Getting Close to Finished

Here's how my Snowflake Sweater is looking these days. Yup, getting pretty close. I started the sleeve cuffs tonight and I'd say they're about half done. Only thing left then is the collar. And I'll probably do a little duplicate stitch on the pattern where the sleeves and body meet. But more on that later.

This was about my last chance to show you how I do my sleeves two at a time:

It's the same thing I did with my Whistler sweater sleeves. Doing them this way saves on trying to make the second match the first one; and you spend half the time counting between decreases because you only have to do it once for both. Of course, you waste a lot of time if you do a sleeve wrong, and you have to remember to do all four decreases on the rounds (two for each sleeve). It's easy to miss one.

So how does it work? You knit the first half of the stitches from sleeve A onto a cable needle and then (with a separate ball of yarn), you knit the first half of the stitches from sleeve B onto the same needed. Then with a second cable needle, you knit the second half of sleeve B's stitches and then the second half of sleeve A. You then proceed to knit in the round on the two cables, making sure to use the right ball of wool for the right sleeve. I tuck my balls into the actual sleeves, which not only helps to keep them from getting confused, but also does a bang up job of keeping the strings from getting tangled. It's brilliant. I can say that out loud because I didn't think of it myself.

And why do I have two gold needles and two green ones? Because I don't have four needle tips the same size. Since I use an interchangeable set, I can set up a cable needle with the proper size tip on the right side, where I'm knitting the stitches (and determining their size) and a size smaller tip on the left side, where it doesn't matter what size it is. So in the picture above there are two cable needles each with a gold tip and green tip.

Ok, now that I am this close to finishing, let's have a little contest...I invite you to make a guess in the comments here of how many hours I will have spent knitting (and ripping) on this sweater by the time I finish. Don't worry about the time spent planning or pattern making, just the straight knitting. Leave your guess in a comment and you know I'll let you know how it comes out in the wrap-up post! Good luck guessing...