Are you laughing? Did your waist disappear a long time ago? Is your waist being taken over by an expanding muffin top like mine is? The good news is you can make a waist in your sweater even if you don’t have one. It’s easier than dieting!!
You know where your natural waist is. It’s the indent when you bend to the side. But we are not concerned with your natural waist.
What we want to do is look in the mirror and see where the narrowest part of our torso is. We’re going to call that our sweater waist.
We want to create a curve in our sweater. It doesn’t matter if this curve is at your natural waist, several inches above your natural waist or right under your bust. If you are working standard waist shaping with the sweater nipping in and then out again to create the curve, you need to establish where this sweater waist is.
Do you remember when jeans came right up to your waist? I think they are making a comeback. The waist band of the jeans sat just above your waist (back when that was the narrowest part). We want to use this idea of the waist band for our sweater.
You want to nip your sweater in and then have one or two inches of straight knitting just above your sweater waist. The BOTTOM of this straight section of knitting sits at your SWEATER WAIST. If in any doubt, high is better than low.
I don’t look like this schematic. My sweater waist is higher. Here’s a sweater with waist shaping where the straight section is sitting just above my sweater waist (several inches above my natural waist).
Here’s a look at the shaping at the side of this sweater. I didn’t do a lot of shaping. I took the waist in about 1 1/2″ (4cm). I think you can see the straight section clearly. It’s a good 2″ (5cm) deep. I have had this sweater for quite a long time. Now I only do the straight waist section 1″ (3cm) deep because since knitting this sweater my waist has moved up a little more, ha, ha. How does this happen?!
If you have a straighter torso (with a belly), high waist shaping really does work. You just have to do the nip in and out very quickly with a 1/2″ (1.5cm) straight section. Think empire waist.
Putting in waist shaping will make all your sweaters look better. Putting the curve in the right place can create a sweater that flatters your figure.
Where is your sweater waist? Can you be brave and stand in front of the mirror and give it a good look? Did you do it? Leave a comment.
Thanks for reading,
Deb
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