And because you’re working from the top-down, that means that you can more easily adjust the length of the body (because you can try it on and see exactly how it will look on your body!). You can add more increases or less, or work your raglan rows longer – it’s simple to adjust as you can.

Once you become a bit comfortable with this construction, you’ll find that you can easily tweak things to work for your unique body. They make sweater-knitting seamless! Because you are working all sections of your sweater at one time, there is no seaming at the end! And even for your sleeves, when you separate them at the underarms, you later transfer them back onto needles and work them in the round to the cuffs.I hope the blog post as well as the video above helps with this process! What I love about top-down sweaters I also know it’s a popular question because my original blog post about this topic back in 2010 remains one of my most popular pages! In this step you separate the sleeve stitches from the rest of the sweater by transferring these stitches to a piece of scrap yarn and then casting-on stitches (that serve as your underarm stitches, connecting the front with the back). The “Underarm Divide” is usually the place where people get a little stuck on because it’s a bit hard to visualize what’s going on in this step just through written words in a pattern.

How to work the underarm divide How to pick up stitches for front bands

Yoke by E.M. Ragland