Fit to flatter is a ten-part series of tutorials on choosing and modifying knitting patterns to flatter your shape. These tutorials will be released every two weeks both as blog posts (free) and as separate, professionally formatted PDF files for printing (nominal charge). Should you desire the PDFs, each installment can be purchased from the tutorial page as they are released, or via a “buy now” button at the end of the installment. Individual installments are US$2.00 and at the end of the tutorial series the whole series will be available for $US10.00. All text copyright Amy Herzog and all images copyright splityarn 2010, unless where otherwise noted. I hope you enjoy the series!

This ten-part series is not about making you feel badly about what you have already knit. It is not about making you feel badly about your shape, or about making you feel like you can only knit certain things, in certain yarns. In writing these tutorials, I want to help you learn basic principles for dressing the figure you have in the most flattering way possible.

Every person reading these words has both fabulous assets to show off and a thing or two that you wish would disappear forever (or, in some cases, appear forever). The fact is this: Though I won’t argue that we’d all be healthier if we exercised more, wearing flattering clothes will do much more to change the way you feel about your body than losing weight or gaining muscle will.

As knitters, we have the ultimate power of creating a piece of couture perfectly suited to our figures, every single time. Your hand-knits should make you look and feel like a million bucks, and not just because of the skill required to form the stitches. I want to help you get there.

Previous installments have focused on determining your own shape, principles for using clothing to flatter, and specific garment elements. In this installment, we cover your best weapon in the quest for flattery in extreme detail: Shaping. The final two installments will close out the series with implementation, advanced sweater modification, and custom sweater design. We’re almost there!

Why You Want Shaping. (Yes, You.)

I’m guessing that a fair number of you, particularly those of you without many curves, are pretty skeptical about this installment. You might even think of it as something only for busty or exceedingly curvy knitters. Well, I hope I can change your mind, because shaping is crucial to getting a flattering sweater for every knitter, curvy or not.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that your favorite dog-walking cardigan, or the pullover you don for night-time beach bonfires, or that comfy knitted jacket must have shaping. We all have garments that we wear for reasons other than how they make us look. For everything else, you almost certainly want some shaping (even if not very much). Here’s why: Hand-knit fabric is typically bulkier and more dense than the knits we buy in a store. Unless worn with negative ease all over, the impression a sweater gives of your shape is heavily influenced by the shape of the sweater itself. If the sweater is boxy, chances are good that you’ll look fairly boxy, too.

This is especially true for the back of a sweater. Almost everyone is curvier on their back than their front. Part of this is that most of us carry some weight in our stomachs at one time or another. But there’s more to it than that: No matter what’s happening up front, the natural curve of the spine will cause pretty much everyone’s back to curve in noticeably.

Consider Sarah, shown here in Melissa LaBarre’s Garter Yoke Cardigan.

You might recall earlier pictures in this series showing Sarah in the same cardi from the front, where she looked great. Like most of us, Sarah is far curvier on her back than her front. Without shaping to take away some of the excess fabric, Sarah’s gorgeous back curve is hidden and she looks. . . well, thicker than she is.

Whether or not to add shaping to the front of a sweater depends a great deal on how large your bust is and/or how large your belly is. We’ll get into these decisions in more detail as we go through this installment.

One of the things that makes hand-knitting our garments such an incredible opportunity for a perfect and flattering fit is that unlike clothing manufacturers, we do not start with a block of fabric. We make our fabric as we go along. Whereas a seamstress starts with a flat block of fabric and has to cut and sew it into a particular shape, we can simply knit extra bits or remove sections to produce a sweater piece that is already our shape. When considering shaping, I want to encourage you to look at the contours of your own body and produce fabric that highlights them. For each of the three main “contour” areas, I’ll go into specific shaping steps. But generally speaking, there are basically two dimensions in which we can add or take away fabric.

Horizontal Shaping.

The first, and more common in knitting patterns and modification tutorials is to add or subtract fabric horizontally through short rows or by adding/decreasing at the sides of a sweater. Let’s talk about shaping done at the side seams first: If you consider the body of a sweater to be a cylinder, shaping performed in this way affects an entire “slice” of that cylinder equally. If you subtract stitches on the front, you need to also subtract them from the back to ensure the seams are the same length. The same goes for adding stitches—any changes made at one seam must be made on its pair as well.

