 12 short rows to shape the body, but 15 to shape the sleeve. Mentally, divide each of the four raglan "seams" into a body side and a sleeve side. I wanted to make one side 12 rows deep, and the other side 15 rows deep. This serves two purposes. It slims the sweater body slightly and reduces the amount of fabric under the arms. I don't have a child to test for sizing, so I'm relying a little on the stretchiness of garter stitch to help the sweater fit a variety of sizes. It is up to the reader to determine if a slimmer body or less underarm fabric is really needed for a little baby. The sweater is about 19" around the chest, but, as usual, it could be sized up with a change in needle size or by adding more short-rows. There is also an optional collar or hood.
About Short Rows
A short row gets its name from the fact that you simply don't work an entire row. Instead, you turn back at some point, and start working back the way you came. By their nature, short-rows are going to introduce at least a small gap into your work. You are stacking at least one row on top of another right next to where you are not stacking these rows. I like to imagine the stitches as staggered Lego pieces. There are times, as when making my short-row slippers, that you don't need to wrap or do anything else to help close that gap. The project will be felted later, and they don't matter. For other times, you will want to close the gaps as well as possible. As far as I can tell, there are three major ways to do this. You can wrap stitches when you turn, create yarn overs when you turn, or use markers to help you pick up a purl bump from the back of the work and knit it with your live stitch.
Short rows are used for shaping your work in ways that can be subtle, sophisticated or just fun. The Sideways Shortrow Watch Cap was one of the first patterns I ever knit, and I still recommend it to new knitters. This link will take you to the KnitList, which, if you haven't seen it, is a real treasure-trove of knitting information.
If you don't like the stair-step look you sometimes get when shaping the tops of sweater shoulders by binding off, you can use short rows instead, to create a smoother line. Follow your pattern's instructions, but instead of binding off a certain number of stitches on each row, just turn when you reach that group of stitches, leaving them on the needle, and, when you are finished, bind off the whole row all at once. If you started with 100 stitches in your sweater back, and you were supposed to bind off by 5 stitches on each row for 4 rows, just knit 95 stitches, turn, purl 90 stitches, turn, knit 85 stitches, turn, purl 80 stitches. Then, bind off. The edge will be much more smooth.
You can also use short rows to add fullness to a specific part of a garment, where you may not want to just increase for that fullness. For example, you can make a sweater fit you very closely if you add short-rows in the bust area. This is sometimes described as working a knitted piece as if it were a sewn garment with darts. This can be intimidating to add to a sweater that is in the works. Usually this area is worked at a moment when you have already invested a lot of time and effort into your knitting. It may not be a moment when you find yourself in an experimental mood. What to do? Make a gauge swatch!
You first need to know how much extra fullness you want in your work. For a close-fitting sweater, you could measure your chest just under the underarms, and again at the most full area of your bust. You would start adding your short rows at the point just under the underarms. Lets say that the difference between the two measurements is 2 inches. You need to know your row gauge. Let's say, for this example, it is 7 rows to the inch. So, to add 2 inches of fullness to your sweater, you need to add 14 rows of knitting. You have a choice here, too. You could either work those 14 rows and pick up all of your gaps in one row. This, to the extent that you could see it, would look more like a traditional dart in a fitted, sewn, top. Or, you could work 7 rows that all get shorter, followed by 7 more that all get longer. This might be a little more subtle and give a rounder shape. But, it all depends on what you want and what works for you.
For a sweater, let's be more specific. Say that the gauge for a stockinette sweater is 5 stitches to the inch, and the circumference around the sweater (before we add the short rows) is 40 inches. That makes the sweater 200 stitches around. Since this extra fabric is for the front of the sweater, you would to place markers at the exact center of each underarm, so that there are 100 stitches in the front and 100 stitches in the back. We have already determined that we want 14 short rows total.
First short row: Knit 99 stitches. Turn, using the method of your choice to deal with gaps.
Second short row: Purl 98 stitches. Turn, using the method of your choice to deal with gaps.
Third short row: Knit 97 stitches. Turn, using the method of your choice to deal with gaps.
Continue in this pattern until you have worked 7 short rows (you will end on a knit row). Begin longer short rows.
First longer row: Purl 93 stitches. Turn, using the method of your choice to deal with gaps.
Second longer row: Knit 94 stitches. Turn, using the method of your choice to deal with gaps.
Third longer row: Purl 95 stitches. Turn, using the method of your choice to deal with gaps.
Continue until you have worked all 100 stitches. Resume knitting the rest of your sweater.
To make a gauge swatch to test this fit, you could cast on at least 14 stitches (21 stitches would give you an inch in the middle and two edge stitches), work for about an inch to get something to guide you, work the short rows, and see if it is deep enough. This would also give you a chance to see which method of short-row gap jumping works best for you, and how it behaves on both the left and right side of the work.
Or, if you are like me, you could come up with a way to make short rows mimic a raglan sleeve seam. Allow it to bother you for a few weeks, then publish it.
Short Row Variations
I was going to do tutorials about short rows, and then I found the ones already made by nonaKnits, also known as Carolyn. She gave me permission to link, so I will share those with you now.
The wrapped-stitch short row is the first one I ever found described anywhere. I liked it a great deal once I had learned to really look at my knitting. I have read that some people don't bother to pick up and knit the wraps when they are working in garter stitch. The wraps simply lie there, looking very much like purl bumps, and no one is the wiser. A drawback of this method is that it can be hard to tell where you are, until you get good at reading your work.
A tipster on Ravelry wrote: "In Germany short rows are often done by slipping the first stitch and then pulling the yarn back until the stitch lies as two strands on the right needle (actually the stitch below I guess). Those are later knit together. Easy, fast and invisible." I believe this is similar, if not identical, to the yarn-over short row technique described by nonaKnits here. I have not tried this method myself, but it looks promising.
Then, there are Japanese short rows. To do this, you need stitch markers or safety pins, as many as you have short-rows. In theory, you could work without pins, but it may be challenging to identify the correct loop to take when closing your gaps.
I used my version of Japanese short rows in this week's pattern. If you try it out, I hope you let me know what you think.
Links
nonaKnits Tutorials
Swatch Use Count
Number ten - to test how much ease you are adding with short rows.
