One of my Saturday chores today was to gather the energy and willpower to head to the department store downtown and get underwear. It’s been increasingly clear as pair after pair of (embarassinly old – no, I won’t say) underwear has hit the dustbin that I need to get more. I’ve been stalling because it meant figuring out German/European sizing. I won’t bore you with the details, other than to say my efforts were successful.
However, I do want to tell you about my unexpected find. I walked into the department store and right into this:
My hand was half way to touch the fiber before my brain caught up and said “hold up – we’re in a department store, not a yarn store. Why is that here?” It was some sort of promotional display for a brand of clothing (obviously made of cotton). I carefully withdrew my hand, as I’m pretty sure they did NOT intend for customers to fondle it and snapped a pic instead.
I’ve also made some good progress on my Zinone top over the past couple days and today reached the point just under the bust where I wanted to add short rows.
If you are on the bustier side (think more than 3-4in difference between the widest part of your bust and your underbust), I highly recommend investing the time in short rows. The distance down the side of your ribs is probably significantly shorter than the distance over your bust.
If you find yourself constantly tugging down the front of tops to keep them sliding up over your stomach, shoulder seams tend to sit towards the back half of your shoulder, or unisex tops choke you, it’s could be because your bust is tugging up on the fabric. If you thought it was just your tummy making you tug down your top, pay attention next time to where the top is moving – is it just from your belly button down? Or did it start higher up, like where your bust is?
Here’s what my top looked like before I added short rows:
That bowing upwards is what my bust is doing to the top, and it’s going to continue all the way down to the hem unless I do something about it.
Here’s what it looks like after (I’ve added blue lines to further highlight the difference):
See how much straighter it is? The last bit of bowing is just the cable of the needle at this point.
Here’s what it took to do the short rows:
1 – knowing the difference between down my ribs and over my bust. I’ve found that the easiest way to get a pretty accurate measure on myself is to hold a tape measure mid shoulder and let it fall to the side of my breast and take the measurement to the bottom of my bra band. Keeping the start of the measure in the same place, I then measure over the top of my breast and down to my bra band again. It’s not perfect, but the difference should be around what you need for short rows. Use this to calculate the total number of rows to add. If it’s an odd number, round up or down to an even number.
2 – knowing the distance from nipple to nipple. You’ll want your short rows to cover just a bit under this distance (don’t match it exactly! You can get “arrows” pointing to your boobs). Use your stitch gauge and this measurement to calculate the total number of stitches to work the short rows over.
Use the (total number of stitches) divided by the (number of rows minus one) to get a sense of how many stitches to cover in each pass of your short rows. If working top down, you’ll make each row longer until you’ve covered the total number and if working bottom up you’ll start by covering the full distance and get smaller. I also recommend looking up German short rows. They save you picking up wraps and are nigh invisible.
So, I wanted 3/4-1in (6-8 rows) and needed to cover about 8in (48 stitches). I chose to round down to 6 rows since the wool has a fair bit of stretch. 48//5 = 9st remainder 3. I decided to divide this up as 9 – 9 – 12 – 9 – 9 to make the top of the bell shape a bit flatter and get the 6 rows to cover a bit more of the distance.
This may sound really complicated, but once you’ve done it a couple times it gets much easier. Start to finish, calculating and adding the short rows to my top took about 20-25min. For all the time I’m putting into it, this is nothing and I’ll enjoy wearing a properly fitting top so much more!