I had hoped to show the bag I made from the not very patterned weaving I was making last week. I’ve washed it, pressed it and then was derailed by spinning and birthday cake planning so that didn’t happen. The thrummed hat is where I last left it two weeks ago, I’m not cold enough or guilty enough to get on with that just now. That leaves us with the Christmas stocking, now at the tedious heel. I’ve knitted this twice before so I knew before I started that the heel is no fun at all. It’s knitted flat so half of it is purled in pattern and some of the beaded rows are worked from the wrong side. The saving grace is that it is only seventy one stitches wide and thirty five rows long so even if I only do a few rows each night I will eventually get it finished. My knitting time is in the evenings in front of the tv so that isn’t a good fit with reading a chart. For anyone who is wondering how I can say that immediately after knitting 8″ of obviously-charted leg without complaint, well there are charts and then there are charts. The leg is a simple small pattern where all I have to do is count my way around, for example one round was 123456-3-3-3 and repeat. It doesn’t need me to look at the chart, just check now and again that the pattern is stacking up right. If I do that with the heel I have to take it back as soon as I get the right side facing me again.

Now onto the spinning, it seems to be ages since I’ve done any. Recently I’ve been making batts that change colour across the width, the set on the left is probably the one with the best photography and it shows the colour changes well (don’t bother looking for that one – it’s sold, packed and posted). You can see that there are three colours in it with some blending where they run together. When I first saw batts that looked like that I thought that they looked lovely but what would you do with them? Well now I know and I’ll share. The batts I used have three colours in four stripes but the colours are closer together, there’s a purple shade, a light lilac, a burgundy and then the light lilac again. What I’m aiming for is something like this but wider seeing as I have a bigger loom now. There’s a possibility that yet again I’ve run off down the path of “so subtle I needn’t have bothered” in which case there may be emergency embellishment ahead.

I tore stripes off the edge of the batt and set them out in order, a purple one, a purple/pink, a pink, a red, a red/pink and a pink. The narrower you make the stripes the less blending you get in each length and so you get better colour separation but I was adopting the “good enough will do” method here. I spun them in the same order that they fell in the batt, made sure that I spun the second bobbin in the same order and then plyed them to get a yarn with the same colour gradient as the original batt. I had four batts (198g) and I got a little under 700 yards of yarn. It would have been good to then show the warp on the loom but you’ll have to call back next week for that. If all goes well I’ll show you the cake I made too, if it turns out to be a plain shop bought one you’ll know that everything went horribly wrong.

My knitting time has been much reduced this week, someone here has a birthday coming up soon and I’ve been spending my evenings doing extensive present research. I could confidently represent my country on my current specialist subject of refilleable pens for the left handed. I have researched rollerballs that run on fountain pen ink, the drying speeds of various inks and the most suitable fountain pen nibs for the left handed underwriter (an underwriter meaning that you have your hand under the script, nothing at all to do with insurance). I didn’t have to research the effect of paper on drying time because when you’re at school you write on what you’re given so paper selection doesn’t come into it. I think I’m done now, decisions have been made and orders placed. The deciding factor in whether junior could successfully use a fountain pen without inking his hand was having him test drive my old fountain pen. It’s been neglected for at least ten years but a quick rinse and fill restored it to perfect working order. You will notice the lack of smudges in his writing which means that I think he will be fine with a fountain pen of his own. It was pronounced to be “less smudgy than a gel pen” which sounds fine to me given that I’m the one that buys gel pens on an all too frequent basis. My timing is spot on seeing that he has homework this week on being ecofriendly, the example of disposable gel pens versus ink balls versus fountain pens is rather more interesting to the twelve year old male than consideration of nappies.

