Preparation: chart

Before you start knitting, you should make yourself a chart to guide you as you work. Here's how.

Step 1: Start with a piece of graph paper and draw out the shape of the front of your sweater. You can use any plain pattern to help with this. I like a book "The knitter's handy book of sweater patterns" for this, but you can also do it based off of your body measurements. For example, I am short and have a large bust. I decided not to do any waist shaping to simplify things, so my sweater front is 21" wide (42" around total) and from hem to underarm is 13". I will pick up around the bottom and add some ribbing to lengthen it later.

Here is what your basic sweater shape should look like. I used one square per inch to help me later.



Step 2: Decide how wide your diagonal lines will be. Pick something that divides evenly into your sweater width. I chose to try to match the original, so I started with 7" strips. That means I have three starting along the bottom of my sweater. I marked them like this. You may notice that the diagonal doesn't quite match up with the neckline. I will deal with that later, I haven't decided how. That part will probably be ribbing.



I like to label these diagonal strips, although I forgot to do it in the picture. My chart has six diagonal stripes, so starting at the lower left corner that is Strip 1, then strip 2 above it, then 3, 4, 5 and finally 6 is at the upper right shoulder.


Step 3: Decide how tall you want your vertical sections within the diagonals to be. I looked at the original and decided it looked like about 2" so that is what I chose for my own sweater. Mark them on your graph like this



Step 4: Mark each section with the direction as a reference for later. The original sweater has alternating sections. Some sections go side to side and some go top to bottom. It looks great with a gradual color changing yarn. You can skip this if you want and do the entire diagonal section with the same (I would probably choose top to bottom). In that case you can skip step 3 above too. Anyway, here's how to do step 4



That is your finished chart. You will use this chart to tell you how to make your diagonal sections.