Sometimes when you knit yourself into a hole it's not nearly as bad as you thought.

Yes, we're still on the mess I made with the Chinese Lace Pullover. I didn't frog the sleeves or decide to go the distracting pom pom route on the raglan seams. I decided to redesign the sleeves as set in sleeves rather than raglan, going completely around the big problem I'd made for myself rather than solving it head on. I got out the paper, pencil, calculator and chocolate and sat down to figure sleeve cap and arm hole shaping, but then I got hit in the head with one of those giant idea lightbulbs!

A long time ago, in a blog entry far, far away, I knit a sweater that I referred to as Gryffindor Mourning. (Jaeger, who designed the sweater, called it Ronnie - it's in JB34 if you're curious.) I love that sweater and wear it all the time. The sleeve cap and arm hole are done beautifully! I'd even been thinking about knitting it again in the Dream In Color Classy in another colorway since it's a simple shape that would look good in a handpainted yarn, with the one change of making it longer (that's the only thing I wish I had done differently on this sweater - the sweater/jeans gap is a bit annoying). The great thing is, it's knit at essentially the same gauge as the Chinese Lace Pullover. (22 stitches over 4 inches versus 22.5 stitches over 4 inches = 1/8 stitch per inch difference = close enough for me - I mean did you see what a mess I made for myself on this design? 1/8 stitch is pretty much nothing at this point.) I pulled out the pattern book to see if this would work and as it turns out, the Knitting Goddess was smiling on me - the bodies of the two sweaters had the same stitch count! The sleeve of the Chinese Lace Pullover as the pattern is written is a different stitch count from the sleeve of the Jaeger pattern, but since I'd already messed around with the sleeve stitch count, I could increase to pretty much any number I wanted to, so I fixed it so the sleeve of my Highly Modified Chinese Lace Pullover would come out with the correct numbers and off I went. No paper, no pencil, no calculator needed! (Chocolate is always necessary and was possibly a large part of the victory dance that occurred when I figured out that this was going to work. Caleb also assisted in the victory dance, but if it involves dancing or chocolate, he's there, regardless of the reason.)

As you can see from the picture above, I'm well into the sleeve cap shaping. I know I've been a bit of a one trick pony on this sweater on the blog - usually I'm knitting on 10 different things at once - but I really want to get this done before it gets really warm here (and before I forget what I'm doing since I've changed so much around), so if you'll bear with me on this, I hope to get this sweater done this week.