Ahhhhhhhhh....so much better!

It's almost like being able to move again after you've eaten Thanksgiving Dinner. That ability to move and breath without pains in your stomach.

I enlisted Dad's help last night. He was so cute about it. While sitting in the living room after returning from my brother's house, Mom disappeared into the other room for awhile. I had hoped that maybe she went to lay down for a nap. Nope not so, but Dad went to investigate. He came back and said that she'd been looking for a recipe. Darn I told him, I need her 'out of here' so I can work on the sweater. OHHHHHHHHHH...he said..OK...

Little while later, when she went to get ready for bed, he came back out tip-toeing to the living room and in his best stage whisper he says...'OK! The coast is clear!' and then he made movements with his hands like he was knitting. ahhhhhh..teamwork! So, here are the sleeves all fixed! Oh so much better. (sorry for the blurry pictures. Tried to go no flash to keep from waking up my parents)

The next step was to attach the first sleeve. Now that it's not 3am here, I found one little spot that wasn't making me happy with the mattress stitch. The beauty of taking pictures of your knitting. It seems to make those 'blips' pop right out, at least it does for me. (The perils of seaming at 2:30 am with less than stellar light.) With a bit of yarn I've been able to go back over that section on the right shoulder and it is much closer to my liking. Again, like on my Dad's vest, I'm so thrilled with the way the mattress stitch works up! All those years in the past that I never knew about it. Thank you Internet groups and y-tube! You're making my knitting much better! It's beginning to look like a sweater now.

After attaching the sleeve to the shoulder, I seamed up the sleeve again with the mattress stitch and went down my 'fake seam'. Remember, I knit this sweater in one piece from the bottom up. The first picture shows the two edge stitches knit side by side between the ribbing. Can you see it?

Well, it certainly made it so much easier to pick up and mattress stitch the seam. It will give the sweater a bit of stability on the sides to have the seam in there. The beauty is, that if the seam should ever pull out, which I'm sure it won't but I'm a worry-wort over that type of thing, the sweater will not unravel!

Now, can you tell where the seam is from this angle? True, I have more to learn and practice but I can see improvement here. And that makes me happy.

Here are the insides of the two sleeves. The one on the left is attached to the sweater, the right one is the next on my list of sneaky knitting things to do.

When I went to attach the sleeves, the first thing I did was to measure out stitch by stitch and row by row each section (front and back) into fourths. I used those clip stitch markers and it lines up really easy and it all falls into place.

Now while Mom and Dad are out shopping I'm going to take advantage of the time to knit in the front window with great daylight helping with those mattress seams I need to get done. Here's hoping that they find a lot of GREAT things to look at! Can you believe I'm sitting here with a stack of coupons and I'm not shopping? Ahhhhh...knitting in daylight...who'd have guessed it would make your eyes see stitches oh so much easier!

Whoda thunk?