I adapted this pattern for both my yarn (worsted weight instead of fingering) and the size (6-9 months instead of newborn). Knowing that the stranded color work was going to affect the overall stretch and size of the sweater (I’ll admit I’m not great at maintaining the best tension where floats are concerned) I erred on the side of caution when calculating how many stitches to cast on or pick up. This worked out perfectly for the body, but I had to employ some pretty aggressive blocking to get the sleeves as wide as they needed to be. (I’m sure this is because, unlike the body, which was knit in the round on a 24” circular needle, the sleeves were knit using Magic Loop so the floats were much more difficult to manage at either end of the Magic Loop. Rather than rework the decreases for my gauge I should have eliminated them altogether. I also should have knit the sleeves inside out.) Unfortunately, my (maybe overly) ambitious blocking for width caused the sleeves to lose some length, so although they were about 7.5” prior to blocking, they ended up about 6.5” long. I’m hoping this will not be a huge issue.
When I was almost finished with the second sleeve I noticed an error on the first one. (Apparently counting to 5 got too taxing for me, so I stopped at 3 rows for one of the color changes.) Rather than fix the first sleeve I chose to duplicate this “design feature” in the second one. (Of course, if I had just gone back and fixed it then my sleeves would have ended up just a little bit longer…)
This sweater was knit with a US 8 needle. I used a US 10 to bind off.
CO 104
Length from CO to arm hole: 7.5”
Height of sleeve opening: 4.25” (less after shoulder overlap)
Total length: 11.75”
Circumference of body: 22”
PU 40 for sleeve
Dec every 6 rounds 4 times
Sleeve length: 7.5” (ideally)
Circumference of sleeve: 8.5” (ideally)