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How to Turn a Sweater into a V-Neck

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How to convert a top down sweater pattern to a V-neck.I love V-neck sweaters, though I think I’ve knit more crew necks, a lot of the sweaters I buy are V-necks. Maybe it’s just because the patterns I tend to be drawn toward don’t happen to be V-necks.

The good news is if you want to add a V-neck to a sweater you are knitting, it really isn’t all that difficult to alter the neckline. These instructions from Basix Knitting show you how to turn a top-down crew neck, scoop neck or square neck sweater into a V-neck, which admittedly is a little more complex than altering a bottom up sweater, but is nonetheless doable.

Yes, there is math. No, it’s not scary.

This is also a great way to learn how V-necks work if you should happen to want to design your own sweater, which is always great knowledge to have.

Have you ever converted a neckline to a different style? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo via Basix Knitting.]

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Comments

  2. There seems to be no actual instructions here, nor a link to the instrutions. Could you please include it? I see one person has already requested this over a year ago, but the instructions are still missing.

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]