I had fully intended to rip the Victorian Christmas stocking but when I came to take a final photo to document it the camera said that it didn’t look as shabby as I’d thought it did. It was regraded to “meets expectations” and promoted to main project although this may have had something to do with the only alternative knitting being the thrummed hat. The stocking is ok but the two sock yarns I’m using are a little thinner than the yarns I used when I made this before and the knitted fabric is on the thin side of acceptable. The red is a bit too bright and I’m not sold on the beads so overall this is not shaping up to be my most favourite thing ever. It will make an acceptable stocking but I could have done better. I know it doesn’t really matter because the only time anyone gets a mark for knitting is if it’s entered for competition but I know that it’s never going to be the best it could be. The real reason that it doesn’t really matter is that this will be leaving the house and I won’t have to see it again so it won’t have the opportunity to bug me.

I scored better with the socks and scarf from the last post. It has turned cold here and there have been mutterings in the school bus queue about how cold it is, some people are wearing two pairs of socks in an effort to keep some feeling in their toes. Those people wearing hand knitted uniform socks have toasty toes and have been very appreciative of that, so much so that I would immediately have knitted him another pair if the memory of what long feet he has wasn’t so clear in my mind. The blue scarf went off to school, I had a thank you card and a letter come home so full marks there too. I’m less thrilled with the second version, if I’d stuck to the same draft (pattern) as the last one then I think I would have had a better result. This is a more complex pattern but you’ll have to take my word for that because the warp is too busy for you to be able to see the diagonal moving the other way. I thought I might pull off the multicoloured warp by using a plain yarn for the weft but it looks like it is not to be. It still has the chance to magically redeem itself in the wash but I’m not holding my breath. I may have the fallback of making it into a bag but because I failed to write down the length of the warp I’m not altogether sure about that, it may have to end up as a rather plain scarf. Again, it doesn’t really matter because there’s only me that knows what I intended it to look like. I have learned something, produced a useable object, used some yarn from the scrap bag and enjoyed the process. “Failure to meet expectations” isn’t so damning if your expectations were unreasonably high to start with.

Here are the contents of the plastic bag shown last time – two 2lb tin loaves. I have the same attitude to arty bread as I do to arty yarn – unless you have a use for it there’s no point in making it unless you really enjoy the process. The whole product vs process discussion applies equally to breadmaking as it does to knitting or spinning except that you can’t stash bread particularly well. We eat all of the bread we buy as sandwiches or toast so it needs to be regular in size (so one round of sandwiches is about the same size as another) and small enough to fit into the toaster. I like the look of those monster domes of arty bread but I can’t see that they have much practical application (rather like supercoils). There isn’t a powerful incentive for me to make bread because we shop at a real bakers which is right next to the real butcher who sells beef from cows and has animal parts on hooks in the cold store at the back. Last weekend the timing of other stuff meant that there was no way of fitting in the bread run so I made my own. They were good loaves, I should have slashed the tops deeper and maybe dusted them with flour but they were as good as any I’ve ever made. The first two didn’t last very long so I had a chance to see what they would have looked like slashed and dusted because I remembered to do that with the second two. The second two were prettier but had a slight flying crust because I was pushed for time on the final rise. I think my next stop is croissants and to do that I need to clear the breakfast bar off to create some serious rolling out space. I used to buy my bread flour by the sack then junior came along with his preference for floppy bread. I am hoping that now is the time to wean him off plastic shop bread and if the trade off is chocolate croissants then so be it.

The scarf from last time also came out well. It needed some fixing because yet again I managed to do an outstanding job of threading (not), I had one threading error and three pairs of crossed threads. It would have come out better if I hadn’t woven a foot before finding the third pair. You can’t tell now and that’s what matters. As this is all sock yarn and machine washable it can go to a home where it may not be properly washed so as soon as I’ve written a thank you note it will be going off to school. This took about 120g of sock yarn bits, I have enough red scraps to make another without getting too inventive with the colours, I’m not sure if I have enough for a third without it being too striped.

The latest socks are finished. The black tops are so that he can wear them for band concerts and school, provided that they are visibly plain they’ll do. What happens in the shoe, stays in the shoe. They were too plain to be fun and another time I’ll know to show him a shortlist of yarns rather than letting him pick his own. I used all of one 50g ball of black, I knitted from both ends of the ball with two sets of dpns so I finished just past the gusset decreases with less than a yard left. I used all of the purple and there’s so little left of the blue after knitting the toe that I’ll keep that bit out for yarn ties. Even though it sounds like a big win over the scrap bag in reality I’ve used less than 30g out of it. I suppose that’s better than putting 30g into it but it’s the scarf that takes the win this week on using leftovers.

