Round 87 is the biggest moment of the entire project, where I split the sleeve and body stitches and do the underarm cast-ons.

I had decided to duplicate my techniques from bottom-up seamless sweaters as much as possible in this top-down project, and when working bottom-up, I leave the underarm stitches of body and sleeves live for later grafting (weaving, Kitchener stitch), which completes the seamlessness of the FO. On this particular garment, worked with zero ease and in a non-resilient yarn, having seamless underarms should help me put it on and take it off in addition to being much more comfortable in the actual wearing.

A Provisional Cast-On Is the Key

Working top-down, I would need to do a provisional cast-on for whichever set of underarm stitches I made first, then when I did the adjoining piece, I would remove the PCO and simply put the live stitches on the needle. I don’t know that it really matters whether one does the sleeves or body first, but in this case, I decided to work with the body first. My reason boiled down to the fact that I wanted to work 34 rounds with each of colors 2 through 5 on the body to get to the desired length. If I were going to run short of a colorway, I wanted that issue to be on the sleeves, where it wouldn’t matter as much. I could always do, say, fifteen rounds of those four colors on the short sleeves I had always intended to make. At the very least, I would work the full number of rounds on the body, then split the remaining yarn into two equal balls to work the sleeves with as much of each color as possible.

So I worked across the front to the left sleeve/front raglan line, put the sleeve stitches on a ribbon stitch holder, and did a provisional crochet CO with waste yarn (leftovers from color 1) onto my source needle (in my case, the left needle). Then I worked across those stitches with the working yarn, color 2, worked across the back, and repeated the entire procedure at the right sleeve and underarm. Now I had the body all on one needle.

The Details

When it came time to put the sleeve stitches on holders so I could work the body, I simply slipped purlwise the stitches between the raglan markers to my standard 1/8-inch ribbon stitch holders.

That gave me the correct number of stitches on the sleeves, but because of the relative positions of the markers and the raglan stitches, I wound up with two more stitches on the front than the back. No, I did not, in my excitement, actually count the stitches in each area to make sure I had split them up properly. I was several rounds into the body before it occurred to me to count them, which is when I discovered my error. I wasn’t going to frog because of a two-stitch difference.

As I was working my provisional CO, I realized that I wanted to have an Elizabeth Zimmermann phony seam down each side of the body, so instead of casting on the calculated 14 stitches, I cast on 15, so that I could drop the central stitch and hook it back up * 2 rungs, 1 rung, repeat from * to make the phony seam.

I then worked across the waste-yarn PCO with the project yarn.

I worked across the back and repeated this process at the other sleeve.

Once I finished 34 rounds with color 2 on the body, I put the body stitches on a ribbon (because I knew I would be trying it on) and worked on the sleeves.