Vine Lace Cardi

As you can see, its getting bigger! It measures 14 inches long now and I'm ready to divide for armholes. The original plan was to add raglan sleeves and knit the whole thing in as close to one piece as possible. I've never designed raglan shaping, so I pulled out Deborah Newton's Designing Knitwear.* In the section on raglan sleeves, she says something about raglan sleeves being some of the most difficult to design successfully. Being a sensible Pink Lemon who doesn't really know how her handspun will react to repeated froggings, I made a hasty retreat from the raglan battlefield and will now be making set in sleeves. But wait, you say, set in sleeves are also difficult what with the matching up of the armsceye and sleeve cap and the curves that must be carefully eased into place. Yes, dear reader, that's true, but the Pink Lemon has designed for set in sleeves before and while they are scary, Ms. Newton has a set of 7 or 8 rules for designing set in sleeves - and they work! Raglan sleeves have no set of rules - its like swimming with pirhanas. Set in sleeves are like swimming with baby pirhanas with no sense of direction - yeah, that's it.

So last night, along with my calculator of knitwear design, a bag of M&M's (have you seen the Easter one's? They have sheep!), and the ever helpful Finn doggy, I figured out armsceye shaping and most of the sleeve cap shaping. Usually Ramius is the one to help me with sweater design, but he was napping and Finn was pretty sure he could be helpful and he smelled food, so he volunteered for the job. (Yes, I am aware that chocolate is poisonous to dogs. He didn't get any.)

*Designing Knitwear is my favorite book about designing for knitting. It is full of helpful tips for all kinds of styles and shapes, if you can get past the sample garments - the book was published in the early 1990's, so you can imagine the kind of large shoulder pads and even larger drop sleeve measurements. The technical information in this book is timeless and useful for any style of knitwear design, IMHO.