A few ramblings about knitting, mainly vintage stuff and other bits and bobs

Sunday 15 February 2015

With Spring nearly here . . Marriner's 443

. . . what better thing to do than start planning your spring and summer wardrobe? And this lovely should take pride of place.

This pattern from Marriner (No. 443) is such a pretty summer blouse and comes in 4 sizes so can be easily sized up a couple more inches either by altering the weight of the wool and or needles sizes to fit a larger size. If you do go this route, make sure you don't use a yarn that's too heavy as it could alter the drape of the blouse and you'll just get left with a saggy mess (ask me how I know). 

The original wool was a relatively lightweight 3-ply and the tension 7.5 stitches to 1 inch. Increasing the tension size to 7 stitches per inch will give you approximately 1 inch gain over the width of the jumper. 6.5 to 1 inch will add 2 inches or 4 inches overall but I think that this might make the yoke huge and you'd lose the lovely ribbing at the neck so perhaps it's time to grab your adventurer's pants and crack out the calculator and grade the pattern up to the size you want.

With muti-size patterns it's easier than you think and using a spreadsheet programme to get the calculations right means you can see across the whole range to see if anything look wrong. To start you need to read through the whole pattern and mark where numbers change. Rather than write out all the figures, here's the link to the google doc I used with some notes to hopefully explain better. I've used the established numbers for bust sizes 32" to 38" to take the pattern up to 40", 42", 44", and 46"

For the purpose of this, I've assumed that most larger women are larger overall, so bigger waists, bigger arms and wider necks and bigger busts. If you are slender but have a large bust, you could use the smaller sizes for the casting on and then increase to the larger sizes or use bust shaping to get to the required number of stitches for the yoke.

Like most knitting, the proof is in the making and I have not made this up so please use the figures with caution and if you see any glaring errors please comment so I can update the chart.

To download the pattern, please click on the pattern cover above.

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