Sorta. I mean there’s 2 of them, they match, they’re attached to the sweater, and the seams are half their previous size.
Can you tell? My armpits sure can.
I was all resigned to classic set-in sleeves for this sweater when I found yet another top-down method in Knitting in the Old Way. P.G.R has you pick up 20% of the sleeve sts along the top of the armscye, slip the 1st st and purl back across, picking up 4 more sts along the armscye. You avoid holes (and all the wrapping, y.o.-ing, and safety pins usually involved in avoiding them) by picking up the first st immediately after the sts you’ve just worked. Keep on slipping, knitting, and picking up, back and forth, and ta-dah! Sleeve cap. So simple.
Great. Except here’s where the “sorta” part comes in: the sleeve cap wasn’t deep enough, so, following Nona’s excellent tutorial, I added 6 Japanese short rows. Adding short rows after the cap was pretty much a half-assed maneuver, there’s a certain funkyness about the resulting shape that’s less than ideal, but this was about my ninth sleeve attempt and I was just really, really over it.
Basically it’s a win, but with added unsatisfactory bits. Like the raisins in what you thought was a chocolate chip cookie.
12 Sep 07 | 11:12 pm
I really wish Vogue Knitting would follow Interweave’s lead and give their patterns names instead of numbers. I happily sped through the body of this little piece of chunky, summery goodness, but the sleeves are giving me a headache.
Usually when I have any sort of knitting question I turn to my friend the Internet, because I’m #16231 on the list, this means Google. In an effort to find out how other knitters have handled the sleeve situation I searched for every combination of Twinkle, Wenlan, Chia, cardigan, Vogue, spring/summer, 2007, I could think of. No luck, either no one in the webby world is as enamored of this thing as I am, or I ‘m a very bad googler indeed. Calling #28… say Chevron Cardigan (if we’re trying to be like Interweave,) or Penelope (if we’re trying to be like Debbie Bliss) might not have gotten more people to knit it, but it certainly would have made finding out how very, very alone I am quicker and easier.
Anyway, here’s the problem: this is a chunky sweater, made out of chunky yarn, and as such it has chunky seams. I know right? Who knew? It’s got four seams total, one at each shoulder and one at each armscye. Normally having these be big fatty seams would be less than ideal, but I’ve made the whole situation worse by knitting it one size too small (I think - we’ll see what blocking does.) I don’t really blame the too smallness on user error though, I blame it on this:
I know it’s sorta standard in knitting diagrams to give the body width at the hem of the garment, but I don’t think this is helping anybody decide whether the small or the medium will fit better. I went with the small, just ‘cuz that’s what I usually wear.
In good faith I knitted one sleeve as per instructions from the bottom up and sewed it into the armscye. Check it out:
Huge right? That bit on the left, by the way, is the shoulder. Not cool. In an effort to half the size of that ridge, I decided to pick up sts around the armscye and knit the sleeve from the top down, something I’d never done before with a set-in sleeve. First I went with Barbara Walker’s method, which has you pick up sts all the way around then begin short rowing, wrapping as you like. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong, but I ended up with too many sts for the circumfrence of my sleeve. I thought about decreasing them away after the short rows, but decided that would probably result in something very wonky, not so much a cute little puffed sleeve, but rather straight across the shoulder and baggy at the sides.
Hmm, what to do? I decided to seek the assistance of Our Lady of Perpetual Ingenuity. In her Kangaroo-Pouch sweater recipe E.Z. has you pick up 2/3rds of the sts around the armscye, knit straight for about an inch, then basically work a turned heel as the sleeve cap. This causes you to widen the sleeve cap by one st each row, while at the same time decreasing the circumference of the sleeve by one st each row, which (hurrah!) was exactly what I wanted to do. The result was underwhelming though.
It certainly does the job, and now I’ve got a smaller seam, but the pattern created by knitting straight and then short rowing seriously bugs me.
Besides, I think the ribbing looks better knitted from bottom-to-top than from top-to-bottom.
Can you see it too, or am I being sorta fussy and neurotic?
So far I’ve got three options:
- Knit the sleeves as the pattern directs, learn to live with the bulky seam, and hope for the best.
- Knit the sleeves as E.Z. directs, learn to live with the visible short rows, and hope for the best.
- Knit the sleeves as E.Z. directs, leaving out the inch of straight knitting in the hopes that the short rows look better flush against the picked up edge.
Right now I’m giving #28 a time-out for bad behavior and spending some quality time with the totally unfussy Big Bad Noro Shawl-Collared Thing. Yay. If anyone has any bright ideas as far as sleeve wrangling goes - please shoot them my way.
04 Sep 07 | 3:4 pm
