Laziness is Really the Mother of Invention

Sometime over this past Spring/Summer I started what will become the ultimate cardigan in my closet. It's a nice rich brown which will match with so much that I wear. It's my first adventure with knitting a top down garment and let me say - I love it! Not just because it doesn't have any seams (which is fabulous). Mostly because when I change the shaping up on the back by adding my increases or decreases - since I'm working both fronts at the same time, the shaping is all done at the same time. No writing it down, no forgetting. It matches. I may never knit a sweater in pieces again. I have enjoyed knitting this so much that yesterday when I went to the big box fabric store for black thread (how do you run out of black thread?) - I bought myself Knitting Sweaters from the Top Down by Cathy Carron and while I have to say that some of the sweaters in the book are not my style - she does give the recipe for creating your own, as well as different collars, necklines, etc. Anyway - I got the body of Big Brown finished the last time I had a dentist appointment. I have been weaving ends in as they appear. Then I came to the sleeves. I really wanted to knit both of them at the same time and I knew it could be done - I just had to figure out how. Well it took some thinking and I picked up one sleeve and picked up the underarm stitches more than once before I figured it out. But I'm doing it! The sleeves look tiny but they are 11" around and almost to the elbow now. So, this is what I did - I started at the center of the stitches already live, knit one stitch and then placed a stitch marker. Then I knit the live stitches and picked up half of the required stitches, placing a marker 1 stitch before the end. In this case, the instructions said to pick up 22 stitches across the underarm seam so I picked up 10, placed a marker, then picked up the last one. I then moved to the second sleeve, finding the center of the picked up stitches, picked up 1, placed marker, then picked up 10 and knit halfway across the live stitches. Did the same on the second side of both sleeves. Now - it's essentially the same as working 2 socks with a magic loop. I just have to remember that the shaping has to happen by the 4 matching markers which are all in the center of the 2 sleeves. With a couple of good television shows this week, I should be able to cast these suckers off and finish the neckline this week. That's the goal.