Adjusting Neck Width

I prefer a wider neck on my top-down yokes, but you may not. In the original, the neck width in the sample size is 23.5” or 58.5cm.

Taybern Light

Neck width easily adjustable and only requires some quick math. I’ll be using inches for this exercise, but if you use centimeters. The steps are exactly the same.

First figure out how wide you’d like your neck to be, remembering that you’ll need to get this over your head. (If you don’t have any idea, try on a sweater you like and measure the neck.) Most adult heads are between 18 and 22” and knitting stretches a bit, so see what you’re comfortable with.

First, figure out the number of stitches per inch in the ribbing gauge. This is usually given in 4 inches (or 10cm), so divide the gauge by 4 (10). In Taybern Light, the ribbing gauge is 31 sts, so I’ll divide 31 by 4 which gives me 7.75 sts per inch.

Multiply the desired neck width by the number of stitches per inch in the ribbing gauge, so if you’d like a 20” neck width, multiply 20 x 7.75 for a total of 155 sts. We’ll have to adjust this because it’s 1x1 ribbing, which is a multiple of 2 sts in the round, so we need an even number. Make this 154 or 156 sts. I’ll choose to use 154 sts.

The original number of ribbing stitches in my size was 182. That means I’ll need to increase 28 sts more. You can do this two ways: you can add the 28 to the original first increase round of 34 sts to get to 62 sts, but my preferred way would be to work the initial increase round of 34 sts, work a few rounds even and then increase those additional 28 sts in the next round.

All of my patterns come with a link to a handy increase/decrease calculator, so this is math you won’t have to do!