Back Neck Shaping- A Stab In the Dark

The back piece of my dragon sweater is off the needles and blocked.  I couldn’t seem to follow my own directions and had to rip out the entire thing back to the underarm bind off.  Apparently I cannot watch TV and knit at the same time.

I’ve noticed lately that many of my favorite shirts and sweaters not only have waist shaping, they also have shaping at the back of the neck.  Instead of researching what a normal back neck shaping curve looks like, I threw caution to the wind and mimicked my front neck curve with much less depth.  I’m hoping that I don’t regret my laziness after this thing is assembled.   It’s about an inch in depth.  I started the curve when I started the shoulder slope shaping.

Here’s a close up of the neck:

It looks a bit messy but it should work out okay once stitches are picked up for the collar… as long as it’s not too deep.

And, since I had so many stitches to reduce to get from the bust measurement to the shoulder-to-shoulder measurement, I ended up decreasing every row in the underarm.  I don’t think it looks too bad:

The first sleeve has been cast on.  I’m resisting the urge to over-complicate the sweater design by adding a motif of some sort up the sleeve.  Plain stockinette is a bit tedious but at least it goes quickly in-the-round.  I’m knitting the sleeves without a seam until the underarm to keep it fast and easy.

This project has been going a bit slow because I’ve been getting side-tracked with other things like painting yarns.  We keep having these strange warm & sunny winter days and I can’t resist the urge to haul my things out to the yarn and play with wet wool and color!  Here are some pics of my latest batch.  These hanks are a soft and cushy worsted weight superwash merino.  You can find them in my Etsy shop.  Dyeing yarn has become just about as addictive as knitting.  I’m definitely knitting something with painted yarns in my next project!  🙂