Victory declared! Two sleeves achieved!

I have two sleeves! Mwahahaha!

Looking over my posts (past and present) on this cardigan, I realize that I’ve talked about it, I’ve reported progress, I’ve bitched about it, but I have not properly described what exactly I am doing here. So here it is. The definitive Saxon Braid Cardigan post.

The journey for this sweater started way back about two summers ago, when I saw the Central Park Hoodie pattern (scroll down), but didn’t want to buy the magazine. So I took note of the features I liked, the cables, the hood, the length and the wide ribbing, sketched it out, and set the idea aside for a few months. I hadn’t, and still haven’t, designed my own sweater pattern, and wanted to get a little better at knitting before I jumped in. I’ve knit quite a few top down raglan sweaters, so that seemed to be a logical starting place for me, what with the avoiding of calculating sleeve caps and seaming. I also had to find a cable pattern I liked. I have very few stitch dictionaries and none that focus on cables, so I set out to the internets and found a pattern I liked. (Let me see if I can find the link. I know it says Celtic, not Saxon, but I like the word Saxon better. Ubi sunt, and all that.) From there, I played around with the braid placement. I liked one on each side of the button bands, but what I wanted to do with the back took a little more time. I eventually decided on one braid right down the center.

That was the fun part.

I looked over all of my top down raglan patterns (thank you, Stefanie Japel!) and Sweater Design in Plain English, and an article I pulled off a blog that was very helpful, but I didn’t write down the source and I can’t find it by Google, so unfortunately I can’t point you to it! Grrr! Anyway, after all of my reading, I still couldn’t find the fundamental piece of information I needed: how many stitches to cast on. I had knit my swatch and was pleased with it, I had my row and stitch gauge. Now, how many stitches? I ordered Knitting from the Top (again, scroll down), but got impatient. So I took my tape measure, placed it where I thought I wanted the neckline to be by looping it around my neck and imagining it was a sweater neck (very scientific, I know), writing down the number of inches, and taking my calculations from there. The next challenge was figuring the bust/ arm ratio. I have plump (ahem) upper arms and a not so plump bust, so increasing a fixed number of stitches until I had my bust measurement wasn’t going to compensate for my sumo wrestler arms. (Sumo wrestlers are awesome. I wouldn’t want to meet one in a dark alley.) Both SDiPE and the mysterious article mentioned casting on more stitches at the armpit to alleviate this problem, but didn’t mention how to go about it. So I increased some, about half, of the amount of extra stitches I needed to get my arm circumference at the top of the sleeve, much like you’d make puffed sleeves, but not enough to actually be puffy. The rest I left to cast on when I picked up the sleeves to knit when I was done with the body. I needed 10 extra stitches, so on each end of the sleeve I cable cast on 5 stitches. Make sense? At least that’s how I puzzled it out. So far, it looks like my sleeves are going to fit fine.

With the cast on figured out and the sleeves taken care of, I just knit back and forth, one braid on each end and one in the middle of the back, increasing at the sleeves, until I had my bust circumference, separated the sleeves from the body and kept knitting the body down to the hem. I did add a little waist shaping to nip it in and get rid of some of the bulk of the cardigan.

I’m designing this bit by bit, and some of my decisions aren’t final. Most depend on how much yarn I have left, like how long the ribbing at the bottom is going to be. I put the stitches on waste yarn (along with the stitch markers I need for other projects, like a doof!) to wait until the rest of the main sections are knit. Then I’ll evaluate how much yarn I have and how much ribbing I can squeak out of it. I want a wide ribbing, like a 3×3 or 4×4, but I haven’t decided yet.

The cuffs got the same treatment (both of them!). Right now they reach my wrists, so my arms are covered, but I like overly long sleeves. I’d like them to go to about my knuckles. Again, it all depends on the yarn amounts. (So much depends upon… yarn amounts. I’m not the first to make w.c. williams rotate in his grave.)

With the sleeves as done as they’re going to be for now, I picked up stitches for the hood. I’ve never knit a hood before, not even following a pattern, so this could get funny. As in cackling maniacal laughter at 3 am, ripping out the offending hood for the fifth time funny. I cast on a large amount of stitches on purpose for having a hood, so I decided not to increase any more in the hood, and just knit straight up. Is this a huge mistake? Am I setting myself up for hood doom and failure? If I am, please don’t sit there and spray your coffee all over your monitor with your own wild and uncontrollable laughter, give a girl a break and tell me.

As you can kind of see in the top photo, picking up stitches from a knit and purl pattern at the cast on edge made a funny… ridge I guess. I keep saying that this late in the game I don’t care. I really don’t. Nope. Doesn’t bother me at all. Not in the least. Know what else doesn’t bother me?

This

It’ll get covered by the hood 99% of the time, right? Right?

Le sigh.

Hey H, learn to knit!