February Jacket Proress Report

I am making good progress on my February Jacket. It looks like my idea of casting on the additional body/sleeve stitches and continuing to knit the body of the sweater instead of knitting the sleeves is going to work.

That being said, I have still continued to stew on how to prevent picking up those 28 stitches.

I thought back to an old KPS neck down pattern for a raglan sleeve sweater and think I have another alternative to this jacket. I believe I can further increase the yoke of the sweater to accommodate 8 additional repeats of the gull stitch pattern and simply place the sleeves on a holder without having to pick up and knit the 14 (or 2 pattern repeats). The reason it will require 8 additional repeats instead of 4 (2 for each sleeve) is due to the 14 stitches cast on on each sleeve are knit for both the body and the sleeve, essentially the sweater is sharing the cast on row to create 8 repeats (4 for the sleeves and 4 for the body).

But I digress, the math is thus: 8 repeats equals 56 stitches. To increase the yoke, I will have to go from 140 stitches to 196. That's a ratio of 140/196; factor by 28 and you get a simplified ratio of 5/7. That means I need to increase every 5 stitches of the original 140 yoke stitches to 7. I plan to do this by *k2,m1,k3,m1; repeat from * to last 4 stitches of the garter stitch border. This will likely require I knit an additional 4 ridges of garter stitch for the yoke, but that shouldn't really have too much of an impact on the finished jacket.

Overall, I believe this modification will give a more flared body with the sleeves being a little less perpendicular. I will be sure to post pictures once I cast it own and also share results. The worst that could happen is it won't work, and if so all is not lost: we still have Elizabeth Zimmermann's original design that we know works.