A cinch

Snork.

Parcel has set-in sleeves; however, the pattern does not instruct you to knit flat sleeve caps and then sew these in, as one might expect with set-in sleeves. Instead, you pick up stitches around the armscye, and then knit the sleeve from the top down, using short rows to shape the sleeve cap. Very clever way to avoid setting in a sleeve with seaming, if you're averse to such things.

Me, I have no strong feelings in this department, but I decided to go ahead and follow the pattern, since learning a new technique is always a good thing, plus with the cable detail, deviating from the pattern would require some thought and rejiggering of things. While that probably would have been worthwhile mental exercise, I decided this time I'd rather learn something new than do a whole bunch of work to avoid learning something new.

So I did my pick up and knit around the armscye, started working the short rows, and then I noticed something.


See that? A little line of eyelets began appearing as I worked the short rows. Something about my technique was causing the stitches to get pulled out of shape. It happened on both sides:


It wasn't a general problem with the way I picked up and knit, though, since it didn't happen anywhere where short rowing wasn't happening.

Now, the pattern does instruct you to not work the wraps, and you may have noticed from those shots that I did indeed work the wraps anyway - I decided that the "attractive seam line" the wraps would end up forming would bother the everloving snot out of me if that 'seam' didn't go all the way around the sleeve, which it wouldn't, since there are stitches at the shoulder that are not worked using short rows. Maybe the unworked wraps would have hid the holes?

I'll never know unless I knit the sweater again, because my solution was to cinch those holes shut:


Once I'd finished all the short rows, I went around to the wrong side of the fabric and started easing the slack out of the stitches and into the running yarn, working all the way around the armscye. The only tricky bit was working through the cable cross at the shoulder. In the end, I ended up with inches and inches of extra yarn at the tail where I'd started the pick up and knit.

The result?





No more holes!

I did that for both sleeves. I'm nearly done the second sleeve. From there, I'm a neckband and weaving of ends in away from blocking.

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