Greensleeve

Don't be too quick to cast me off discourteously, but I think I've used this title for a blog post before. As long as I'm knitting green sweaters with green sleeves, however, I reserve the right.

This sleeve took a while, for some reason. I just haven't been able to devote the time to knitting (or blogging about knitting, for that matter) as I'd like. The size I'm making, 42" chest with 2" of ease, calls for increasing every 10 rows 13 times. Pretty easy to count. I had to concentrate during the sleeve cap shaping, but my size is one of the easier ones to follow, so no real worries. It looks kind of stumpy here, but a few inches of ribbing will be added to the cuff edge later.

The bound of stitches on the cap and other parts of the sweater use a sloped bind-off method, where you turn before knitting the last stitch in a row, slip the last stitch worked from the previous row, and then bind off in pattern as usual. I wasn't watching as closely as I might have, and some of these edge stitches got a little stretched before binding off. But I love the effect. It really smooths out that stair-step effect you can get with a normal incremented bind-off. You can see the smooth curviness this technique gives to the cap.

Now, I'm following the deceptively spare and simple instruction' "repeat for second sleeve." After that, it's adding the cuffs and a neck, and then the sewing. Loft, while lovely and hard-wearing, doesn't have the tensile strength for use in sewing seams together. The pattern recommends using a sock yarn in a similar color. I don't know that I have any dark green scraps, so I may be in the weird position of buying sock yarn to finish a sweater...