Cutthroat

As I was working on the Frog Prince neck shaping, I realized that my dining room table had become kind of an interesting tableau: A snapshot of how I work.  Clockwise from upper left: My trusty gridlined Moleskine design notebook, which is never more than a foot away from me, even when I sleep (TMI?); Knitting chart, underneath workbag with stitch marker box (In which I would also keep cable needles, if I could ever find any); Pile of unperused mail (not germane to project - just part of the landscape); Actual work in progress; and blue painter's tape, without which I probably could not make sweaters (more about that in my book).

More waste yarn marking lines, adjacent to which I will machine-stitch the neck curve outline.  Notice that it's not exactly a curve at this point - that little corner formed by the intersection of the marking yarn will round out on its own.  More Pure Magic.

Here is the actual neckline stitching, with the marking lines removed.  You can also see that the original live stitches from the top of the knitted tube are all just held on spare yarn.  The live stitches on the left will become the shoulder seam.  Those on the right...well, see below:

Sacrificed for the greater good.  Here I have mercilessly hacked off a section of perfectly sound knitting, in order to make room for the wearer's head and neck.  Without doing this, there would be no neckline, making for extremely awkward wear.  Knitting is not for weenies.  

Lest you think me too callus for ruthlessly discarding pieces of my hard won knitting, I wanted to show you this:  The actual amount of wasted knitting = about 3 square inches.  Not a bad trade for never purling back on the wrong side of the knitting.  Have I mentioned it's Magic?  Pure Magic.