Adding fabric via short rows does not change the seam but also does not change the width of a sweater piece. Instead, they change the length of the region you’re modifying. Both short rows and side-seam shaping are absolutely the appropriate choice in certain circumstances, but they are more limited in the flexibility they offer the knitter. When should you use them? The best example is for heavily patterned sweaters. Sweaters with allover lace patterns or complicated cables often call for horizontal shaping and shaping tucked into side seams because this sidesteps working complicated decreases into a visual motif.

Vertical Shaping.

Slightly more work to calculate, vertical shaping adds or subtracts stitches in vertical lines on the sweater pieces. This very targeted shaping changes the width of a region of the sweater without affecting the length. It is typically placed within the “middle” of a piece of fabric instead of on an edge—which means that you can perform it on one piece of a sweater (e.g., the back) and not another (e.g., the front). Since Sarah’s sweater looked great from the front, this is the kind of shaping I would have recommended for her to use: She could easily have inserted some vertical darts on the small of her back to take away the excess fabric at her waist and added them back in as her ribcage expanded without affecting the rest of the sweater at all.

The back of my design Adelina provides an example.

Although this picture wasn’t taken from an identical angle, the seams illustrate how vertical darts can nicely highlight the curve of a back without affecting side seams or the sweater’s front.

So here we are. I hope that I’ve convinced you it’s worth putting shaping into your sweaters to ensure the contours of the fabric you’re producing accommodate your own contours. Having covered general techniques for incorporating shaping, we’ll spend the rest of this installment focusing in detail on the three sections of a sweater most likely to contain “contour” areas: the hips, the waist, and the bust.

Bottoms-Up: Shaping for the Hips.

First up, the hip and bum region. We often have more curves here than we realize, and as we age they tend to be of the variety you want to downplay rather than highlight. (While the curve at the small of the back discussed in the last section technically starts in this region, I’m going to defer discussion of back waist shaping until that section of this installment.)

Looking at these shots, we can start to get a sense of some common shaping needs in the hip area. First, many of us carry some weight in our lower stomachs. If balanced by the curve of our back (it’s a little hard to see but this is true for Crystal, who is standing to the far left of the bottom photograph, for instance), we might not need to take any particular action. If your curves are more pronounced on the front than on the back, don’t despair! Just make the front of your sweaters a little longer.

The Magic of Short Rows.

Knitters with a belly probably already feel self-conscious about it. And it’s a cruel twist of fate that an off-the shelf sweater (whether literally or figuratively, as in the case of a pattern knit exactly to pattern specs) can unfortunately draw a disproportionate amount of attention to a region we tend to be really sensitive about. This is because just like a large bust, a stomach larger than the curve of the back will cause the length from shoulder to hem to be longer in the front than in the back. (Doubly so for those knitters who have larger busts and larger bellies.) This causes the front of the sweater to ride up, perhaps exposing some skin, and definitely causing the wearer to tug the hem back down again. Both draw the eye right to that part of the tummy.

Fortunately, the solution is the same for busts and bellies: short rows. We touched on this topic a bit in the last installment, but I’d like to go into more detail here in the shaping section of the series. Remember the picture to the right, from Installment 4?

Imagine for a moment that the orange lines I’ve drawn on myself extend all the way to a sweater’s hem (about 1.5”/4cm lower than currently drawn).

For some knitters, getting their sweater to end at the desired point on their body will require more length on the front than the back. Find out how much by subtracting one length from the other and multiplying by your row gauge. (Round up to an even number since short rows come in pairs.) This is the number of rows you’ll need to add.

Example: My front shoulder-to-hem measurement is 24”/61cm, and my back shoulder-to-hem measurement is 23.5”/59.75cm. Now I know that I want to add ½”/1.25cm to the length of the front of my sweater. My row gauge for this project is 8 rows to the inch/2.5cm. Thus, I’ll want to add 4 rows to the front of the sweater.

Going into a short-row tutorial is beyond the scope of this series, but once you know how to add short rows the only question left is where to add them. This can be fudged based on a particular sweater’s needs (for example, whether the hem has a complicated pattern), but I find that adding the length an inch or two up from the bottom of the sweater is a good choice so long as that causes the short rows to be added in a plain portion of the sweater front. (See the orange oval below.)

