The Knitting Fiend

Hi all,
I’m off to sunny Sarasota to visit my Dad. Jim will be holding down the fort here in Illinois, but his tasks don’t include blogging about knitting. So, blogging will be light or nonexistent for the next 11 days. Meanwhile, keep knitting.

For today’s blog: “How to knit the correct length sleeves, 101″.

Yesterday, I mentioned that I once followed a pattern slavishly, and knit sleeves that were way to long for the wearer. Today, I’m going to discuss how to figure out how long to knit the sleeves sleeves to fit the wearer. Obviously, I use this information to calculate patterns from scratch. However, this information is also useful if you are just trying to check the sleeve length on a published patter.

It’s pretty obvious to most people that your armlength affects the proper length for sleeves. Above and to the left, I show how to measure my arm.¹ To measure your arm length, find the bone at the top of your shoulder, your wrist and the point of your elbow. Holding your arm bent, run a tape measure from the top of your shoulder, along your elbow down to your wrist.

Write that number down. Arm Length = 21″.

Now, if you knit a sweater with a fitted sleeve cap, and you’ll probably find this is the correct length for a knitted sleeve. But you know what? The knitted sleeve won’t be that long for any other sweater style!

To figure out the correct sleeve length for other sweater styles you also need to measure your shoulder width. I put sticky dots on each of my shoulder bones and measured from dot to dot. (By the way, I used one of those dots when I measured my arm length.)

Write that number down: Shoulder Width = 14″.

Now, do a simple calculation to determine the “full sleeve length” for the wearer.

Full sleeve length = Arm Length + Shoulder Width/2 = 21″ + 14″ /2 = 28″.
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Things are getting heated on the floor of the Senate. From The Raw Story, we learn that Republican Senator Santorum today invoked the debaters’ “nuclear option”. That’s right, he compared his political opponents to Hitler. Here is a partial quote:

Remarkable hubris. I mean, imagine, the rule has been in place for 214 years that this is the way we confirm judges. Broken by the other side two years ago, and the audacity of some members to stand up and say, how dare you break this rule. It’s the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 “I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.” This is no more the rule of the senate than it was the rule of the senate before not to filibuster. It was an understanding and agreement, and it has been abused. . . .

Of course, Hitler hyperbole tends to turn a Senator into the current laughingstock of the blogosphere. Reuters quotes a possibly chastened Santorum:

“It was a mistake and I meant no offence,” added Santorum, who holds a key spot in the Republican leadership.

No. Of course you meant no offence. How could you imagine anyone would mind being compared to Hitler?