Growing the yoke

Part 3:

So far, all there is is the back and the shoulder bits of the sleeves -- there are no fronts yet. The next step is to start the fronts. The increases at the 4 increase points have nothing to do with the neck edge increases from here on out. For a cardigan that comes together at the center front, increase to the neck edge as many stitches at there were on the back in the very first row. I started with 19 stitches across the back in the foundation stitch row, so I want to increase 9 stitches on each neck edge. That leaves a little gap, which will be filled in later with the button band.

So here is what to do for the next set of rows:
1. For a V-shaped neck edge, add 1 stitch at the end of the next 18 rows (that adds 1 stitch to each side of the neck edge every two rows).

2. AT THE SAME TIME, start the next row and stitch to the first increase point --
a. Increase in the LAST stitch of the increase of the previous row (to increase to the front)
b. Increase in the FIRST stitch of the next increase point (to increase to the back)
c. Increase in the LAST stitch of the next increase point (to increase to the back)
d. Increase in the FIRST stitch of the next increase point (to increase to the front)
e. Continue to the end of the row, and sc 1 more in the last stitch to add to the neckline for a total of 9 times on each side of the front. (This is the same as step 1 (above). Once these stitches have been added, skip this step and just work even on the row ends.)

Repeat step 2 for quite a while.

For this section, you will add 2 patt stitches to the back in each row and 1 patt stitch to each front side and 1 stitch to the front neckline in each row. The number of stitches in the shoulder/sleeve bits will stay the same for this time.

When the back is as wide as you want it to be, it is time for the next step. You can tell by measuring between the increase points on the back. Not including the increases, the distance should measure what you want across the shoulders. So for me, for example, the distance across the back, between the increase points, will be about 15 inches.

Since the neck shaping is not related to the over-all increasing going on for the yoke, if you don’t finish your neck shaping before you reach the end of increasing to the back, that is ok. But in this case, I finished the neck shaping first, so the instructions above worked as written.

Here's about what your work should look like now.

The next phase will be finishing adding to the front and starting the sleeve caps.

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