Design a Sweater, Lesson 3: Shaping the Torso

Hi there! As you’ll see in this week’s video, my sweater is coming along swimmingly! Now that I am deep in the process of working the waist shaping, I am remembering why my row counter is my best friend!

This week, we’ll be discussing how to calculate the increases and decreases that will shape the torso of your sweater to the finished dimensions you desire. It may be helpful for you to look over and print out this week’s handout so that you can follow along with the video lesson, in which I’ll be walking you through all the math required in this step. I promise, it’s not terribly hard 🙂 Click the link below to get the handout:

Lesson 3 – Shaping the Torso

And check out the videos below!

As you can see, I’m already halfway through the torso of my sweater. I stopped so that I could record this lesson, and now I’m going to get busy finishing it! Next week we’ll cover sleeves and sleeve shaping, and then I think we’ll take a week off (I’ll just call it Summer Vacation!) so that we can all get caught up on our knitting before we move on to the yoke.

I also mentioned in the video that there are further modifications you can make to these shaping instructions to make your sweater even more personalized, and there is a longer discussion of these modifications (including suggestions for adding short-rows to cover larger busts) in the handout. If you have any questions or ideas for shaping that you’d like more information on, post in the comments and we’ll try to help you with that! And post your progess, too, so that we can support and motivate each other, now that we are into the serious knitting of our sweaters! See you there,

Nina