The thrummed hat is still in the bag, not one row longer than last time. I bet it wouldn’t take an hour of my time to finish it, even so my next project is going to be winding another warp from the scrap bag. I’m pushing myself to finish the hat, I have no other knitting (my inner knitter whispered something about a Victorian stocking but she’s wrong) and I’m not starting anything else until it’s finished. It has to be done because I can’t face the thought of attempting to frog thrums.

I have to admit that I’m not enjoying these latest socks all that much. I let the recipient have the full choice of colours from the scrap bag and he pulled out the first ball he came to and proclaimed it to be perfect. I moved from plain black to plain purple and it’s all so …. plain. I’m at the same point on both socks, just about to start the toe shaping and I think there is just not quite enough yarn to finish them.  This wasn’t a problem because all I needed to do is poke about in the sock scrap bag and I already had three perfect (really perfect, not just first-out-of-the-bag perfect) not-plain yarns in mind. I had a good look in the bag but couldn’t find any of them, in fact there seemed to be a shortage of purple scraps which puzzled me because I was sure that I hadn’t knitted them.

This puzzle was solved when I sat at the loom. This is my first weaving this year, I wound this warp months ago and it’s been threaded and ready to start for weeks so it’s not surprising that I’d put it from my mind. All those missing purples and the rest of the turquoise are now accounted for. This is all sock yarn from the scrap bag, I’m confident that there is enough of the weft to actually finish it, I didn’t do anything radical like work it out but it was a pretty big ball so I was happy to wing it. This is all machine washable sock yarn and I think I already have a home for it.

The other reason that the plain and boring socks aren’t finished is that I have had two projects on the go. They say that a change is as good as a rest and there has been a world of difference between tiny yarn on tiny dpns and doubled yarn on pencil sized dpns. (Excuse the weird crusty fingers, it’s dough, not a gruesome skin condition) This is my first thrummed item, apart from when we have freak weather and it gets down to -17 we don’t really have it cold enough to need that extra trapped air. If I get to the end this will be something that looks like a trapper hat except that as soon as I started with the grey I immediately regretted my colour choices. I’m going to carry on and finish it because it will suit someone somewhere, I’ve learned from it (don’t use wool that matches your hair colour unless you are knitting a wool wig) and with needles that big there is not exactly a lot of work involved.

My other first is still proving and is the reason for the scabby fingers in the photo above. I’ve been making bread by the same method all my life and I thought it was time for a change. These are my first loaves made by the sponge method and it will be interesting to see whether they are actually noticeably different to ones made with a one stage mix. If the kitchen wasn’t north facing and cold then I might already know, as it is the bag is now sitting in the living room enjoying the sun.

If I knuckle down then there is a chance that everything here could be finished next week – unlikely but possible.

My major achievements last week were the purchase of football boots, black trousers and white shirts. From that you can deduce that it has been half term for the growing school child. The week’s shopping turned out to be less stressful than my baking, which is usually not the case at all. I made some macarons which would have been better if I’d not explored the other functions on the oven and burnt them. The setting that the manual said was “especially good for baking” appears to really be “especially good for baking much hotter than the normal fan setting”. Apart from that they were not bad for a first attempt especially after they’d stood for three days and absorbed some of the liquid from the filling. I made a peach and blueberry dessert which looked lovely when I saw it on a repeat of Great British Bake Off but which failed to deliver. I lost faith in the recipe when the first layer (of three) overflowed from the two litre dish that the recipe specified. If I was ever making it again I’d halve everything and substitute a basic crumble topping seeing as mine was soggy rather than crumbly (I have a suspicion that there was too much butter in relation to the flour and sugar). I was on safe ground with the pasta, bread and pizza and they vanished so quickly that this is the only photo I have.

