How are you Yorlin knitters getting along? While a few lovely cardigans have already appeared as finished projects, many of you are knitting at an appropriately leisurely summer pace, familiarising yourself with the lace panel while working the upper body. A couple of knitter’s questions regarding the raglans have prompted me to tell you about one of my pattern-writing techniques – or idiosyncrasies, if you will – which I have developed to convey the instructions for shaping through the upper body of a garment.
The upper body of a cardigan or pullover with raglan shaping has 4 markers, around which increases (or decreases) are worked, most usually in pairs. In the Yorlin pattern (where 2 “y” markers are used to separate the front panels, and 4 “x” markers set the position of the raglans) the abbreviated shaping instruction reads like this:
Work left front panel sts, slmy, *k to 1 st before x marker, m1r, k1, slm, k1, m1l; repeat from * 3 times, k to y marker, work right front panel sts. 8 sts inc
In a less abbreviated form. the instruction would read like this:
Work the left front panel stitches from the next row, slip the first y marker, *knit to 1 stitch before the next x marker, increase 1 stitch (m1r), knit 1 stitch, slip marker, knit 1 stitch, increase 1 stitch, (m1l), repeat the instruction from the* (asterisk) 3 more times (thereby working the paired increases 4 times in total). knit to the second y marker, work the right front panel stitches from the next row. 8 stitches increased.
You can see that this unabbreviated version, is almost three times as long and is consequently quite confusing: moving from the needles to the page (or screen), the eye quickly loses itself among all those words and numbers, increasing the potential for the knitter to lose her place.
Abbreviating instructions is essential for knitterly clarity, then. And reducing the wordiness of patterns is also an incredibly important consideration if the pattern is to be printed out in any form: indeed, earlier systems of pattern abbreviation and notation – from the first nineteenth-century pattern books to the mid twentieth-century pages of Woman’s Weekly – arose from a need to fit a series of complicated instructions for doing things by hand into a limited number of pages.
Many of my patterns are printed in books with particular page counts: because I publish these books myself, and because more pages equals more cost to me (and more weight in each book-containing envelope to be shipped around the world), I’ve had to develop various methods of producing abbreviated instructions that convey quite complex information simply, clearly, and concisely. I don’t regard this as any sort of constraint or imposition: on the contrary, I’ve found that thinking about page length from the off has imposed a useful discipline on my pattern writing. I myself have a tendency to get lost in a pattern that’s overly wordy, and as a knitter, I much prefer clarity and brevity of instruction, wherever possible. As a pattern writer, I’m always thinking, then, about the essential information that the knitter needs to know before performing a certain action, and how to best convey that information clearly and concisely.
Brevity and clarity are especially important considerations in a pattern which has an extensive size range such as Yorlin (with its 12 sizes, from 33 to 60½ inches). When grading a pattern like this, I have to think about the different relative proportions of different body sizes, and with a garment which is shaped with raglan increases, there is a very specific ratio of sleeve and body stitches to armscye (armhole) depth which needs to be considered for each size. So while each size in the pattern begins with a similar number of neck stitches, they increase through the raglans at quite different rates, in order to accommodate the requirements of quite different numbers and proportions of stitches for the upper arms and upper body.
My grading spreadsheet allows me to determine these ratios, and, with a little jiggery pokery, to calculate the specific shaping requirements for each size. Adding or removing plain rows between each row of shaping allows me to create or remove depth from the armscyes and upper body. Equally, adding increases adjacent to two “x” markers (rather than to all four) enables me to add more width to the front and back, (where it’s needed in the larger sizes), whilst keeping the sleeve caps at a fixed circumference.
If you felt your brain beginning to melt when reading the preceding paragraphs then please do not worry: the whole purpose of grading a pattern is for me to do these calculations for you. And, as I said, my key aim when writing the pattern is to produce a set of clear, concise instructions which, whatever size you happen to be knitting, are completely straightforward for you to follow.
To explain how I’ve done this, let’s return to the particular wording of the Yorlin pattern. When you reach the pattern’s Step 3, you’ll encounter four lettered instructions, labelled C, D, E and F. Step C instructs you to increase 8 stitches on the right (knit) side of the garment; step D instructs you to work one wrong (purl) side row without any increases; Step E instructs you to increase 8 stitches on the wrong (purl) side of the garment and step F instructs you to increase 4 stitches on the garment’s front and back only (while working no corresponding increases on the sleeves). The pattern suggests you should “read each of these lettered steps carefully” (so that you fully understand what each step involves) before moving on to follow the individual instructions for your size. These individual instructions are written out like this:
Fifth size: Work steps C and D 26 times; then steps C and E twice. 240 sts inc; 430 sts total; 63 sts each front; 88 sts each sleeve; 128 back sts
So if you are knitting the fifth size, you’ll work steps C and D 26 times (increasing 8 stitches on each alternate row of 52), before working steps C and E twice (increasing 8 stitches on every consecutive row of 4) The total number of stitches increased and final number of stitches on the needles are given at the end of the instruction, as well as individual stitch counts for the garment’s front, back and sleeves.
Let’s take another example:
Ninth size: Work steps C and D 28 times; then steps C and E 6 times, then steps F and E twice. 344 sts inc; 552 sts total; 79 sts each front; 114sts each sleeve; 166 back sts
So a knitter working from the pattern’s ninth size will work 28 repeats of steps C and D (increasing 8 stitches on alternate rows) before working 6 repeats of steps C and E (increasing 8 stitches on consecutive rows) before finishing the raglan shaping with two repeats of steps F and E (increasing 4 stitches on each knit side row over the front and back only, followed by 8 stitches on each purl side row).
In the pattern layout, the shaping instructions for each size are set out individually, so that you can focus on the requirements of your own size without unnecessary distraction, while the instructions for each row are set out separately, enabling you to familiarise yourself with what’s involved with each lettered step, and quickly refer back to it if necessary.
This combination of separate lettered steps with individual shaping instructions is the best way that I’ve found of conveying quite complex information about raglan increases across an extensive size range, clearly and concisely on a single page. Other designers have, of course, other ways of doing this, and though I now very rarely knit from someone else’s pattern, I really enjoy reading patterns, exploring the different ways that different designers, and different publishers, get around these issues of communication (clarity) and presentation (a pattern’s page length and printing / layout constraints etc). I think that it is possible to discern national styles of contemporary pattern writing (Danish, Japanese), but there’s no one way of describing things; no way that’s better than another. I personally love that there are so many different methods available to designers to convey this information clearly to a knitter; that pattern writing has no fixed standard; and that pattern notation is a language that is continually evolving, through knitterly use and innovation. This, by the way, is one of the key reasons that AI-generated knitting instructions are so completely rubbish: first, the data being used for the training of these models is, I think, largely scraped from Google books (whose dataset includes lots of patterns written in the 1980s and before, but not much post 2010) and second, contemporary patterns are written with so many different styles and types of instruction that it is impossible for an AI to devise a lowest common denominator standard from which to begin. So, there’s both not enough data and not enough data of the same type to allow AIs to produce patterns efficiently or effectively. This is likely to change, of course, but in the meantime, I feel we knitters should regard all of these distinctive stylistic quirks and idiosyncrasies of the patterns we work from as signs of their essential humanity. This particular method of communicating different rows or rounds of shaping with individual lettered steps is one such quirk of mine.
In short, let’s stay human. And have a great weekend.
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