Clue 9 of the 8-Bit sweater dropped on Ravelry today, and this is the moment you’ve been waiting for: We all get to celebrate the utter lack of being marooned on Sleeve Island! That’s my favorite thing about working sweaters bottom up. It’s not the right construction for every sweater, but guys, it feels *so good* to get to the sleeves and delight in how you’ve already knit them. In one spectacular round your sweater will go from individual pieces to an actual garment!

Clue 1, Clue 2, Clue 3, Clue 4 made up the sleeves. Clues 5, 6, 7, & 8 worked up the body and now it’s time to bring it all together.

Eight Bit: Clue Nine

When you add this pattern to your Ravelry library, you will have immediate access to 1) the project sheet, which includes the usual yarn/gauge/needle information for the sweater, as well as the instructions for a gauge swatch and 2) clues one through eight. The remaining four clues will be released via pattern updates. Once the project is added to your library, the clues will automatically be added to your library when they release.

Add the MKAL to your Ravelry library by following this link.

Admittedly, this isn’t the most exciting clue. There’s no video game chart to uncover. But I wanted to keep this week a little lower key. If you’ve gotten behind in clues (and want to knit them weekly) then this is a chance to catch up, and if you’re caught up, it’s a week to just relax a little. Take your time on the sleeve join round. It’s naturally going to be slower than other rounds, and your stitch count is increasing significantly.

Insider tip: when working a sleeve join round on a bottom up sweater, I like to get a little creative with needle management. I tend to find the the stitches from the sleeve don’t like to conform to the shape of my needles when they are first joined, and if you experience that too, don’t stress out about it. My “hack” for that is to pull the cord/cable of the circular needle out of the work at the center of the sleeve, as if I were working it in magic loop. It allows you to only have to fit half of the sleeve sts on the straight part (the actual needle part) of your circulars at any given moment. Then, on the other side of that sleeve I pull the cable back into the work (so that it’s just on the circulars in the normal way) and repeat that when I get to the next sleeve.

~Megan-Anne

This is unrelated to anything Geek-A-Long, but I think I might dye my hair purple tonight.

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