I finished the second pair of green and black socks for Daniel proving that you can get two pairs of socks from 100g of black. With a blatant disregard for my eyesight I cast on for a third pair of black and leftovers. The current black yarn comes in 50g balls so one ball will make a pair of socks. I’ve found out that I don’t have enough light at night to count rows or pick up stitches but the rest of the time plain round and round socks don’t need a lot of looking at and I get on well enough.

I took this photo two weeks ago and Ophidian is exactly the same size now.  It turned out to be a non starter because of the yarn. It’s a very slick superwash and I know that it’s not going to hold a block for five minutes so although I like the colour and the beads I have to concede that it’s a waste of time knitting it into anything lacy. I will rip it and put it back into the sock yarn drawer for another day. It’s difficult when you can’t touch what you are buying because not all superwash merino is as slick as this,  I’ve knitted this pattern twice before with sock yarn but that wasn’t the same super slippery sock yarn as I have now.

I had some fun with the carder, I made a couple of batts from natural coloured fibre and some more from wool that I’d dyed. I have the feeling with these that I’m making something from nothing because I take little bits of fibre and make them into a big lump of something (or sometimes into other little bits of fibre).  I did manage to make a significant impact on the bag of wool this week because I looked in it rather than just pulling things from the top. In the bottom was 500g of undyed fibre that belonged in a totally different bag. As if by magic the carding bag immediately became big enough to hold its contents and stopped slithering lumps of silk onto the floor.

I have to go and root through the stash now, I’ve bought a pattern that knits to three stitches to the inch on huge needles and it’s a fair bet that I have no suitable yarn. I suspect that it’s going to be character building seeing as it’s so far away from what I usually knit, I also suspect that I’m going to be holding three strands of yarn together.

It’s been a funny week, more beef products unmasked as horsemeat, snow closures and the non-appearance of the school bus again. Mr WFB has been in Paris all week and my original plan was to open out the loom on Monday, bring the carder downstairs, ignore all the housework and play with wool until I was sick of the sight of it or until he came home on Friday. I still can’t see any flaws in that as a plan but it didn’t happen at all. I got as far as combing 20g of Oxford Down before it all went wrong

This is a photographic record of my achievements for the week. There’s no Ophidian, no Victorian Stocking, no carding, it is altogether a total failure when measured against my grand plan. What I do have is a pair of stealth socks and a freshly decorated dining room. I’d planned to redecorate the dining room after I did the kitchen in September but I kept putting it off until suddenly the Christmas tree went up. I never intended to be painting this week and I can’t work out now how it was that I came to fall into doing it. At least it is a chore that stays done, unlike dusting or ironing, so although it was a big job I can now forget all about it for another mumblemumble years. I managed to avoid painting the dog, it was a close thing and it took a volley of “nononoNO” repeated at least twice a day for him to get the message that there was nothing interesting to be found in the roller tray. I wouldn’t have minded him getting paint on his nose except that he would have immediately wiped it off on the carpet which would have been a bad thing. He seemed to think that I put the dust cloths down for him to hide his breakfast dog biscuit under, the hiding was fine but I could have done without him digging it back up again while I was above on the ladder.

I have enough black and green yarn (originally from the creeper mitts) to make another pair of band socks which is lucky because there was some serious begging being done and I have promised to make a similar pair for the junior bandsman before next Saturday. All I’m saying is that you need to love someone very much to be knitting black socks in February. I ordered some more black sock yarn (it was on sale, I was weak from the paint fumes) but I’ll be saving it for the summer when I can actually see it. This is not such a big purchase as it looks because they are 50g balls so you need two balls for a pair of socks. If you’re knitting stealth socks then you only need one ball for a pair and that’s what I’ll be doing with the black. I have a lot of leftover sock yarn to use up and I’m hoping that six pairs of socks with contrasting feet will make me feel like I’m winning the battle with the leftovers.

