George’s Seamless Hybrid Sweater (could there be a less romantic name for a sweater design? sounds like some kind of sea anemone or flowering anemone! ah, tho, I love EZ’s practicality!) is progressing – so much so that I felt I should try to puzzle out the saddle shoulders. 

Usually, I will just work something through to figure it out – as I cannot always envision it from the printed word. But since 1) I had cables to consider (and what was I going to do with them now that I was about to hit the saddle shoulders?!) and 2) there were actually two methods presented for making the saddle shoulders and I had to choose one, I decided that I should figure out how the whole process worked. 

So, the other night I sat up quite late puzzling & puzzling, figuring & calculating, reading & re-reading & re-reading!  EZ’s directions are pithy, blessedy and blastedly concise.  I just could not get it all to work out in my head!

I understood (tho there were moments when I panicked and questioned entirely!) that the saddle on the shoulder would be built up from the top of the sleeve between the front and the back – in fact, joining the front and back – to the neck hole.  At that point, one either knit one’s way across the back to the other shoulder and built up the corresponding saddle, then built a saddle between the two saddles from the back to the neck hole – or one continued, on a reduced number of stitches, from the first shoulder saddle across the back of the neck (leaving a neck hole) and then stopped and built up the second shoulder saddle (say “second shoulder saddle” 10 times quickly!) and grafted it to the extended first shoulder saddle.

The problem was that I could not get EZ’s number to make sense.  And since my numbers were different (since my gauge and size was different), I had to figure out how many stitches, rows, etc. to knit to make the proportions work out.  It all looked so simple, but the numbers were screwy.  Heaven help me, when they seemed to come out to a solid saddle reaching across the entire shoulder section with no head hole possible I questioned both EZ (may I be forgiven!) and my own sanity!

It turns out that when she said (so calmly & concisely):

Work back and forth on the 32 stitches for 44 rows. At the end of the knit rows, sl 1, K1, psso (or SSK); at the end of the purl rows, purl 2 together, each time nipping off one stitch from back or front respectively.

I imagined that 44 sts were used up on both the front and back – bringing one half-way across the top of the sweater.  Then one was to do the same on the other side – filling up the whole shoulder section with no place for a head hole!  It took me a shamefully long time to realize that one would only use up 22 sts on each side (front & back) – since one alternated taking a stitch form the front on one row, from the back on the next row. Duh!

The next brain cramp came when I reckoned this up as about ¼ of the approx. 88 stitches that existed at the tops of the back & front – not 1/3 as it should be.  In fact, having worked off 22 stitches, knitting one’s way “across 43 stitches to the other side” in order to repeat would only get one part way there (65 of the 88 stitch distance)!  Augh!  Now, I would not only have a head hole, but an extra hole at the top of the sleeve before the 2^nd saddle started!  That couldn’t be right!

And (after much calculating and gnashing of teeth), I realized my 2^nd major error.  I had forgotten that in decreasing the sleeve stitches with a double decrease I had been decreasing the front & back stitches too!  So, EZ’s 88 stitches would have worked down to 66 – 22 stitches for each shoulder and 22 for the head hole.  Textbook proportions!

Sanity restored!  The world was as it should be.  And when I started playing around with my cables (at this point I think George had given up on the probability of our ever getting to bed and was silently immersed in a session of Angry Birds), I found that I could continue the cable lines up into a very attractive cable pattern along the back of the shoulders – and I had the numbers (my numbers – the actual numbers of stitches and rows I would need to complete the shoulders!) to ensure that my cable repeats would come out symmetrically.  Wow! EZ brilliance triumphs again!