Hi friends! We are back and chugging along on the Be Mine Sweater. I hope you're enjoying it! This week, I guide you through how to do the back neck shaping portion of the pattern in a video tutorial. Then I'll finish up this blog post with a few photos of what your sweater should look like once you place the front stitches back on your working needles and then finally bind off your body stitches. We'll go through it together step by step, so don't fret if you're feeling overwhelmed by all of that.

 

Video 4 detailing how to knit the back neck shaping portion of the pattern:

Alrighty! Key things we go over here:

* How to switch the back sweater stitches from spare needles or scrap yarn to your working needles.

* How to rejoin your working yarn to knit the back panel. 

* How to knit the K2tog stitch, a right leaning decrease stitch.

* The remaining directions in the back neck shaping portion of the pattern are ones that you should be familiar with from knitting the front side of your sweater. We have gone over all of those stitches in previous videos.

 

After you finish your back neck shaping, the pattern asks you to place your front stitches back on to your needles. This is where we rejoin the front and back panels at the right shoulder.

* You have 2 options here, if your front stitches are on another needle, you can simply knit these to join your front and back panels. 

* Your second option is to place the front stitches back onto your working needle and then knit across the row. You'll have to place your stitches on the left working needle because these stitches still need to be knit. When you're ready to knit across the front panel, you'll add stitches from left needle to right, as shown below. Once you rejoin front and back your panels should look like the photo below. This is what we are working towards!

* We now begin knitting the right body portion - this is a mirror image of what you've already done on the left side. You'll go ahead and knit an additional 4" or 6" in stockinette as the pattern calls for and then bind off your body stitches, either 6 or 18 stitches per side depending on which size you chose to knit. Here's a photo of what your garment should look like after you've cast off the body stitches.

If you can get through all of this knitting this week, amazing. We'll meet back here next week to finish up the right sleeve. Of course if you need help at anytime please reach out to me at amy@knitcollage.com or cheryl@knitcollage.com Above all else, we want you to have a wonderful knitting experience and be happy with your finished sweater.  So please don't hesitate!  If you're chugging along a little more slowly, that's all good too :) Good luck this week!