The sock yarn wasn’t my only reward for my week of being chained to a paint roller, I got a new sock knitting bag which came free with some very high class artisan macarons (being French they end with a ron rather than a roon). I believe that the macarons cost about the same as the sock yarn, the sock yarn will last longer but it’s nowhere near as indulgent. My favourite so far has been the white one in the right hand column, the filling was a chocolate and hazelnut paste that was unbelievably tasty. They are not something that I’ve ever made seeing as they fall under the heading of “too much messing about” but I’d be tempted to make plain ones and sandwich them together with Nutella and chopped nuts.

I have the carder out now, instead of having wool week I’m having a wool day. I’ll enjoy it much more now that I’m not looking at what needs to be done and feeling guilty.
 

I’m through with plain grey stockinette for a while so I had a poke through the stash to see what I had that was most unlike a sweater. This is another Victorian Christmas stocking on the left and another Ophidian on the right. I was hunting for the red beads when I found a full packet of brown ones so it seemed a good idea to look in the sock drawer to see if I had yarn to match. This is all from stash, the red beads came from a ripped project but I have no idea what I originally bought the brown ones for. Yarn selection had to wait until I was finished with this week’s big event, the one that had been derailed by my unplanned sweater finishing on Tuesday.

I’ve come clean before about my boxes full of quilt tops and at the time I did say that I thought that there were more of them somewhere. Whatever number I have, I now have one less. These are four inch paper pieced log cabin blocks made from the scrap boxes. I have two plastic boxes that live near the sewing machine that collect all the leftovers, edges trimmed off quilt backing and odd shapes straightened off yardage. I usually have to add some lights to the mix because there’s never enough of those in the boxes. You can add the theme from Jaws yourself, the shadow at the top left tells you that Something Is Coming (da dum, da dum, da dumdumdum)

It was a small quilt top so I was finished before the approaching menace inched close enough to drop his toy on it. On Monday I got about half of it quilted and on Wednesday I finished the quilting and sewed the binding on. I took the time to clean the machine properly, taking the bobbin race out and chasing out the fluff mice and it was time well spent. It’s needed cleaning for a while but because I sew for ten minutes here and fifteen minutes there it never seems worth the effort. Sewing is more of a pleasure when you’re not having to ignore the noises that the machine is making, the ones that shouldn’t be there that you don’t want to hear. Quilting this was a trip down memory lane because I kept seeing fabrics that I recognised, spotting the little pieces of fabric reminded me of the original project. That’s probably why it seemed to take no time at all, that and the fact that it was less than a quarter of the size of a full size quilt.

My last job on Wednesday night was to make two batches of muffins and then I could think about playing in the yarn drawers. It may not be a croquembouche but in some respects it is better because it will freeze and so you don’t need to eat it all at once.

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Tuesday morning started going off plan at the moment when WFB Jr missed the school bus for the second time ever. He waited and waited until he decided that the bus wasn’t coming because of the snow and he came home. As he stepped through the door we saw the bus gingerly going past on the icy road. Missing the bus turned out to be a good thing because everyone that was on it had to walk home from wherever they were when they got the message that school had closed. Depending which bus they were on some walked a mile from the bottom of the hill, some walked two miles and some had to walk all the way home. Those who had to wait for Mrs Morris to get dressed (I was planning on starting my day with a shower) and find her car keys got not much further than the bus stop before getting the message about the closure and turning around for home. The flowers were from a grateful mum. I’m not sure whether it was for my attempt to get their child to school or for inviting them over once it was closed.

My original plans for Tuesday were to start with a leisurely shower and spend the rest of the day working on a project with a firm Thursday deadline. I didn’t plan on spending any time at all on the sweater because I wouldn’t be able to get a photo of him in it until the weekend and Thursday was the more pressing priority. Having the sweater wearer home all day for modelling was an opportunity too good to pass up. The clasps are only tacked on because I didn’t know whether I’d be taking them off and switching to the zip that he originally asked for. This is a good thing because they aren’t in the right place – they need to be set wider apart to eliminate that niggling gap in the middle. I originally thought that I would need three but when I set them out they were too cramped and two was the right number. He’s willingly worn the sweater for real, out of the house, twice now with the clasps and I think they’re staying.

