Persistent Knitter

I’ve been working on Hardangervidda’s sleeve. Last night I had my husband try it on. He said "The cuff fits great, but it seems awfully big back here". (Back here referring to the area with the needle still in it). Harumph.

I tell him that he needs room to bend his arm, and he doesn’t want it too tight. He said "Ok, I’ll trust you". Then I fiddle with it on his arm for a few minutes, take it off measure it a few more times. Think about it some, then decide I need to compare it with a sweater he already wears to see if it really is too big.

The sweater on the bottom is one he’s had a while, which fits pretty good, but is too big around the chest. You can’t see the left side of the pic, where Hardangervidda is slightly smaller in the chest than this one. So looking at the sleeves, the cuffs start out about the same size, but Hardangervidda’s sleeve really poofs out dramatically. Part of this is that you do a lot of increases right after the block ribbing (before the 2nd colorwork portion), but part of it is that I’m just increasing way too often. Some calculations I did yesterday tell me I don’t want as many stitches at the end as they say I do. Pattern gauge is 6 st/inch, mine is between 5.5 and 5.75 st/inch on the sleeve.

I measured the amount of room between the armpit on the store sweater and the top of the shoulder where it would be on a drop shoulder and that is 9.5". Hvidda’s measurements say in this size I should be at 10 3/8". That’s not too different. So what’s wrong?! Because my gauge is different, I am increasing the width faster than if I were exactly on gauge.

So. What to do?

Well, I’ll be ripping the sleeve back to the start of the plain stockinette portion. I’m going to use my actual stitch gauge and calculate how often I should be doing my increases and to what final stitch count (aiming for somewhere between 9.5 and 10" for the armhold depth) I also know that my row gauge is 7 rows/inch (pattern calls for 7.5) so that will help figure this out as well. Luckily I haven’t really spent that much time on this part of the sleeve because it goes so fast (esp since I got my great 16" length Addi Natura circular). So re-knitting doesn’t really bother me too much. (This makes the 4th or 5th time I’ve ripped back on a sleeve for this sweater though. heh)