Welcome to week 2 of our Farrah Top Knit Along (KAL): Shaping your front piece neckline and armholes
Head over here to be taken to all the posts in the Farrah Top KAL
Last week we walked you through the knitting basics, including how to:
Cast on
Work in 1×1 rib
Work in stocking stitch
Hopefully you have had a productive week and have been able to knit your Farrah top up to the armholes without any trouble!
This week we’ll be shaping the neckline and armholes of your front piece and it’s time to learn some more skills! For this week’s steps we’ll be covering:
Casting off (to create the steps to create the armhole shape)
Knitting 2 stitches together (this decreases the number of stitches in your row and if you consistently decrease over a series of rows – as your do in the Farrah top – you end up creating a neat, sloping edge.)
Slipping stitches (we slip the first stitch of each row so that your armhole edge is nice and neat)
Joining a new ball of yarn
These techniques are used over and over again in a lot of our patterns so once you have mastered them, the world is your oyster. Right! Let’s get to grips with these techniques.
Before you begin decreasing, check you have knitted in stocking stitch until your front reaches the measurement stated in the pattern.
1. Casting Off
2. Knitting two stitches together
3. Slipping stitches
When your pattern instructs you to ‘slip 1 stitch knit-wise’, insert your right hand needle into the first stitch as if to knit as normal, but then slip the stitch off the left needle and onto the right without knitting it. Do exactly the same when you come across the instruction ‘slip 1 stitch purl-wise’, except instead of inserting your right needle knit-wise, insert it as if to purl. Easy, peasy!
4. Joining a new ball of yarn
You’ll notice that you’ll be working back and forth across your whole front piece to begin with during the initial steps. But then, after a certain point you will swap to working on just one side of your top to finish the shaping of the strap. As you will see from your instructions, this means that in order to finish your second strap you will need to rejoin your yarn to the stitches on the needle, as if adding in a new ball of yarn. Luckily we have a video tutorial to cover that too!
That’s it for this week! See you next week to make a start on our back piece.
And remember, we’ve got prizes! £100 / $145 / €130 to spend at woolandthegang.com to be precise 
We’ll be keeping a beady eye out for your finished makes as well as WIPs on social media – be sure tag us so we can find ya and pick a winner! #woolandthegang on instagram and tag us on ravelry. You can check out a whole Facebook album of WIPs right here.