Now, I know that in the past I have talked about my progress on the sleeves of my aran cardigan, but until now I have offered up no evidence to support all of my blabbing about said theoretical sleeves. For all you know, I could have been making it up, but behold: The Sleeve.
(I twisted the sleeve on my arm so you could see all the cables)
Let me tell you a bit about this sleeve. It all began when I was happily knitting around and around on the body until I thought I could no longer stand it and decided that I had reached the underarms. (I still think a may need to add some more length before I attach the sleeves, but for now I am still in denial.) I was then all set to start knitting around and around on my sleeves until I realized - I hadn't designed them yet. Details schmetials. (Hmmm... it doesn't really work for that one does it.) This is the crazy part, so pay attention. I decided that I wanted my sleeve to be 9" around on the cuff, so I referred to my trusted gauge swatch and figured out that I needed to cast on 41 stitches for the garter cuff and then increase to 56 stitches when I started the cable pattern to make up for the way the cables pull the knitting in. Ok, so now I have 56 stitches just waiting to be assigned a role. I arbitrarily chose some cables that I had used on the body and placed them around the sleeve with 3 divider stitches in between each one (paying no attention to my stitch count) and guess what? It added up to 56!! Wow is right.
I wasn't done yet. I wanted to knit straight until the sleeve measured 5" and then I would increase two stitches every 5 rounds until I reached 90 stitches. Simple enough. I also knew that I wanted the sleeve to be 21" long when I was done. I went back to my trusty swatch, did a little math (using my row gauge this time) and figured out that at this rate, when I was done doing all of my increasing, my sleeve should measure about 19.5" long. PERFECT! I would just knit straight for 1.5" and my sleeve would be done. And so I knit following everything I just told you and I ended up with...
...a perfect sleeve. Thank you gauge.
Isn't math wonderful? Hooray, gauge!
ReplyDeleteI had some happy accidents with stitch counts like yours when I was working on my gansey.
Daaaaaamn! Very impressive. I haven't even finished one sleeve on my sweater, and it just has a couple purl rows going up one side. Well done.
ReplyDeleteyou may be the first knitter in history to say "thank you gauge" usually when I speak the word gauge it's followed by something a bit more... profane
ReplyDelete