You might think that adding an extra bit of length to the front will draw attention to your stomach, especially since when laid flat on a table the bottom of your sweater’s front will look a bit curved. Trust me: You’re going to draw far less attention to that bit of your anatomy if you’re not constantly pulling the hem of your sweater down. And a few short rows near the hem can totally end the riding up problem that makes you tug in the first place.

Go forth and short row!

When your hips are wider (or narrower).

When the wearer has hips that are out of proportion to the rest of her frame—wider, in the case of a bottom-heavy knitter, or substantially narrower in the case of a very broad-shouldered knitter, it can be desirable to “Frankenstein” your sweater from two different sizes: One for the hips, and one for the torso. This can be scary to contemplate but is not usually very difficult to carry out.

First, decide what two sizes you want to join. This will give you a number of cast-on stitches (from the selected hip size) and a number of torso stitches (from the selected torso size). You now have some choices to make about what lies in between. Start by looking at the waist measurements for the two sizes. Is one of them the right waist size for you? If so, place all additional shaping rows on the other side of the selected waist size: First, total the number of shaping rows by adding original shaping rows to the extras you need to bridge the sizes. Next, take the number of rows between the smallest part of the waist and the largest part of the “oddball” size, and divide it by your total number of shaping rows required. You now have your shaping ratio.

Example: Suppose you’d like a 44”/112cm hip size paired with a 40”/102cm torso, and that your waist perfectly matches the 37”/94cm waist of the 40”/102cm torso. You’d now like to work all decreases necessary to reach the 37”/94cm waist size between the start of the waist decreases and the narrowest part of the waist. If there are 4 shaping rows initially and 3 additional shaping rows to reach 37”/94cm, you’ll want to divide the number of rows between the start of the waist shaping and the narrowest point of the waist by 7.

If you’d like a waist size in between the two sizes, first decide on your waist measurement. Then, calculate the number of shaping rows between the hip size and your desired waist measurement by multiplying the difference in width by your stitch gauge and dividing by 2 (for a sweater worked in pieces—you typically decrease 2 stitches per row per sweater piece). Divide the total number of rows by the number of shaping rows and subtract one (the shaping row itself) to get the number of rows to work even in between shaping rows. Then, perform the same calculation for the waist-to-bust portion of the shaping.

Voilà! A sweater with contours that perfectly match your own.

In the Middle: The Waist.

As mentioned earlier, most knitters will benefit from at least a tiny amount of waist shaping. When properly placed, waist shaping can help the sweater catch the right contours of your body and ensure it moves naturally with your own movement. When improperly placed or omitted, even straight shapes will look blockier than they are. The Owls sweater by Kate Davies is an inherently fantastic choice for Sarah, below.

The wide yoke and eye-catching little owls draw our attention to her lovely collarbones. But this version of Owls (which is actually someone else’s sweater) highlights the importance of waist shaping. Sarah has a tiny waist, but the excess fabric around her midsection gives the appearance of a figure that goes straight out from the bust to the hips.

Getting the right amount of waist shaping is something of a delicate balance, though. Too little and your figure is completely masked (and not in the good way); too much and you start bearing a definite resemblance to a sausage. While I’m a big proponent of negative ease in the bust, I think that a couple of inches of positive ease in the waist (up to 4”/10cm) are a good idea for almost everyone.

When calculating how much waist shaping to use in a pattern, start by comparing the pattern schematic with the waist measurement you took in Installment 4. If the schematic is 1 – 4”/2.5-10cm larger than your actual waist measurement, no modifications are necessary!

Otherwise, multiply the total number of inches of shaping you need (what’s already there plus what you want to add, or what’s already there minus what you need to subtract) by the stitch gauge and then divide by 2 to get your number of shaping rows. You’ll probably use the same number of shaping rows for the decrease and increase portions of the waist shaping. Divide the number of total rows in the shaping portions of the sweater by the number of shaping rows to get the number of plain rows you work in between. This number will probably be different for the decrease rows below the waist and the increase rows above the waist, but now is a good time to double-check that the narrowest point of the sweater will actually fall at your narrowest point. If it doesn’t, simply move the shaping around.