If you look at the photos on the pattern it makes a stand up collar which is why it’s picked up from the right side. I have no idea why I knitted it because that’s not the collar I wanted, I wanted one that turned over and if you turn the original over then as you can see there just isn’t enough of it. The second time around I picked up from the wrong side, knitted it longer with some increases to make the front edges swing further to the front. If you put a pattern in my hand I’m dangerous, I’ll knit it even when I know it’s not at all what I want. The last thing to do was to fill in that gap at the front. I was on solid ground with that because I put that gap there and I knew from the start what I was going to do with it.

I picked up stitches from the right side whilst looping the yarn over the cable of a circular needle on the wrong side. That saved me from picking up stitches on the reverse side. I knitted the stitches I picked up on the front, then I knitted the stitches I’d caught on the cable. I went round and round making a tube that would enclose the original edge of the neck. When it was deep enough I knitted the two edges together with a three needle bind off. I’d seen this somewhere as a way of enclosing a cut edge and I thought it was a neat idea because you automatically get both sides the same depth and there’s no sewing at the end.

The result was a facing where both sides start with picked up stitches and both appear to be the right side. When the collar flips over to show the “wrong” side it looks exactly the same as the right side. I am very pleased with the result and it came out exactly as I’d imagined. It’s not often I get to say that but this time I got it right. It was a pig to knit at the start, the stitches at the back needed to be held on a cable because there wasn’t enough flexibility for me to use dpns but the end result was worth the struggle.

I’d thought I’d be merrily casting on now I’m through with the sweater but the Thursday deadline was still there so new knitting has had to wait.

I’m nearly done with grey yarn, the fifth ball would have done the second sleeve and part of the collar except that I started the collar with a fresh ball. I found a sleeve that I was happy with, it’s the one on the right. Looking at it now it looks just about identical to the one on the left so I can’t say that my full day of sleeve wrangling was well spent. It was less work than it might have been because I took off the sleeve just below the sleeve cap and grafted that back once I’d reknitted the top. The sleeve on the left has twice the number of short rows as the one on the right so there was less knitting in the second two sleeves than in the original.  I have the collar and neck bands to do but there is little chance of getting a modelled shot in daylight until next weekend.

I have been knitting a lot of sweater, some of it multiple times, but I do have something else to show. I still didn’t get around to making a proper icord hanger for the Christmas stocking, it’s always the last bit of finishing that I get stuck on. My current Christmas stocking is about the size of my hand and is full once it’s holding a satsuma. I’ve been meaning to knit myself a new one but so far I’ve knitted three and given them all away. It looks like I have been busy but if I told you that last week I’d knocked off a pair of legwarmers as well then you’d really not believe me. I did do some knitting on both of these, I knitted the black rib at the top of the legwarmers and the heel and toe on the stocking. Everything else was sewing and snipping of someone else’s knitting.

I said that the dog will settle onto knitting as soon as I’m not looking, I went to fetch the camera and came back to find naptime had started. The link between this and the current sweater is the clasps, I went to shop for them on line and then found that I could buy six with an attached cardigan for about the same price as three new ones. The seller said that this was hand knitted which I was not certain about until I’d unwrapped it but it really was hand knitted which made repurposing it so much easier. When you know how it was put together it is easier to take it apart. This was the ideal shape because there isn’t any, there’s no sleeve cap so the sleeves transformed easily into leg warmers with a bit of ribbing added to the top (knitted from the yarn reclaimed from the front bands).

You can tell this isn’t my knitting, there are no floats. Even the three stitch floats across the lice are all caught down. The top back is on the left, the fronts were knitted with the back and they are sitting at the top of the photo. I sewed down where the side seams would have been had there been any, sewed the upper backs together, cut the fronts off and sewed down the raw edges on the sewing machine. After that it was a simple matter of putting in an afterthought heel using the yarn from the front bands and scooping up the live stitches along the neck edge to knit a toe. Both the stocking and the legwarmers are upside down but because the patterns are reversible it’s not obvious. I could have done it with a cardigan with reindeer on but it would have meant more work taking the reindeer off and grafting them back the other way up.

