Because I’m working a fade, there was really no point in waiting to do the sleeves until I finished the body, which might be the usual way to work when a top-down sweater is all one color.
Both sets of sleeve stitches were still on ribbons from working the body, so working with one sleeve at a time, I had to get the held stitches and the stitches from the PCO on two circs.
Because of the way all PCOs work, or maybe because of the way knitting in general works, there will be one less stitch when you take out a PCO to work in the opposite direction. The best explanation of this phenomenon is probably on TECHKnitter’s website, where she does an example with our fingers. If we hold up our hand, we have a total of five digits (four fingers and a thumb), but when we count the gaps between them, we have only four. Now, undoing a PCO (or capturing live stitches to work in the opposite direction after we remove a regular row or CO) actually means we’re capturing the loops at the bottom of the gaps, rather than the loops at the top of the stitches we originally formed on our needles.
What this meant for me was that while I had PCO 15 stitches on each side of the body, when I removed the PCO to use those stitches for the sleeve, I had only 14 stitches. I could have left the 14 stitches, and when they were added to the 55 waiting on the ribbon, I would have the exact 69 stitches I had previously designed. However, I wanted a phony seam along even the short sleeves’ underarms, so right smack in the middle of those 14 stitches, I did a backward loop to give me a central stitch for the basis of the phony seam’s dropped and rehooked stitches.
And because I did a backward loop, I would know exactly where to stop when I dropped the stitches to hook them back up again, instead of running the risk of getting into some difficulty should the dropped stitch attempt to cross into the body.
Neatening the Underarm “Corners”
When working sweaters bottom-up with grafted underarms, one has the two ends of the yarn used in the grafting to neaten up the areas around the ends of the grafted line of stitches. Since I would not have any tails at the underarms on this top-down sweater, I would have to neaten up the places where the front, back, and sleeve come together using what I had available: the stitches on the needles along with, probably, the stitches where the splitting occurred.
Once I had the live stitches from the PCO and all the waiting sleeve stitches on the needles (two circs in my case, as my preferred method for small-diameter ITR knitting), there was a considerable gap between the live sleeve stitch and the adjacent underarm stitch on both the front and the back.
As I considered my options, I realized that each live stitch was connected to the adjoining stitch on the sleeve or body.
If I would pull one leg of each of those two stitches onto the needle in such a way that they were twisted, then I could K2tog each to its neighboring stitch. That should take up the slack and close the gap.
It worked fantastically, though with this non-resilient yarn, it was a bit of a struggle getting the needle tip into both a twisted stitch and an untwisted stitch to work the K2togs. But the results are stupendous, if I do say so myself.
Finishing Color 2
Once I worked a total of 34 rounds of color 2 on both sleeves, I tried on the WIP.
As I was working the sleeves, I decided that I was going to trust the designed stitch and row counts (even though I knew my stitch gauge had been a little tight) and not frog, no matter how poorly the WIP seemed to be fitting at the intermediate stages. If this sweater turned out to be unwearable for me, well, it would fit somebody.
I’m glad I made that decision, because the whole thing fit quite differently once it had actual sleeves, even if they were less than 2 inches long.
The other thing I had to keep in mind for this garment in particular is that the working gauges and the laundered gauges were quite different, so “trying on the WIP” wouldn’t really give an accurate picture. I figured that if the WIP were at least close, then the fit of the laundered FO would be an improvement.
Yarn Usage
I finished the 67 rows/rounds of color 1 with 34.70 g left, which is plenty for the neck ribbing.
After I finished the 34 body rounds of color 2, I had 37.14 g left. The extra rounds on the first sleeve took the remaining yarn to 29.27 g, and I had 21.54 g left after finishing the second sleeve.