Two Sleeves in Two Days

Now that my Dad has opened his Christmas present (my parents are going away this year), I can safely reveal that it has taken three weeks to knit a single glove for him. It was ribbed, it was fiddly, and it was in DK, which is the thinnest yarn I have ever used.

Now that I don't need to have the second glove finished until he comes back from his travels (oops...), I decided to give my fingers a bit of a break, and go back to the Nicky Epstein Cardigan with Cabled Points. I knew that knitting with chunky wool on 7½mm needles would be much faster than ribbing in DK, but I wasn't expecting to complete both of the sleeves in just two days!

I'd completely lost track of where I was up to on the first sleeve, so I decided to bite the bullet, unravel what I'd done, and start again. I'm really not having very much luck with this pattern.

This time the mistake genuinely wasn't mine, but a printing error. The row numbers for the sleeve had been printed wrongly, and before I knew it I had three fewer stitches than I needed. I made an executive decision not to undo the sleeve again, but instead to make some cunningly disguised increases on the next row. Thankfully, this worked really well.

I also made an executive decision to change the increases on the sleeves. As you may have noticed on my previous encounter with this cardigan, my maths really isn't up to much, and I couldn't cope with cabling on every sixth row and increasing on every eighth. My decision was to make the increases on the same rows as the cables, which made for less counting, which is fine by me!

As it happened, by the time I'd finished the correct number of increases the sleeve was already at the exact length I was supposed to keep knitting to, so if I'd been increasing every eight rows instead of every six, it would actually have been several inches too long!

If you click through to the larger picture of the single sleeve, you can get a much better indication of how this will look once it's finished. You can really see the bright flecks of blue, and the occasional spot of red, scattered across the sleeve.