Knititude

Bethel Tank

The Bethel Tank is one of the three projects in Knitted Tanks and Tunics that uses more than one color of yarn (the others are the Roanoke Tank and the Beverly Tank)-- but the only one that uses the stranded or Fair Isle technique. In this technique, many colors may be used, but traditionally only two colors are used in any one row or round.

For stranded designs, the color choices are all-important: when combining yarn colors, a particular color displays very differently depending on the adjacent hues. Traditionally, Fair Isle knitters use a fingering (#1 super fine), Shetland wool yarn such as Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift, which comes in over 200 colors! The Brown Sheep Company makes a similar yarn, Nature Spun, from U.S. sourced and spun wool, which comes in over 80 colors, but since Bethel is primarily a warm-weather garment, I decided to use Brown Sheep's Cotton Fleece yarn for this project. Cotton Fleece is 80% cotton and 20% merino wool AND it comes in over 60 colors. It's also a borderline DK/worsted (#3 light/#4 medium) weight, so it knits up much faster than a fingering weight yarn. And finally, I was already familiar with Cotton Fleece, having used it for the Sherwood child's pullover, one of my first published designs, back in 2006.

I used Brown Sheep color cards to choose the yarn colors, found a few suitable stranded motifs in Alice Starmore's Charts for Color Knitting (highly recommended!), and then I did a lot of swatching, arranging the colors in different ways. I ended up with two favorite motifs, and I went with the one that I thought would have more of the effect of a necklace in the finished design.

Bethel's stranded yoke is worked in the round from the bottom up, and then stitches are picked up from the lower (cast-on) edge and worked down for the body. I used short rows to shape the top of the front and back along the edge of the yoke, so that it keeps its natural round shape. One of the advantages of working top-down is that the top can be tried on while work is in progress, to check the placement of waist shaping as well as the finished length. The hem, neck and armholes of Bethel are all finished with an attached I-cord, which creates a simple, clean edge.

One word of caution: The darker colors of Cotton Fleece can bleed if washed in warm or hot water, so take care to use cold water when washing!

(all photos copyright Tom Moore Studios)

*I used the runner-up stranded motif for the Zinnia Tank, also worked in Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece.

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So many short rows!

My latest design, the Zinnia Tank, utilizes short rows to shape the upper chest and back to the curved edge of the yoke. But I've used short rows in many designs and many places before, and not just in the place they are most commonly used (to shape the shoulders). My first design accepted for publication by Interweave Knits, the Lutea Lace-Shoulder Shell (summer 2007), used short rows to shape the front and back into triangles, so that the lace shoulder sections could be angled out, creating a narrow V-neck.

Almost all of my designs in which front and back are joined at the shoulders (including the Fern Fitted Shell and the Twisted Rib Cable Tank) utilize short row shoulder shaping; designs in which short rows are used in more creative ways include the Aran Wrap Cardigan (short rows shape the caps of the top-down set-in sleeves), the Treccione Pullover (short rows shape the yoke, 2nd photo), the Oscilla Wrap (short rows shape the wrap, pictured below), and the Leaf Yoke Top (1st photo, copyright Szyleczko). 

The Leaf Yoke Top is where I first used short rows to shape the front and back to the yoke. Usually a circular yoke is contiguous with the body of the sweater, but because the shoulders are shaped more like a narrow oval than a sphere, this does create slight distortion across the chest (most visible as a bit of slackness across the upper chest, seen subtly here and in more exaggerated form here). The stretch of the knitted fabric and relative looseness of many yoked sweaters makes this distortion irrelevant, but what is more noticeable is that the neckline and any yoke patterning usually form a wide, shallow arc (see here and here). This is the main reason I wanted to try something different with the Leaf Yoke Top and the Zinnia Top: I wanted a rounder neckline.

Although I'm happy with how the Leaf Yoke Top turned out, the neckline is still fairly shallow, and that is because I didn't use many short rows, so the triangles that meet the yoke on each side are only an inch or so high. For the Zinnia Tank, I used over twice as many short rows, and as a result the neckline is rounder and deeper. 

Short rows can be intimidating if you haven't tried them, but luckily there are numerous tutorials available online. Knitting Daily TV has a great video on four different ways to wrap short rows; if you prefer photos to video, here is a useful tutorial for the most common wrap and turn technique, from Knotions. One note: I find the wrap easier to pick up when the yarn is brought first to the front and then around the stitch to be wrapped, as shown by Eunny Jang in the video, but most tutorials have you wrap the stitch in the opposite direction.

Zinnia Tank

The ZInnia Tank pattern is available for purchase! (If interested in the design process, see here, here, here & here.) 

The boldly colored floral yoke is the focal point of this tank. In traditional Fair Isle fashion, only two colors are worked on each round, although a total of four different colors are used. Optional duplicate stitching (see photos of front of garment) is used to accent the center of each flower. After the yoke is completed, stitches are picked up around the bottom edge and worked down for the body; short rows are used to shape the upper part of the front and back to the yoke. With gentle waist shaping and simple rolled edges at hem and armholes, this tank has classic lines that work well with both casual and dressy outfits.

The difficulty of this pattern is Intermediate to advanced: Skills include stranded knitting, following a color chart, knitting in the round, picking up stitches, Knitted Cast-On, and short row shaping.

A preview of the Zinnia Tank

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.