Once you know how much shaping to add and how much length the two kinds of shaping should take, you have two main options for how to incorporate the shaping itself: Entirely at the side seams, or through the use of vertical darts.

At the side seams.

I think most of the sweater patterns I have ever knit included waist shaping at the side seams or not at all. (Marnie MacLean’s patterns are a wonderful exception to this, and more and more designers are starting to incorporate other kinds of shaping. But I digress!) This kind of waist shaping is the easiest to calculate: You calculate the number of stitches to be subtracted (and then added back in) for each piece, divide by 2, do the row gauge calculation described above, and you’re good to go!

And there are times when it’s the most appropriate shaping, as is the case when the front of a sweater is heavily patterned or incorporates an eye-catching cable that you don’t want to distort. This type of shaping is fairly blunt, however—you must match the shaping on the front to the shaping on the back, even if your front and back don’t match, so that the seams remain the same length. Placing the shaping entirely to the side of the sweater can also sometimes cause the fabric to stretch a bit in weird ways, since the removed/added stitches are not located near the actual curves they’re compensating for.

Vertical darts.

Vertical shaping is hands-down my favorite way to do things, largely because it’s so flexible. The side seams of a sweater stay exactly the same, so you are free to mold the fabric on the front and back independently. Further, the stitches are added and removed in place with the curves they’re accommodating, giving a nice fit without any stretching or bunching. For reference, I used them in Adelina, pictured again here.

More and more designers are starting to incorporate this kind of shaping, and I think it’s a great thing.

Vertical darts are incorporated by dividing a sweater piece roughly in thirds (or by dividing the back into thirds and the front 25%/50%/25% if you don’t mind the extra work) and increasing/decreasing against markers placed at those lines instead of at the side of the piece.

For those knitters with a tummy, vertical darts offer what I think is the best way to get the benefits of shaping without making the sweater overly clingy on the front: Eliminate all waist shaping on the front of the sweater, and leave it in on the back. Letting the sweater hug the contours and curves of your back ensures that the sweater will keep you from looking boxy and that it hangs properly on your form; eliminating shaping on the front means that the sweater will skim over the stomach instead of being tight.

Of course, if you would like some shaping on the front and more shaping on the back, you can work the shaping unevenly. Your side-view picture from Installment 4 is a good guide for determining whether this is an appropriate option, but you can also measure—have someone help you tack a bit of tape or a safety pin on each side of your waist, and then measure from one to the other both on the front and on the back.

Finally, if your front and back are more or less the same vertical shaping is still a great option. The darts take fabric away just where you want them to, and they’re easily extended for bustier women. Which brings us to. . .

At the Top: The Ladies.

Ah, the bust. I would be hard-pressed to find another part of our form that’s as demanding of our sweaters. Some negative ease in the bust is almost always a good idea, because nobody is really flattered by a sweater looking loose in their bust area. I think between 0 and 2”/5cm of negative ease in the bust is almost universally flattering. For some knitters, particularly those with a DD or larger cup size, getting that level of negative ease without making the sweater too large everywhere else requires additional work.

Similarly to the other kinds of shaping we’ve discussed in this installment, a large bust can be accommodated by adding fabric horizontally or vertically. In Installment 4, we took measurements for determining how much bust shaping to add; because the measurements are different for different methods of adding bust darts, we’ll explore them individually.

More Magic Short Rows.

Short-row bust darts work by lengthening the front of a sweater so that the bust does not cause it to ride up. To determine how many inches of horizontal short rows you need, go back to Installment 4:

Calculate the difference between shoulder and hem on the front and back of your body: First, measure close to your body, following the curve of your back, from the hem of your imaginary sweater to the top of your shoulder. Then do the same on your front, following the curve of your bust. Subtract the back measurement from the front measurement. The difference will probably be between ½’’/1.25cm and 2’’/5cm.

If the difference is under an inch/2.5cm, you probably don’t need to add any short rows at all. For everything over an inch/2.5cm, multiply the difference by your row gauge. Add the closest even number of rows (because short rows are worked in pairs) to this number without going over. Since this information is amply covered elsewhere, I’m not going to go into a short-row tutorial in this installment (Bonne Marie Burns wrote a great one for Knitty’s Summer 2003 issue, for example). But like with a belly, bust short rows should be added in a particular place to avoid looking strange. I’ve highlighted the target region in orange in the photo below: You definitely want the short rows to be complete before the level of your bust’s widest point.

