Welcome, or welcome back to you! I am so happy to be able to bring you this final installment of our Raglan Sweater series: how to knit our sleeves. In our first installment, we talked about knitting the yoke (or upper chest, back and shoulders section) as well as knitting the ‘raglan line’. Then, we talked about separating our sleeves from the chest and back sections, adding stitches under the arms, and knitting the body. We ended the last part by finishing the lower hem. Today, we’ll pick up some stitches under the arms and then we’ll knit our sleeves and finish the cuffs. This one will be a pretty quick post, but knitting the sleeves can take some time, as did the body section.
If you remember in the previous post, when we separated our sleeves from the body, we added several stitches to ‘fill out’ under the arms. Now, we need to knit from the other side of those stitches, to finish out the underarms and then work the arms.
We begin by starting from the lower shoulder sections. If you put all of your stitches on a piece of yarn, transfer your first sleeve back to a your needles. You can use a long round needle, double pointed set, or smaller round needle, if it fits the size of your sleeve. Once on your needle, you need to ‘pick up’ the same number of stitches you cast on when working the body section, ie. I cast on 12 stitches, so I will pick up 12 stitches under the arm to fill out opposite those stitches we cast on previously.
How to Pick up Stitches
Insert your left needle into the desired stitch, then insert your right needle into the same spot, knitwise, then knit normally, wrapping your yarn, and finishing the knit stitch. Continue adding stitches to your right needle until you have the desired number of stitches.
Tip: I like to insert my needles so that 2 strands of my yarn are over my needles. I think, this anchors my yarn better to my work/fabric.
Once you have enough stitches, add a stitch marker to the beginning and end of the under arm section, so you can decrease across that section, to taper your sleeves. (if you want to do that, of course).
Knit down your sleeves, and decrease over several inches if you taper, or consider continuing to taper to the wrist. Also, another tip, if you’re knitting your sweater for a child, consider knitting an extra long wrist cuff, that can be folded up when they’re small, then unfolded as they grow.
One more Knitting Technique to consider: Magic Loop Knitting
Why should we use it:
Knitting with Magic Loop allows you to knit in a circle with an extra long round set of needles. This can be easier for many newer knitters than using double pointed needles, and I find less chance of losing stitches when I have to put my work down/away.
How to Knit with longer round needles
Step 1: Once you’ve finished your row, match your needles up, and pull the tube(or wire) part of the needle out of the middle of your row, opposite your needle tips. Hopefully, you can see that in the image here.
Step 2: With your needles pointing to the right, slide the back needle out, so that section of stitches is now on the middle of the tube of the round needle. See this image, at right.
Step 3: At this point, you can bring the back needle tip around so you can now use it to knit as your right needle. The back stitches will be looser so you can hold onto everything, and the tube from your needle keeps the sections apart, so its like knitting 2 different sections.
Step 4: At the end of the first half of the row, it should look something like this image at right.
Step 5: You may be able to see in the above image, I am holding the tube, and am ready to slide the tube out to the right, so the needle will slide into that section of stitches. This will match up with the from needle facing to the left this time.
Now turn around your needles so they’re facing to the right again, and you’re ready to repeat at Step 1.
Please see the below video, if you would like a full tutorial for how to knit in Magic Loop. As well as everything we included in the post above today. Once you’ve reached the length you need for your sleeves, or an inch or 2 less than needed and begin to knit your wrist cuff. I did mine the same as my neck and lower hem.
Once you’ve finished your first sleeve, go back up to the shoulder and knit the second sleeve the same as the first. Once done, you can weave in your ends and you’re done your first sweater! Now if you notice, I matched up the colours of my sweater with the body section. To do that I had to change colours many times on each sleeve and have tons of ends to weave in. 🙁
I hope that you got some benefit from this series and are ready to knit a raglan sweater for yourself. If you have any questions, please leave them down below, or on the YouTube video.
Much Love,
