Sew Sleeves Correctly

A lingering project with a blown deadline is a scenario for subpar knitting. When the knitting gets tough, slow down. A case study for you:

The Afghans for Afghans deadline for donations had ended a month ago. In a fit of self-loathing, I finished the last three inches of the second sleeve, which had languished on my desk like an unpaid bill. I grabbed my tomato pincushion and sewed that sucker in place faster than you could say “You’re such a disorganized and flaky knitter.”

Done done and DONE! Doesn’t it look just GREAT? Isn’t it just the most complete thing you ever saw?

Look closer, friends.

I sewed the sleeve on, sure: INSIDE OUT. The whole sleeve, stitched for the ages, wrong.

I can totally believe that I would do something like this. But still. I can’t believe I did this!

The Seamy Underside of Seaming Undersides

Before I sewed the SLEEVE IN WRONG, I took a couple of photos to show the difference between knitting a sleeve flat and knitting it in the round.

Sleeve 1: Flat knitting at bottom, Sleeve 2: in the round up top.

I worked Sleeve 1 back and forth, flat, because I couldn’t find two circular needles of the same size. Sleeve 1 was sort of tedious on the wrong-side rows, because the fun of these rambling cables is scheming out how they’re going to wander around. It was somehow tedious to be flipping back and forth, right side, wrong side, positive, negative. Ech!

Sleeve 2 indeed cranked a lot more pleasantly than Sleeve 1. I worked the increases on the underside of the sleeve, where they appear in a flat-worked sleeve, and it turned out just dandy. I shifted the cabling away from the underside of the seam, to minimize bulk and also to minimize the eventuality of a bunch of creepy semi-felted cables under there once an Afghan child wears this thing.

The additional bonus of working Sleeve 2 in the round was that there’s no seam along the underside. I don’t mind sewing up knitting (when I DO IT CORRECTLY, I mean), but there is a pleasantness to this particular sleeve when it’s not interrupted by the seam.

Blocking

Just want to show how extreme a difference blocking can make.

Pre-blocking, Sleeve 2 was very, very skinny. I blocked it by soaking the sleeve a while, then running two blocking wires inside and pinning them as far apart as was sensible.

Conclusions

Whining aside, I actually loved making this sweater.

I wondered how the set-in sleeve would look with a bunch of random cables, and I was relieved that it seemed to work OK. When the CORRECT SIDE SHOWS, I mean.

In case anybody is wondering if I actually redid the sleeve, I promise I did: 

No sense driving some kid crazy with this thing.