Welcome to the Hood!

I've jumped ahead a little bit because I was anxious to see how the hood is done.  In order to get clear in my head how to do it, I read carefully through the instructions and made myself a rough sketch below of the direction of knitting.  The green "S"s are starting points with new yarn, the orange "X"s are where the knitting ends and the working yarn is broken.  The red line is the direction of knitting.   If my sketch just looks like a very poorly thought out map of a corn cob maze, then just forget you saw it and skip on down to the actual pictures below.

In the photo below you can see I have just completed the bottom shaping and am ready to start knitting the "straight stretch" up to the bottom of the "V" where more shaping is required.  You can clearly see the concave curve that has been created, particularly if you ignore the creative mess behind it that is my knitting machine table.

Below is a photo of the first half of the bottom concave curve completed.  

This bottom curve, with live stitches, will be attached to the neck edge of the body of the hoodie on the machine, so having a neat and smooth curve enhances the finished look.

Here's a photo of the finished hood, or most of it anyway.  It's a bit larger than my little little blocking board so I just pinned out flat the key parts for you to see.  The colour is off a bit as it was evening when I took the next two photos, in a different room with a different light bulb - I didn't suddenly switch to a different yarn!

I see that I didn't pin it very straight but I was just trying to get the photo, not actually blocking the hood yet.  At the top, you can see that one half is taken off on waste yarn at a time since for the top shaping we are back to short row decreasing instead of increasing (as we do for the bottom), and as when decreasing for a neck, one side is done and scrapped off and then the second side is done.  The top, live, stitches will be grafted one side to the other to close up the top of the hood.  Imagine a vertical fold line at the centre of the picture above.   Each half of the hood opening that frames the face is to the far right and left.

The picture above is a close up of one side of the hood front where the cord casing is formed.  There is a needle taken out of work on each side of the hood, for me the sixth stitch in from the edge, which creates a fold line.

So that is the hood piece knit.  I have the two pockets left, assembly, and the bands to do.  And a zipper to purchase.

If you have any questions or comments don't be shy!

Nancy