Going Off Road

 

I’ve been working on my Alpengluehen cardigan, but I ran into a problem.  I was picking up stitches to knit the sleeves and I realized that my row gauge was off.  Ordinarily this isn’t a problem, most patterns have you knit to measurements for the most part anyway.  It becomes a problem in this type of pattern where you pick up and knit your sleeves from the top down.  If your row gauge is off, you will need to either pick up more or less stitches than the pattern calls for and then your sleeves won’t fit.  I’ve tried to adjust things while knitting the sleeve and that doesn’t really work very well either.

I pulled out what I had done and decided to knit the sleeves separately, from the bottom up.  Since I was going to have to write my own sleeve pattern to fit the armscye anyway, I figured I’d just knit the sleeves flat so I could do them at the same time.  I sat down with the pattern and a calculator and Max and got to work.  Several sheets of scratch paper and one badly drawn diagram later, I had a sleeve pattern.  I finished knitting them last night and once I have all 70 million ends woven in to this sweater, I’ll sew them in and make sure they fit.  (I’ll probably also block things first.)  It wasn’t a perfect solution, but I think it will be a much better sleeve than if I had used the pattern directions, knowing that I was off on row gauge.

I’m not going to add my sleeve adventures to my Ravelry notes because I think it will just confuse things for other knitters.  There’s nothing wrong with the pattern at all, I just didn’t knit it correctly and then had to compensate.  The next time you see this sweater, it will be finished!