A good rule of thumb is to start 2”/5cm below the height of the widest point of your bust, but modify this number as necessary based on the amount of length you’re adding. You also want these short rows to reach most of the way across the chest—aim for the longest short row to be only about one inch/2.5cm in from the sides of the piece.

The benefit of this kind of bust dart is that it is easily worked in a patterned stitch with very little visible evidence you’ve done so. It is also quite forgiving of small errors. The down side is that short rows don’t look quite as tailored as vertical bust darts: Since you’re adding length, not width, the bust can bias the fabric a bit and cause the look to be a bit less precise.

I added short row bust darts to the Salina that Crystal is wearing in the picture here:

The look is flattering, but not quite as trim as the vertical bust darts you’ll see below.

Vertical darts.

Rather than adding length and letting the bust distort the front of a sweater, vertical darts add width to the front of your sweater at the bust line. This produces a more targeted, trim look, and in my opinion is preferable to horizontal short rows when the sweater’s pattern allows for it. Recall how to determine the necessary width of your own vertical bust darts from Installment 4:

Calculate the difference in the cross measurement on your front vs. your back: First, measure from side to side at your widest bust point across your back; then, take the same measurement across your front. Keep in mind that the stretchiness of the knit fabric will accommodate up to an inch/2.5cm or so of difference.

If you have more than an inch/2.5cm of difference in these measurements you should probably add vertical darts. Note that these will be in addition to any increase rows worked for the waist shaping! To determine the total number of bust dart increase rows, multiply the difference in your front and back measurements by the stitch gauge. Since you’ll be adding 2 stitches per increase row, divide by 2 and round down. This is the number of additional increase rows to work over the existing waist shaping rows.

Like horizontal bust darts, you’ll want the vertical darts to be completed by the fullest point of the bust. To calculate your rate of increase, multiply the number of inches between the first increase row for waist shaping and the fullest point of the bust by your row gauge. Divide this number by the total number of increase rows—that is, any already included in the pattern’s waist shaping plus the bust dart rows you just calculated. Round down.

Then, you must calculate where you want the darts to fall. If you’re already using vertical darts for waist shaping, simply continue adding stitches along the existing dart lines. If the sweater you’re knitting doesn’t already have vertical shaping, break up the stitches on the front of the sweater by placing a marker so that 25% of the stitches fall before the first marker, 50% of the stitches fall between the markers, and 25% of the stitches fall after the last marker. (Take the number of stitches on the front piece of your sweater and divide by 4. Call this number n. On the last row before adding shaping, place markers as follows: Work n stitches, place marker, work 2*n stitches, place marker, work n stitches. If the number doesn’t divide evenly by 4, add the remainder to the 2*n stitches between markers.) On a RS row, add 1 stitch just before the first marker by performing a m1R; add 1 stitch just after the last marker by performing a m1L. After performing all the increase rows, work straight for 1”/2.5cm to ensure that the width accommodates the fullest part of your bust.

After the fullest part of the bust is complete you can decrease these extra bust stitches either into the neckline (since you should be wearing a nice deep neckline if you’re busty, right?) or back into the same dart line you previously used.

This kind of bust dart adds very targeted stitches right where you need them. It gives an extremely tailored look and is a great choice for busty knitters. Diana added 3”/7.5cm of vertical bust darts to her version of my design Arm Candy.

Can you see them?

What’s Up Next.

I hope I’ve convinced you that shaping is essential to getting a sweater that flatters your shape! In this installment we’ve covered the many ways to shape a sweater, with substantial pointers toward implementing them in any pattern. In Installment 9, we’ll pull together all of the implementation techniques we’ve learned and tackle the ultimate in knitting to flatter: custom sweater design. In Installment 10, we’ll wrap up with some advanced topics and a high-level summary of what we’ve learned.

I feel passionately that you should have a closet full of hand-knits that you’re proud to wear wherever you go. Helping you understand what your own shape is and how you can choose knitting patterns that will make you look your best are the reasons I’m writing this tutorial series. I hope you’re enjoying them—we’re almost there!

To purchase a PDF version of this installment (US$2.00), or the entire series (US$10.00): Buy this Buy all