I still have some fabric left from what was the fronts of the cardigan, I’m throwing them in with the washing to full them a bit because I see their future as slip cases and at the moment they are still a bit stretchy. i would do this again, ideally starting with a big roomy hand knitted cardigan with drop shoulders, no shaping and a reversible pattern. The clasps are an added bonus.

The son and heir had gone to Scouts by the time I finished the fronts and tacked the shoulders together so I had a choice of waiting for him to come in or DIY modelling. The addition of the ribbing does make this surprisingly stretchy, it was a bit snug but it was merely sized with negative ease rather than bursting at the seams (not that it has any seams). My head went through the hole easily enough, it will be a smaller hole once I’ve added the facings but there was enough room for me to not worry. The next step was to join one shoulder for real so that I could pick up and knit the sleeve. I did it four times and I still wasn’t happy about it but good enough will have to do.

I want to knit the sleeve down rather than up so I can add inches on at the cuff next week when he’s grown again. It started well enough, I Googled “top down sleeve video” and found two excellent tutorials which walked through knitting a shaped sleeve. I already knew how many stitches I should be picking up because I knew that I should end up with the same as the number in the sleeves at their full width. I had four more than that because my armhole was slightly longer than it should have been (not planned that way, I’m just bad at measuring). I got him to try it on and it looked ok so I ploughed on all the way to the cuff.

The fourth ball finished the fronts and got me right down to the cuff so another one and a bit balls should do the other sleeve, collar and neck facings. There’s a slight problem though in that this sleeve will be coming off. I thought the sleeve cap was right, he tried it on and it looked all right, it was a bit roomy but then these are big sleeves, 18.75″ sleeves for a 39″ chest. There’s something not right about it, the sleeve fits into the body but .. well that’s it really. I can’t tell you what’s wrong with it other than it is wrong. (ETA I have seen the light and think I know what I’ve done wrong. If I’m right it’s only the last bit of the sleeve cap that I need to reknit.) A bit more research on top down sleeve shaping suggests that the method I used doesn’t work well for very big or very small sleeves, generating a sleeve cap that’s too big or too small. Did I stop and think “are there limitations to this method and will it work with this sleeve?”. No, I did not but another time I will. If I can’t be a good example then at least I can be a terrible warning.

I looked to see what a straight drop sleeve would look like but if I’m only picking up the same number of stitches that I need for the width in the schematic then the hole is much bigger than the sleeve. Knitting stretches but if it’s doing it this much then there’s something wrong. To make this work I need to pick up more stitches making the already wide sleeve even bigger or I need to take some length out of the straight bit of the fronts and backs. I don’t want to do that because that’s going to raise the neck opening, to do it right means more knitting than I want to do (reknit the fronts starting the opening and the ribbing earlier, make back to match). My options now are to go back to the pattern, knit the sleeves bottom up and sew them in (thereby wasting the sleeve I’ve knitted and losing the chance for easy extension of the cuffs), knit the sleeves according to the pattern but top down so I get to reuse the sleeve I’ve made or revisit top down shaping but with less fullness.

After due consideration I’m going with the last option. I’m changing the rate of the short rows so there will be fewer rows in the cap and I might also start the sleeve decreases earlier. When (if?) I’ve got the second sleeve right I should be able to snip a thread on the first sleeve at the start of the shaping, unpick a round, rip and reknit the sleeve cap and graft most of the sleeve back on to it. The only knitting I’ll lose is the wonky bit at the top, I’ll save the perfectly good sleeve. I’m hoping that I’ll recognise a well fitting sleeve when I see one, otherwise I could be at this some time.

I’m still a one project knitter at the moment, it may seem that I took a diversion into a Christmas stocking but there is a link between the stocking and Dan’s sweater. More about that next time, I might need a fill in post to cover for me reknitting these sleeves again and again and again.