Monday, December 28, 2015

the sleeve works for me!

;-) ok, I'm pretty happy!
In case you're just joining me, the reason I start with a sleeve is because I'm gonna cheat a bit and the sleeve can take a bit of a beating. I'll explain. I have some experience behind me here - this is not my first or second garment...I don't want to bother with the regular swatch, especially for 4 colour fairisle - a swatch would likely take almost as much time as the sleeve and I do know that this yarn at T8 for stockinette and T9 for the fairisle rows (when mixing plain stockinette and fairisle, as a general rule of thumb, by going up one full stitch number for the fairisle rows, you'll get the same stitch gauge on the fairisle as the plain rows) my gauge will be something in the range of 28-30 sts and 38-40 rows to 10 cm/4 inch and because a sleeve isn't quite as crucial in fit, I can usually get away with using the sleeve as my tester and making adjustments for length and width in the body pieces if necessary. I made the sleeve using 28 sts and 38 rows, note the long cuff which I can turn back if it's way too long...Not that I'm giving you full license to do away with swatches, use your judgment and know your limitations - if you're not sure of the colour choices, make a swatch first. If you're not sure of how many plain rows you want where, make a regular swatch.
Anyway, I won't bore you with how many times I had to rip out a row because I forgot to change the cam to fairisle or forgot to change the stitch dial from 8 to 9, or had the colours in backwards, but it did show me that for someone with a lot of experience, my time away from the machine - even though I had knit this stitch pattern before, it was a  while ago and remembering things like dealing with the long floats on the Greek key portion: two choices - tuck the long float on the midway needle before the next row is knit (which it does tell you in the Knitwords original pattern), or, latch them up every 10 rows or so if you forgot to do the first one!
I'll make the second sleeve the same, adjust my calculations for the body pieces according to the actual measurements (30 sts and 40 rows) and think about pockets and the hood. Of course, you know this is a cardigan but I've already planned to do a button-up front - need to change it up - kinda sick of zippers for now...

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