Chinese Lace Sleeves

I've been working on the sleeves I cast on for the tutorial last week and I've just finished the lace. The next row will be the ribbing, so it should go much faster.

These sleeves represent a first in Pink Lemon History - this is the first time I've done lace patterning on wrong side rows! I've done lace every round on socks as well as the body of this pullover (since I knit it in the round), but I've never worked lace every row on a flat piece. The wrong side rows were a bit slow going at first, but since this lace design has a rhythm to it in four row increments, it wasn't too bad once I got my mind around it.

I made the same changes to the sleeves that I did to the body of the pullover - no decreasing. The sleeves are 3/4 length (love that length - great for bracelets!) and the lace section bells a bit in the original pattern before being decreased and then increasing in a normal sleeve shape. I love this type of sleeve, but I decided to go with a classic, no frills sleeve. If you've been watching sleeve shapes in fashion lately, the slightly large, gathered sleeve OR a very exaggerated bell that gathers at the elbow are what's on trend right now. The sleeve on this pullover as it's designed is a more subtle (and wearable) bell sleeve, but I don't want to pull out this sweater in a year, look at the sleeve and say, "That's so early 2008!" I've said it before and I'll probably say it 249 more times before I'm done - classics are classics for a reason, so I went with classic sleeve shaping. In order to do that, I not only eliminated the decreases at the top of the lace, I cast on one less repeat in the lace pattern.

OK, After writing all of the above, I just realized that I might have messed myself up in all this redesigning and sure enough, I have - if you look at the picture of the design, you can see that the designer, Angela Hahn, has made the ribbing pattern line up from the body to the sleeve beautifully. In my tinkering with the design and eliminating one repeat of the lace (and thereby one section of ribbing (bad Pink Lemon, bad Pink Lemon), I won't have the ribbing line up nicely. I will have to frog the sleeves and refigure the sleeve (or I could just knit it the way the nice designer designed it instead of second guessing the pattern.) OK, never mind any of the above post - the sleeves are off to the frog pond!