Sunday, December 13, 2009

Keeping Track of those Darn Decreases

Behold, my current obsession. The Folded Mini Dress.

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This is an incredible pattern found in Lynne Barr's new book, Reversible Knitting: 50 Brand-New, Groundbreaking Stitch Patterns. This was instant love and I am shocked that there isn't a million people stitching this right up. I am one of 2 projects on ravelry. huh. I'm usually such a lemming with my project choices. But I digress.

The point of this post is to tell you about a technique for keeping track of increases and decreases that I learned from Susan of the rainey sisters. It is simply brilliant.

Lynne' direction for the bodice of the dress are typical and straight forward. Split at the center front neckline and then do armhole decreases on either side and do neckline decreases on either side. This means you need to track 4 decreases on every row. Hard enough. HOWEVER, the neck and arm decreases happen at different rates AND the arm decreases change row count half way through. yikes. AND I am using dark yarn. DOUBLE yikes. (dark yarn makes it really hard to "read" your previous stitches)

I am a bear of little brain. How can I possible keep all of this straight? Enter, the Dental Floss Solution.



Every time you make a decrease stitch lay a length of dental floss between the just completed decrease stitch and the next. When you come back around to make the next decrease, bring that same length of floss back over between the newly completed decrease and the next stitch.

As you can see in this picture I have 4 lengths of floss for each set of decreases I am tracking. I can easily see how many decreases I've done and what row I decreased. it is also easy to see if I MISS a decrease.

Obviously, this works just as well for increases. Brilliant.

Just thought I'd share.

I want to wear this for Christmas and I have many gifties to finish as well. Will I make it??