It will eventually sprout two sleeves, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. I finished the back on Saturday and decided to keep the momentum going (even though I really just wanted to finish the first of the Leftover Socks, which is only a few rows from done). I cast on for the sleeve on Sunday night and immediately realized I should have thought more about it.

I did, at least, read the pattern before starting. But I wish I’d read the sleeve part of the pattern before knitting the front and back, because if I had I might have decided to slip the first stitch in each row, thereby giving myself a nice selvedge edge from which to pick up the sleeve stitches. I didn’t do that, though, so I just had to pick them up through the edge of the fabric. This made for a bit of a mess when I had to repeatedly pull out the picked up stitches and start over so that there would be the same number of stitches picked up on each side, and that they would meet in the centre of the shoulder, etc.

The main thing I learned while doing this, though, is that doing short rows (to shape the shoulders) on double-pointed needles (or, “knitting skewers,” as L calls them) is really annoying. I really need to figure out the magic loop, because I have to think that this whole process would have been smoother (both in terms of ease of execution and fabric quality) if there hadn’t been so many annoying joins. Anyway, here I am, just past the short rows, where I suspect this will start to feel a lot more like a big sock and just tick right along.

The sleeve is looking a little small right now, but I’m hoping that’s just because the stitches are all pushed together and not because it’s tiny and will thus require reknitting. Stay tuned!