You’ve probably heard of “Sleeve Island”, that mystical place knitters are transported to when the time comes for knitting sleeves. Some visit because they find sleeve knitting boring or monotonous. Some visit because knitting two of the same thing causes them anxiety.
There’s really only one time I want to be whisked to Sleeve Island and that’s while knitting top-down sweaters. I’m good through the yoke and the body, but when it’s time to knit the sleeves, I go into full avoidance mode. I don’t find it boring, or anxiety-inducing. My problem–I can’t stand having the whole body flopping around while knitting sleeves.
It’s a pretty particular hang up, I’ll grant you that.
Knitting Sleeves Separately
I don’t knit a ton of top-down sweaters, in part because of the sleeve situation. But a few years ago, I decided to try reverse engineering the process of a bottom-up sweater to apply. I did it first in my Iðunn Sweater, though I didn’t mention it in my blog post for some reason. And I am doing it now in my Arachne sweater.
The process is pretty simple and not really revolutionary, but if you, too, hate having a ton of fabric flopping around while you knit a sleeve, here’s how I do it.
I start with making sure I know exactly how many stitches I need. When I knit my Iðunn sweater, I only saw the number of stitches to pick up and knit down. I accidentally left off the number that were supposed to be cast on and eventually sewn together with the stitches bound off for the underarm. This didn’t break the sweater, but it made that section a bit tight.
Then I just cast on with another yarn. In this case I used a bit of cotton yarn that’s not fuzzy and will be easy to pick out. After that, it’s just knitting the sleeve as written in the pattern.
Once it’s finished, just Kitchener stitch (graft) the sleeve to the body! That’s it. Except you get to do it all over again.
Yeah, the grafting doesn’t happen quite that fast. But it meant that I only had a sweater body plus a sleeve in my lap for maybe 20 minutes. I’ll take it.
Would you try something like this? Or do you have your own dramatic avoidance behavior trick?
I’ve done that! I’ve also knit the yoke and then the sleeves flat and then the body last. I’ve also knit the yoke and body and knit the sleeves from the bottom up and grafted the live stitches back onto the yoke. Because I share your particular aversion to knitting the sleeves onto the big sweater middle.
It’s just no fun! I really could just flip the pattern upside down but I never remember to do that.
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