Our photo shoot took place at Stow House, a landmark in the Goleta valley. It isn’t haunted, as far as I know, but it’s the oldest house hereabouts, where most dwellings sprang up like mushrooms in the 60s and 70s.

See also the Velma Socks.

Short rows for sleeve cap shaping done using “Japanese” short rows (the 4th method from Eunny Jang’s excellent video: 4 ways to wrap your short rows. I used split stitch markers instead of bobby pins, which seem to fall out. Eunny’s instructions didn’t address the transition from purl to knit, only the one from knit to purl. I found that I had to do an SSP instead of P2tog to make it look good. I am really prone to get confused with counting when doing a long set of short rows. A diagram like the one provided with Dream Bird would be a good plan.

I picked up sleeve stitches as follows: 4 front armpit, 22 front, 14 saddle stitches (I actually made the saddles 12 stitches wide, then added 2 for the purposes of the short row counting), 22 back, 4 back armhole, 1 purl for “seam”. Total is 4 + 22+ 14 + 22 + 4 + 5 = 67. That is a lot more than the instructions for my size and gage would have required (54)!

Now that I’m working the sleeves, I’m using a super-long magic loop, with both of my KnitPicks 47” cables joined together with a “cable joiner.” It is rather cumbersome, but it means all the arm shaping will be the same on both sleeves. (I’m terrified of “second sleeve syndrome”!) Not planning to decrease for a while yet, these sleeves are supposed to be big.
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Just determined that body is long enough, now it’s time for bottom ribbing. Armholes worry me, they are large, as planned, so I have no idea how many sleeve stitches to pick up!
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My gauge is a tiny bit smaller than 4/inch, so 36” fits pretty snugly. I had gotten pretty far down and then had Eden try it on and she requested some shaping. I placed stitch markers under each of her “girls” to indicate where to start the darts, then frogged back to that row.

Each decrease row features a decrease for each dart, and a decrease at each side seam, on the back edge of the “faux seam”. I’m figuring 1 decrease row followed by 3 plain rows should be about right, and I picture doing 4 decrease rows altogether.

Later:
The decreases are too rapid. Trying again with four plain rows between decrease rows, also an opportunity to use the hungry stitch technique to clean up the ssks.