Goldenrod - One Sleeve Done

It seemed to take me forever to finish the first sleeve.  The lace pattern was easily memorized and I even took the sleeve with me when we went to Charlottesville last Sunday to watch Amy dance.  I even pulled it out a couple of times at dinner afterwards.  When it came to the decreases for the shoulder cap I improvised the adjustment of the lace pattern and had to rip back twice when I decided that I had made the wrong choice.

I did make some modifications to the sleeve.  I knit it in the round, which did pose some challenges when it came time to block it.  I also did not do any shaping of the sleeve until I reached the shoulder cap.  The pattern calls for decreases and increases in the lower half of the sleeve but I really did not want to mess with that because of the all over lace pattern.  The pattern called for casting on 50 stitches, which I did.  I did not join for knitting in the round right away - I worked 7 rows of garter (as called for by the pattern), and then did the increase row.  When figuring out the number of stitches to increase I took two things into consideration - how many stitches I needed to end up with (87), and the number of stitches in each repeat of the lace pattern (8).  I decided to go for 88 stitches (10 repeats of the lace pattern), which meant that I had to increase 38 stitches.  That is a lot of stitches.  I used my iPad App Knit Evenly Calculator by JAKRO SOFT LLC.  It is invaluable when you have to do increases, it will even step you through each increase, which is wonderful, because you know how easy it is to lose your place when you are doing a lot of increases.  To join the cuff I used the tail from my cast on and just did a couple of single crochets.

I was not able to get a really good picture of the sleeve blocking, this was the best that I could do.

I ran blocking wires up the side so I could spread it out and open up the lace pattern, but this left me with two pointy bumps near the bottom.  I'll spray those to get rid of the them when I spray the shoulder seam.  I was worried about the length of the sleeve and the shoulder cap so before I cut the yarn I pinned the sleeve into the body (and was happy when it went together perfectly with no bunching and no gapping) and then very carefully tried it on.  Sewing the sleeve was pretty straight forward.  I turned the body inside out, put the sleeve inside the body and pinned the sleeve to the armhole with the right sides together.  When sewing set-in sleeves I like to start at the top and work down one side and then the other.


Pattern:  Ladies Sweater - 1838 from Moments No. 005
Yarn:  SMC Select Extra Soft Merino Fino
Needles:  US 2.5 (3.0 mm) and US 4 (3.5 mm)