I’ll spare you a photo of mine, but when I tried on the Zinone just before joining front and back, my suspicions that the armhole would not comfortably find my arm were confirmed. There was a nice little gap which could only be covered by serious stretching of the fabric.
So I proceeded with my devious little plan, and I think it worked! Since I’d been alternating skeins of yarn, I stopped the front with one working yarn at each end. Then I knit up a few extra rows (11 total) of just the edging (it’s clever k1 sl1 wyif only on one side I had to switch to p1 sl1 wyib instead to match). So now I had a little strip of the edge, which I grafted to the edge stitches on the back. I picked up 7 stitches along each edge.
As I worked the first few rows of front and back together, I used ssk and k2tog to reduce out those 7 stitches.
I think it’s looking pretty good!
This actually left me with 22st less than the pattern has: -6 from each edge * 4 edges = 24st, only the pattern has you reduce out 2st as you join front and back, so -22st. But, based on my st gauge and the fact that my upper bust is smaller than around my shoulders this is ok. I also tried it on to check that the math wasn’t lying.
I’ll add back in a few stitches to the front over the next few rows to get back to my bust measurement. And then start decreasing back towards the waist after a bit (the pattern has me starting this too soon based on my row gauge – my st gauge is few to the in and my row more to the in, can’t meet them both). Then do some short rows for a better fit through bust before a final small decrease towards the waist. Then increase again for the hips…
So um, yeah, at this point the rest of the pattern is basically guidelines until I get to the finishing steps and I have a sheet of calculations for how many to decrease/increase and when to match my waist and (short) height. I still need to finalize my short row plan.
But so far so good:
