Thanks to the kind help of a fellow knitter on Ravelry I think that I may have figured out how to do those sleeves.  Now the fun part – I need to actually make them!

My problem had been that in order to get the armhole large enough on the body I needed a 18 inch opening.  I had assumed (always a bad idea) that I had to pick up the correct number of stitches for this opening so that I would be at the correct stitch gauge.  This would mean that I needed to pick up 90 stitches.

However – and this is where I started having issues – with the lovely short row shoulder shaping you end up at the bottom of your sleeve cap with the same number of stitches as you started (90) but at that point the width of the arm needed to be 14.5 inches (68 stitches).

What I have been told – and I think that it should work, is that you only pick up the number of stitches that you need for the sleeve width at the end of the cap.  So… it is 68 stitches not 90 stitches that need to be picked up.  A real Eureka moment!  Now my last concern is how picking up that many stitches will look, will the spaces between them be too obvious?  Will keep you posted on progress!

I have used Barbara Walker’s ‘Knitting from the Top’ for top down raglan shaped tops and cardigans before and it works beautifully.

I have been fascinated by the idea of knitting set-in cap sleeves from the top down with short row shaping and in theory it seems like a great idea. I’m working on a cardigan that is knitted from the bottom up and will have cap sleeves. I thought that I’d see if I could design myself some top down sleeves to make sure that the cap sleeve fits nicely.

However I’ve hit a stumbling block with the maths.. unless I misunderstand I can’t make the numbers work.

If I measure around the top of the shoulder to the underarm area I would need 90 stitches, which includes picking up the bound off stitches at the underarm. So far so good – now if I follow the Barbara Walker method you take 1/3 of the stitches centered at the sleeve top and work short row shaping back and forth picking up one stitch each side until you reach the picked up underarm stitches and magic you have your nicely fitted sleeve cap.

Sounds perfect doesn’t it?? Here is my problem … I don’t want 90 stitches at the top of the arm, I want 68. If I have 90 stitches the sleeve would fit a gorilla.

Maybe I need to work a combination of the methods – short row shaping but at the same time decreasing the stitches so that the upper arm diameter will be the size I want it to be by the time the short row shaping is finished and you reach the end of the sleeve cap.

I finished my son’s hoodie yesterday.  He was just delighted with himself!  He likes the Shine yarn so much that he just keeps telling me how soft it is…now hopefully it’ll stay that way.

This was mostly done on the knitting machine but all the edging and the hoodie edging was done by hand.  I have to tell you with this many colour changes I had about 3 hours worth of solid work just to weave the ends of the yarn in.  If he wasn’t standing over me waiting to wear it I probably would have chickened out and left it for weeks.

I am currently working on a piece made from Araucania Patagonia Nature Cotton.  I got a skein from This is Knit several months ago and have been wondering what it will become.  I swatched it a few weeks ago and came up with some lovely results so now you will have to wait for the surprise outcome…I must figure out what to do with the resulting pattern.