I'm pretty happy with this

Well, I left off yesterday with my alpaca sweater stretched out arms akimbo with a promise that I would do the big reveal today Today the shackles are off and its a wonder of smooshy loveliness.

But it did not look so fabulous when I first cast off and tacked it together.  In fact the sleeve head was hopelessly too long and narrow.  How could that happen?  Well, I did follow the pattern, almost, but after the shaping (for the underarm bit) the instructions said to knit 7 rows, that seemed far to little so I added some more. Disaster! back to the drawing board

I needed more width across the middle of the sleeve head and less fullness at the crown.  Luckily there is lots of negative ease in this design so it has been very forgiving.  My modifications would not work on something more structured but they did here.  Fistly I got out my tape measure and calculator and worked out my tension to the half stitch.  Then I measures the exact circumference of my armhole and divided my rough chart into three sections A,B and C

A - The underarm. To get the extra width I cut out a lot of the shaping in the underarms and kept it to casting off 3 stitches at the beginning of the next 2 rows and  1 each end of the following 3 alternate rows.  I noted how long the edge would be to this point.  

C - The Crown. I decided to work all the rest of the decreases in the crown part until 18 stitches remained before casting off and calculated how long that would be.  

B- The middle section was calculated last, once I knew how many inches I needed to add to A and C to equal my armhole circumference I worked out the number of rows I needed to work straight.

I planned all this on paper and put in an afterthought lifeline before I ripped out the top section of both sleeves. 

You can see how uneven it all looked still, but blocking is miraculous!

 A lovely tidy edging

And a big sweeping swooshey neckline

As I mentioned before I have in mind a bright colour affection shawl to wear with my new sweater but for now blight does nicely.

The sun has come out At Last, but not too warm for a sweater yet.

xx

c