Escape from Sleevil Island
Jan. 23rd, 2019 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
janestarzA full weekend of nothing-but-knitting has paid off! I have officially escaped from Sleevil Island. This is the wonderful nickname my knitting friends call the tediousness of knitting sleeves.
I slimmed the stripes down from 7 rows each, slowly to 6 rows each, then 5, and finally 4 rows. At first you can't hardly tell the difference, and it makes for a nice slow change in the pattern of stripes. I hope it works.
And this was the master plan: knitting two sleeves bottum up, because of the picot edge hem and use up the odd dye bath skein first. Sharp eyes may pick out that the darkest of the three colours is slightly less dark around halfway down the arm.
And then: kitchener stitching it all together in the middle.
I'm not kitchenering exactly in the middle of the back, but on one side of the centre-back stripe. It saves me from weaving in a thread or two.
The way kitchener stitch works is that you make a row of knitting by using a needle and yarn tail, so I stopped one row early and made the final row connecting the two sleeves with a single hand-sewing needle.
They always say "don't kitchener too tight!" but honestly, I find it much easier to do with socks. After the two sides were stitched together I manually tightened the gauge on the kitchenered stitches, ending up at least 20 cm more yarn tail than before, producing a very neat line of knitting indeed!
Finally, it was time to fit, take a picture, post it as clickbait on Facebook, get some hilarious comments, and hours of self-doubt. Is it not too loose? Will it fit? How can you tell, anyway?
For the next step, I picked up 367 stitches around that centre-back panel and now I'm going on and on and on in the round. Very curious how the final result will be.
I wish the pattern had more pictures of what was expected, though. It's hard to make it out just from the description.
I slimmed the stripes down from 7 rows each, slowly to 6 rows each, then 5, and finally 4 rows. At first you can't hardly tell the difference, and it makes for a nice slow change in the pattern of stripes. I hope it works.
And this was the master plan: knitting two sleeves bottum up, because of the picot edge hem and use up the odd dye bath skein first. Sharp eyes may pick out that the darkest of the three colours is slightly less dark around halfway down the arm.
And then: kitchener stitching it all together in the middle.
I'm not kitchenering exactly in the middle of the back, but on one side of the centre-back stripe. It saves me from weaving in a thread or two.
The way kitchener stitch works is that you make a row of knitting by using a needle and yarn tail, so I stopped one row early and made the final row connecting the two sleeves with a single hand-sewing needle.
They always say "don't kitchener too tight!" but honestly, I find it much easier to do with socks. After the two sides were stitched together I manually tightened the gauge on the kitchenered stitches, ending up at least 20 cm more yarn tail than before, producing a very neat line of knitting indeed!
Finally, it was time to fit, take a picture, post it as clickbait on Facebook, get some hilarious comments, and hours of self-doubt. Is it not too loose? Will it fit? How can you tell, anyway?
For the next step, I picked up 367 stitches around that centre-back panel and now I'm going on and on and on in the round. Very curious how the final result will be.
I wish the pattern had more pictures of what was expected, though. It's hard to make it out just from the description.
