After all that color swatching, I ended up with a very simple color scheme for the yoke for my Zinnia Tank. After realizing that the Teal was creating an unwanted distraction in the background between the flowers, I tried adding space between the flowers, and then moving the stripes of Teal to different places, but eventually I realized that the Teal just stood out too much against the other colors to stay in the background. So I ended up removing the Teal completely from the center of the yoke.
However, I kept thinking about how nice the Teal looked within the centers of the flowers (just not in the spaces between them). So I tried duplicate stitching over the Lilac with the Teal, and I liked the results a lot-- to my eye the spots of Teal unify the whole yoke and tie it in to the body.
For this tank, the yoke is done first, and then stitches are picked up around its lower edge and worked down for the body, so I couldn't move on until the yoke was finished. Once I finally got the yoke done, the only other tricky part was the short rows that shape the front and back to the yoke's bottom edge.
The decreases that shape a knitted yoke are usually evenly distributed, which means that the yoke wants to be round. But since the upper chest and shoulders form more of a narrow oval, when worn the yoke also takes on an oval shape, making the neckline wide and shallow (as in the above photo of my Renee Pullover). For the Zinnia Top, I wanted more of a deep round neck, so I had to change the orientation of the oval from side-to-side to front-to-back-- which I did with short rows. The short rows form triangles of fabric on either side of the upper chest and back; without them, the fabric of the body would have pulled the yoke into that wide, shallow arc seen above. And making the front neck drop deeper than the back? That was a matter of sliding the yoke forward, then adjusting the lengths of the body portions of the armholes to keep the yoke positioned where I wanted it.
After the armholes, it was just a matter of a little waist shaping, some mindless TV knitting, and I was done with the sample! The pattern is now ready to be tech edited, so I hope to have it available for purchase very soon.
P.S. It's not that noticeable, but in the top two photos, the background is blurry-- and it didn't start out that way. Yes, I finally realized that you can use Photoshop to blur the background while keeping the subject in focus. Since I now shoot most of my photos with an iPhone, I'm really looking forward to using this technique for the modeled photos for the pattern.
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