Designing My Sweater: Day 3

You probably can't tell from the picture, but this sleeve is enormous.

I didn't make as much progress today, simply because I ripped the sleeve out at least five times trying to get it "just right".

Two things went wonderfully right, though:

1. The button band turned out perfectly.
2. The two skeins are not as different as they appeared in the lighting I saw them in earlier, so the sleeves will look just fine knit from the second skein.

My notes on the button band:

I picked up 262 stitches (3 for every 4 rows around) with smaller needles. This gave me 44 stitches before the v-neck on each side, and I placed markers to separate these. I'll be working buttonholes onto these stitches and increases directly after them on even rows.

To account for the v-neck, I increased one stitch after the first stitch marker and one stitch before the second stitch marker on every even row. Row 2 is a "make 1 knit", Row 4 is a "make 1 purl", Row 6 is a "make 1 knit" (right beside the previous "make 1 knit"), Row 8 is a "make 1 purl" (right beside the previous "make 1 purl").

I worked the buttonholes on Row 5. I wanted 4 buttonholes, and I worked a bind-off buttonhole over 4 stitches so that I can use the BIG buttons that I want. Each end buttonhole is 2 stitches away from each end (I'll increase to 4 stitches on the bottom if I do this again), so that meant I had 8 stitches between each buttonhole.

I bound off the button bands (regular, non-stretchy) on Row 10 without increasing any at the bottom of the “v”.

My notes on the sleeves:

Originally, I picked up 3 sts for every 4 rows around the armhole and got 84 sts. I tried several methods to make that work (and ripped them all out after the sleeve cap was finished), but that was entirely too many stitches.

So I'm going to go back and pick up every other stitch. That should work a lot better.