Jon's Knit Blog

Not Another Sleeve!

So this is what I decided to play with today. I'm ideally going to have this sweater done by October 15, which is the recipient's birthday. So I have time, but I still want to get done soon-ish, especially given everything else I'm working on right now. And everything I have "on deck."

The hardest thing about this sleeve wasn't knitting it. It was figuring it out, especially since it's a home-made pattern. The nice woman at the LYS "helped" me figure it out when I bought the yarn. Some help she was. Her cuff was 96 stitches, which would have been around 11 1/2 inches -- WAY too big. So I cut it down to 62 stitches. After two inches of ribbing on US6's, I was ready for the US8's, same as the main body. Difference between the back of the sweater and the sleeve? No increases in the back. Lots of increases in the sleeves. One every other row, to be precise.

Only I had never done increases in a 2x2 rib-based pattern before. So I had to do some playing. And I made a swatch, just to see how the increases would best work. I decided before swatching that I wanted to increase on the WS so that I could increase into the knit stitches rather than purl. It just made more sense... I'm leaving two knit stitches on each side so I can mattress stitch it together when I'm done, and then I wanted the increase to be there in the purl. So it just made sense: increase each side every WS row.

The question then became which increase to use. I tried a M1 increase first (lift the strand between the stitches in the row below and knit into it). The big Vogue Knitting book says this is a "nearly invisible" increase. Not when I knit it! It gets very holey (Maybe I wasn't twisting the stitch properly?). So I tried a bar increase (K1, K1B into the same stitch) and that looked a lot better, so I kept it up, and then just added knit stitches into the bunch when there were enough purl stitches to still maintain the rib.

And I think it looks pretty good so far:

OK, 124 rows to go... and at least there's no cap shaping for me to have to frog...

If I had a cat, I'd insert a photo of him or her at this point. I will tell you that my sister has a cat named Maggie. Apparantly after Maggie Simpson. Me, if I had a cat named Maggie, she'd have been named for Maggie the Cat, of Tennessee Williams' fame. However, if I actually did have a cat, he (or she) would probably have a Shakespearean name. When my parents got a brother and sister cat, I suggested "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" but was shot down in favor of "Bialystock and Bloom". If I had a cat? Ophelia, perhaps. Or maybe Iago. That'd be fun... a lithe, secretive black cat named Iago. Damn allergies! At least I'm not allergic to wool. I think I might be allergic to mohair, though. That's one reason we haven't seen the BGWA much lately.

Posted by Jon at June 30, 2004 05:29 AM