Caitlin - the sleeve

The thing that drew me to Caitlin was the colorwork on the arms. Its so beautiful!!! I was so excited to begin it. I did have a couple of false starts at first. I don't know why it was so hard for me to grasp the concept of how to do the colorwork in the round. I had to rip it out three times. All because I was double-knitting. Now I have never had the desire to learn how to double-knit, so it is pretty funny that I learned totally by accident. I can say two things about double-knitting. A) Its not as hard as it might appear when you are watching someone do it (a la Knitty Gritty) and B) I still don't want to ever do it. I was merrily knitting along thinking to myself, its really weird that this isn't ribbing like it should, I'm only seeing one color on the front and the other color on the other side, and man did I make a mistake in picking this pattern because these arms are going to be SO hot because this fabric is turning out really bulky. It was after I ripped out (for the third time, did I mention that?) that I realized I was doing it completely wrong and finally got the hang of it. After I got into it, goodness gracious did I love it all over again. Here is what it looked like when I finally got a little bit into the pattern.



I started out doing this magic loop method. I just wasn't willing to pull out the DPN's, and I wanted to try out magic loop to see how I liked it. I really enjoyed it at first. It was easier than DPNs I think, and similar to doing it on two circs. It just still seemed to be taking me longer than I had hoped.



I finally made it through the colorwork, with some minor problems with reading the colored chart. Some of the colors are just so similar, unless you knit in a brightly lit spot, it is easy to screw up the chart. I'm kinda sad, because I missed some of the pretty red down in the middle of the pattern, but I didn't get sad enough to rip it out and fix it. So I just noted on the chart what colors I had actually used so I could duplicate my error on the second sleeve. I will maybe toss in a bit of extra red in the yolk maybe, but I'm not completely sold on that idea either. But here is what it looked like almost to the end of the 50 some rows of colorwork.


Not too shabby I don't think. Goodness the ends I have to weave in. We won't speak of that again.

I really like the way it turned out. The colors are very me, with the purples and greens.

Of course, then the great fall of 2008 happened and my knitting came to a screeching halt.

My friend Kristin did her sleeves in the round on 12" circulars, which is a FANTASTIC idea. I swear, that woman is like a knitting goddess or something. When I tried to pick this back up to knit again (because I realized that I was becoming quite cranky and that the Ravatar that my friend Deb had that said "I knit so I don't kill people" is actually quite close to the truth for me), I found that the magic loop was killing my elbow. And DPN's were just not an option. Those really would have hurt me. I had to find a way to keep my right arm still and do all the motion with my left hand. I ordered myself four pairs of 12" circs. Yes, I only needed ONE pair for this sweater. But you know, a girl can never have too many small circumference circs I am finding. Kristin told me this, but I failed to listen immediately. I now know that what she says is probably true. So I ordered some in size 0 11", size 1 11", size 6 12", and size 7 12". I got them in yesterday and put the sleeve on them today. Again, I owe Kristin dinner. This sleeve is literally flying off the needles. I am probably 3/4 of the way done with it at this point, and in fact I can hold my right arm completely still and make my left arm do all of the work. We won't talk about the knot that I now have in my left shoulder. Its a small price to pay for sanity.