Leaves In Relief - First Sleeve

I have finished the first sleeve on my Leaves In Relief sweater from Knitty.com. The nice thing about doing a sleeve in the round is that you can actually try it on to make sure it fits and I am happy to say that it does. The bad thing about this pattern though is that the sleeve will only come out the right length if your row gauge is correct. I don't know about you but it is hard enough for me to get my stitch gauge correct without also having to worry about rows. I think that my sleeve is a bit long but it still works well so I'm not going to worry about it.

I thought that there might be an error in the pattern but I contacted the designer, Ariel Barton, and she promptly clarified things for me. I am making a large sweater. At the end of the sleeve you end on a row 16 which has 16 pattern stitches per each of 3 needles. The pattern also says to increase 27 stitches along the way which adds 9 stitches to each needle. The pattern, however, says that you should have 78 stitches on your needles by this point. This stitch count only adds up to 75 though. Ms. Barton said that I also need to add in the initial increase row (3 stitches total). So by this point each needle should include 16 pattern stitches plus 1 initial increase plus 9 increases. A bit confusing but it all worked out in the end.

I think that the one thing that makes this pattern hard is the designers attempt to write the pattern for so many different sizes. The variety of sizes makes reading the pattern somewhat confusing but it is wonderful to see a pattern that includes plus sizes.