I am starting to be cautiously optimistic that I might just have enough yarn to finish these sleeves after all. I’m doing them both at the same time, but one ball of yarn started off a lot bigger than the other and it’s getting close to the point where I’m going to have to just finish off sleeve #1 and use the rest of that ball to (hopefully) finish off sleeve #2.
I’ve done 16 of 22 increase sets, and, it looks like I just might actually make it, with even a teeny bit to spare. Extreme emphasis on the ‘teeny’ part of that statement – at this point I’m saving every single piece of scrap yarn just in case I have to resort to some hasty knotting to extend that last bit just long enough to bind off the last sleeve. All fingers crossed that it doesn’t come to that, though.
Obviously, I’ll be using a completely different yarn to seam the sides, but the beauty of mattress stitching is that no one will ever be able to tell. Heh. Or at least I guess it’ll prove how good my mattress stitching is (or isn’t, as the case may be).
Oh, someone asked where I got the pattern for the Seabreeze sweater. The body is the Oversized Sweater pattern from 1000 Sweaters, by Amanda Griffiths, the sleeves are the basic dropped sleeve pattern (but using the detail from the sweater body), and the neck is the rolled keyhole neck pattern from the same book. Basically this book provides all sweater pieces as separate patterns, letting you mix and match to customize what you want. I should point out that as much as I love this pattern and like the book, the largest size is only for a 38 inch bust. Or in other words, if you want to try to fit someone with a more womanly figure, a little creative math may be required (Seabreeze, for example, required some of that creative math of which I speak).