Zip Neck Saddle Shoulder Yarn Patons Canadiana Yarn in Lime Juice After what seemed like an eternity of working on the slowly-growing sleeves, I finally reached the armhole shaping. There’s good and bad to working both sleeves at the same time: It is very, very nice to not have to worry about whether you’ve counted properly and both sleeves are going to be the same length. But progress on both sleeves together can seem extremely slow. Decreasing in this particular ribbing stitch was a challenging at first, but I figured out a method. It was challenging because the pattern of stitches on the side you’re working looks completely different from what you are supposed to do. Usually, when ribbing, you can look at the work and say “this looks like a purl stitch. I should do another purl stitch now.” This rib stitch is not like that. The pattern is written so that the first few stitches set you up for the whole row, and then you just keep repeating the next four stitches all the way across and everything works out fine. But now I was decreasing and chopping off those “set up stitches”. How was I ever going to figure out where I was in the pattern? And then I dawned on me: I could look! It’s not a sophisticated trick, but as I decreased, I simply flipped the work over and took a look at where I was in the four-stitch repeat and then set off. The pattern for this one is really nicely written, with not only the number of stitches you’re supposed to cast off, but the number you should still have left. I love a pattern that provides more than one way to check whether or not I’m getting it right! Next up: saddle shoulders. FEATURED YARNS
