Last Wednesday night I cast on my quickie black raglan sweater, and I began knitting it in earnest the next day while stuck in a waiting room for a couple of hours. I knew I wanted to make the drop from the back neck to the front a little deeper than I have on improvised top-down sweaters of the past. And this is a crazy fast bit of knitting. And my mind was elsewhere. I didn’t even have a ruler on me, just a rough idea of how tall I wanted my little crescent of fabric to be before I cast on the front neck stitches and joined in the round. So mindlessly I knitted, and quickly it grew. Even when I was casting on only five stitches, it didn’t occur to me what I had done. Late that night, I pulled the little yokelet over my head and … duh! … I’d made a V-neck by accident. A sort of gentle V, since I had cast on 5 stitches and not none, but a V-neck nonetheless. Given how fast it was to knit that bit of yoke in the first place, it would have been nothing to rip it out and start again, but I pretty much instantly decided to live with it. As I see it, I have two options: embrace it, or take it as a design challenge. By the latter, I mean creating a little V patch like a sweatshirt (always my favorite thing), which could be knitted a few different ways or could be wool gauze sewn on, which would be a pretty marvelous little detail.
I’m not really a V-neck wearer, so it feels a little foreign to me, and it’s obviously unlike my original sketch, in the upper left corner up there. I still want that sweater, and will very possibly still want that sweater (and still want it to be black) if I finish this as a V-neck. On the other hand, maybe the universe was trying to tell me something. If I decide the V isn’t filling up that whole in my heart, I can always rip out whatever edge treatment I put on it and do the patch thing instead. So for the moment, I’m embracing it. But it did mean stopping to ask what kind of hem treatment and what shape of sleeve will work best with the V. After sketching it out (such a necessity for me!) I’ve decided the original shape and details are still best, so I’m headed for the lower right sketch. As fast as this is going, we’ll know how it turns out in about 10 minutes.
NOTES: There is no pattern for this sweater. I am improvising it, and you can too: There’s a whole top-down tutorial right here. This yarn is Lettlopi, worsted-weight Icelandic wool, knitted on US10.5 needles at 3.5 sts and 5 rows per inch.