Sleeve island

Here are the sleeves of my Green Mountain Gardens cardigan. About 4 inches down, many more to go. I sewed up the cuffs loosely so that I can now use the sleeves themselves as mini-bags for the multiple balls of yarn that otherwise will get hopelessly tangled. Sleeves don't make up the majority of sweater knitting, but they take the longest perceived time to knit. I've heard it referred to as being "stuck on sleeve island."

Adrienne Martini, who wrote Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously, speaks of "The Sleeve Death March." I liked that part, though I found the rest of the book pretentious and needlessly snarky. The premise is that she issues herself the challenge of knitting an Alice Starmore sweater (something of a knitting holy grail) in one year, and writing a book about the experience, while interviewing the biggest names in knit-blogging about the nature of Art and whether her Starmore is really a Starmore. It continues to amaze me that a book published in 2010 about a knitter's self-imposed challenge finds the need to drag itself into a toxic wasteland of snark by injecting hatred of George W. Bush into the mix. But, whatever.

Cautions: language, narcissism, excessive namedropping (of knitters).

Of interest to: obsessive knitters trying to understand their own obsession.