A.R.A.N. PROJECT

Date: Mon, 7 Jul 1997 10:40:05 -0400 (EDT)
To: knit@bolis.com
Subject: A.R.A.N. #15 Body Ribbing

Good Day All

This poor post is a week old...new knitlist address and AOL on the blink
caused a time warp. My apologies to those of you who have been more than
ready! 


The time has come........we must move on.  Are your sleeves ready? Are YOU
ready? 

Percentage sweaters a la EZ are sized so that the ribbing pulls in from
the body of the sweater. This is a good thing if you want the sweater to
hug the body (warmer!), stabilize the top and stay put when you wear it.
If you are working in stockinette stitch, your ribbing will be done on
your "K" stitch number - 10% of "K", and worked on needles at least 2
sizes smaller than your body fabric needle. 

Since we are working with a cabling pattern...the body will eat up many
more stitches than you think and EZ's method of casting on 90%K sts
(which...all you math wizards...is the same as K-10%!) will leave us with
a HUGELY WIDE straight ribbing edge...very nice if you want a "hanging
sweater"  (popular with the grunge crowd). If you do a little reading and
pattern comparing, you may find that designers like a 20% or GREATER
number of stitches to be deleted at the body cast on edge. We will stick
with 20% because it is easy and because we already did the math with the
sleeve (oh, sometimes I amaze even myself). 

I am cutting and pasting a section of Post #4 that has the "K" number
stuff in it below, to allow for an easier grasp of what's happening
here...

> So, we take our stockinette stitch gauge and multiply it by the finished
> circumference to arrive at our "K" number...

> 56" x 4.5 = 252 stitches = "K"

> Now, if we were doing a stockinette stitch garment (or we had done a  
> swatch in a pattern stitch), we could plot out ALL the remaining numbers
> we would need for our sweater at this point.  But, we are doing an Aran,
> and the gauge will change as we start cabling and mossing and trellising
> around...SO, we simply do the sleeve basics at this point to get
> started. 

> Sleeve cuffs can be anywhere from 20% to 33% of "K".  Since we are
> plotting an oversized sweater, we will take the SMALLEST percentage for
> our cuffs, or 20%. 

> 20% x 252 sts = 50 sts


BODY RIBBING

"K" stitches - 20% = ...

So, since all kinds of math was already done in the post above...Notice
that our K number minus our sleeve cast on will determine the ribbing
stitches. How quaint. 

Body Ribbing: 252 sts - 50sts = 202...aw, how about 200 sts.

So, cast on 200 sts on # 5   32" circular knitting needle.

Join BEING VERY CAREFUL NOT TO TWIST and place a marker and work in K1,P1
ribbing for a few inches (I will do 4"). 

Alternate (twisted) ribbing: 
   Round 1: *K1, P1* repeat around.
   Round 2: *K1 in the back loop, P1*; repeat around

Hopefully this newly revised twisted ribbing won't bias on me and
you...keep an eye on it. 

A.R.A.N. Future

Tomorrow I sit in the hospital waiting room for 10 hours and so will work
out the bugs for the cables that are going into this sweater.  I
envision... 

... the BODY to the underarms being done by the end of July
... the RAGLAN YOKE treatment being done by August 15
... the NECK done the last two weeks of August

Hope this schedule helps the Network!

Claudia knitting at Countrywool overlooking Blue Hill in the Hudson Valley
of NY State in the USA
Countrywool@berk.com
get the complete Anyknitter's Revolving Aran Network (A.R.A.N.) pattern
at:  Esther's Knitting Page  http://www.cs.oswego.edu/~ebozak/knit