Marooned!

Oh, Sleeve Island, you get me every time. I complete the body of a knitted garment, and think that the end is in sight. Spoiler alert for any non-knitters reading this: it isn't.

I added button bands to this and thought I was nearly done. Wrongly.

Really, I shouldn't be surprised. I know from decades of dressmaking that sleeves can be large pieces, and there's no reason why knitted ones should be any different.

One thing which was very different from my previous knitting projects was the experience of knitting a sleeve in the round in super chunky yarn. For Wondrella and Confidette, which I knitted in DK yarn, I used fixed length circular needles of ever shorter lengths as the sleeves got narrower, ending up on 20cm long needles. These don't exist for 10mm needles, and of course thicker yarn requires fewer stitches to make something the width of a sleeve. I struggled with interchangeable tips and the shortest cable I had, until eventually I realised that the solution was actually to use a longer cable, pulled into loops in two places

My method for knitting the sleeves

Another issue was the yarn itself. I'm using Stylecraft super chunky tweed, which consists of four thick strands twisted together. Unfortunately in every ball I've used (I'm currently onto my sixth) there have been sections where either the strands have been poorly twisted, or one of them has not been twisted at all. As a result, I've had to cut out unusable sections several times, which has provided a whole bunch of extra ends to sew in - joy.

The yarn, and an unuseable section

Of course, any knitting project of mine requires a healthy dose of my own stupidity. This time it was the discovery that 10 rows back I had knitted five stitches which I should have purled.

Bother!

I tried unravelling the affected columns of stitches and picking them back up correctly with a crochet hook, but while to first one worked perfectly the second one was a complete mess, so I decided to just undo the whole thing back to a safety line and reknit it.

The pattern has three-quarter length sleeves, but when I tried the cardigan on, I decided that I would prefer full length for winter. As ever with Tasha's patterns, Express Line comes with lots of customisation tips, which included how to lengthen the sleeves.

The original sleeve length, pre-ribbing

Despite all this, in under a week I have managed to complete one sleeve and start the other. On the plus side, I'm far happier with my pick-up-and-knit on this than I was with my Confidette bolero. However, somehow on the second sleeve I have managed to start the knitting in the round section one stitch different from the first one, so there are purls where there should be knits and vice versa.

Whoops

It only affects what would be the sleeve seam if the sleeves had been knitted flat, so I shall just hope that no-one notices, as I'm certainly not going to take it all out and try again!