With the silly season taking up so much and leaving me too tired to think when I do have spare time, I’ve been getting more knitting done than weaving. For the last few nights I’ve flaked out in front of the tv or listening to podcasts, while getting stuck into the Lime & Violet Raglan. I want it done so I can put all my knitting attention into Sylvi.

A bit of focus got the yoke and neck band done, and last night I started on the sleeves. I’m knitting them downward, from the purple stripe. Why it didn’t occur to me that I could have knit the entire yoke in one piece I’ll never know. There have been too many gaps in the knitting of this in which I forget details (including one that had me forget to go up a needle size for the colourwork – but I’m rather narrow in the shoulders anyway, so I didn’t bother frogging and reknitting, and it seems to have worked out okay).

After I’d reached to the under arm I couldn’t escape the feeling there was something not quite right about those sleeves. I tried it on and the sleeve was clearly too big, so I counted stitches at the underarm point and found I had too many. After working out what went wrong, I frogged and started again.

Second time around the number of stitches were right, but when I tried it on this morning the sleeves still seems awfully big. I remember noting this in the pattern photo, too. (Cardigan to the Stars – down the bottom of the right sidebar.) It’s a rather loose-fitting garment, and I anticipated that modifying it this much wasn’t going to be straight-forward.

I’d given the body a bit of waist shaping, and I love how it turned out. The neck band is a bit high, though, so I’ll probably rip it back and refinish at half the size. But big arms on a fitted jumper are going to look odd, so it looks like I’m going to have to rip them out again, then decrease by about ten stitches around before knitting the top of the sleeve a third time.

In retrospect, it probably would have been easier using a top-down raglan method and fitting it as I went. But I’ve reversed and modified patterns this way before, and I wasn’t up to trying something new. Doing something you’ve done before is less intimidating than learning an unfamiliar method. But next time I’m going to ‘bite the bullet’ and try top-down.

Thankfully I’m not planning to modify Sylvi… much. Just remove the hood. I’m resisting the temptation to knit the body in one piece, because if there’s one type of garment that needs the supporting structure of seams, it’s a long jacket.