Knit, Swirl! Sleeve Math

As you may know if you’ve been in the shoppe lately and are working on the Knit, Swirl! jacket, there is a potential issue with the sleeve length. Diana discussed this at the last KAL (recorded video available here), but here’s a reminder in case you’ve forgotten some of the details.

We’ll use Diana’s sweater as the example, but the concept is the same for all of the sweaters. Diana is knitting Tangerine Rose in size 1.

Towards the beginning of the directions for each jacket, there is a measurement given for the Center Back Neck to Cuff size. To be sure that your jacket fits correctly, this measurement must be the same as from the center of the back of your neck to where you want the end of the cuff to fall on your arm.

On page 52 of the Knit, Swirl! book, the Center Back Neck to Cuff measurement for a Size 1 Tangerine Rose is given as 33 1/4″. Diana’s measurement is 30 1/4″, so she needs to decrease the length of her sleeves by 3″.

Page 52: Center Back Neck to Cuff

Before we can alter the pattern, we need to figure out how many stitches to decrease for 3″. This is easy, since we know our gauge. 3 inches x 4 stitches/inch = 12 stitches. So we need to decease 12 stitches over the next two welts (35 and 36). To do this we will omit some of the cast-on stitches, rather than decreasing already existing stitches.

Page 54: Sleeve Cast On Stitches.

As you can see on Page 54 (or the image above), we need to increase in both welts 35 and 36. For the 33 1/4″-length sleeve, we should increase by a total of 58 stitches over these nine rows. To make the sleeves 3″ shorter, we will increase by only 46 stitches.

Cast On by Rows: Unmodified

We want to space the reduction reasonably evenly across both welts, taking away the most stitches from where we should increase the most. For Welt 35, rows 1 and 3 we will increase by 3 stitches instead of 4. For rows 2 and 4 we will increase 5 stitches instead of 6. The final number of cast on stitches is shown below.

Adjusted Number of Cast On Stitches for Sleeves

If your arms are longer than the sleeves, you should increase the number of stitches you cast on in a similar fashion.

We hope this will prevent you from having sleeves 9″ too long for your arms! If you need further help, please send us an email or come by the shoppe.

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