Knit Sleeves, 1849

Plain under-sleeve.

I needed a set of knit undersleeves to go with my new wool basque, which, being red, would not look well with the blue-edged sleeves I usually wear with my blue wool dress. Being pressed for time, I wanted something that would translate well to the circular knitting machine, and ideally was fairly plain. I ended up opting for the 'Under-Sleeve (long)' in Esther Copley's The Comprehensive Knitting Book (1849).

Starting from the cuff, the sleeve is to be knit with 12 rows of 1-1 ribbing, and is then knit plain for the rest of its length. The instructions call gradually increasing the number of stitches (making a sleeve that fits fairly close to the arm), and describes both shoulder-length and elbow-length variations. They do not, however, specify whether the sleeve is to be knit in the round or knit flat and then seamed. I take that to mean that it is left to the maker's choice (or was so obvious at the time as to not need to be said).
 

The main departure in turning this into a circular machine project was adding the hung hem at the upper edge, and working down from there. I used the machine tension to give the sleeve a little shaping, and ran a waste thread 13 rows before my the desired length. Off the machine, I then frogged those 13 rows, transferred the live stitches to a size 1 circular needle, and re-knit them as 12 rows of 1-1 ribbing, with 13th used to cast off.

I'm fairly satisfied with the sleeves. I wish I'd made them a little bit longer; I was calculating for an upper-arm length, but ended up about 4" shorted than desired (when worn, they go about two inches past the elbow, which should be sufficient even if it wasn't what I wanted). In retrospect, I could have just run an entire ball through the machine for each sleeve, tried them on, marked the cuff, and then frogged back to there. The process worked just fine though, with the waste thread being very helpful to mark the appropriate location and to transfer the stitches. The size 1 knitting needles were a close match to the stitch size of the machine, though it took a few rows for the tension to even out, which looked pretty rough at first, though blocking helped a lot. If making these again, I would opt for double-points rather than a circular needle, since the cuff was so much smaller than the needle that I was constantly fighting with the excess length.

Similar instructions for 'Lambs-Wool Sleeves' appear in Miss Watts' The Ladies' Knitting and Netting Book (1845) but with 3" ribbed cuffs and a 1.5" ribbed upper edge, the sleeve in between being otherwise knit plain, to whatever length is desired. Interestingly, this sleeve doesn't call for adding stitches to shape, but instead seems to be more of a straight tube.