Saturday, January 20, 2007

Amazing Week

This has been a fantastic week. I'll try to avoid writing endlessly about my new job. Suffice to say, it's wonderful. I love the place, and I adore my new colleagues. I'm exhausted, but I'm thrilled.

And The Stitch Stops Here is two blocks away. I dropped in after work on my first day and blew my raise on sock yarn and another Addi Turbo.


Koigu, Colinette, Tiny Toes, and Strapaz Cotton Effekt. I've already made socks in that color Strapaz Cotton before. I like it better than Fortissima.

My "Wider-Scale Wyvern" socks with the gusset experiment are coming along nicely (pictures and pattern to be posted soon), and the lower body is nearly done on the tweed sweater. It's time to cast on for the sleeves, but I haven't yet decided how I want to handle the stripes of color on the sleeves. Options include:
  1. Don't worry about making the colors match.
  2. Do ridiculous amounts of math to calculate sleeve length and the placement of the stripes.
  3. Continue the body, learning to do steeks at the arm holes, pick up the sleeves at that point and knit them down to the wrist, matching colors from the body.
  4. Cast on the sleeves provisionally at the upper arm, knit the chest (I'm in love with the look of the seamless hybrid), and then knit the sleeves downward.
I'm leaning toward option 4. What do you all recommend?

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Glad you enjoyed the week.

Cat Herself said...

I have no advice for the sweater - I'm still on the clueless train. I am very glad you like your new job, though. Didn't I tell you that CP is wonderful?

rcclive said...

I vote for #4 - have done "sleeves up from the cuff joining to body at armholes" numerous times, and love the final one-piece finish. Going armhole-down would probably trick me into thinking that I'm knitting really, really fast and making tremendous progress.
Glad you're happy about the new job - will look forward to hearing more about it over lunch some day!

Mel said...

I don't recall your arms being freakishly long, so why don't you just cast on sleeves at the cuff and knit up, doing the stripes at the same interval as on the body? If you feel the sleeve needs to have more length than the lower body, it seems one option would be to insert more rows before the first stripe up from the cuff, but most sweaters are constructed so that the length to armpit is basically the same for the sleeve as for the lower body.

Even in steeked Fair Isle, the lower body pattern from the armpit down is traditionally just repeated in reverse on the sleeve so that they match up and so the sleeve comes out to essentially the same length as the lower body. Of course, that raises the difference between options 3 & 4. If you steek, then you won't really be able to make the color stripes continuous across the upper body and upper arms, since your sleeves will be knit perpendicular to the body. Assuming you want to continue the striping, then either cuff-up sleeves or option 4 would be the way to go.

Anonymous said...

How about just putting stripes closer together and only 7 or 8 inches up the arm, with the rest in the background color?

I've never knit a sleeve top down, so I can't help with that. But, it sounds fun.

Mary

Diane said...

Blew your raise? I think the term would be, "wisely used my raise to support a local business thus stimulating the economy to assist the country from falling into a recession." There doesn't that sound better?

Anonymous said...

If I knew how to knit, rather than Crochet, I would make this. http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=19076.20

--CG