Seamless circular sweater - joining body and arms

I'm knitting a circular seamless sweater following Elizabeth Zimmerman's technique. I knit the sleeves from the wrist up, then knit the body from the bottom up. Here's the technique I used to join the body and sleeves.



According to Knitting Without Tears, you take 8% of the body stitches and put them on threads for the armpits, making sure there are an equal number of stitches between the threads for the front and back of the sweater. In my case, I had 144 body stitches, so I took 12 stitches at each side where the underarms go and put them on threads. Then I took 12 stitches from each sleeve and put them on threads.


The stitches on threads will be grafted together later with kitchener stitch. Meanwhile, I took the remaining body and sleeve stitches and combined them all onto one long circular needle. Next I'll knit around in a circle for about 2", then start shaping the shoulders (I'll post that when I get there).


I like this sweater construction...it makes sense and eliminates bulky underarm seams.

Two sleeves on two circular needles

I'm working my first sweater to be knit entirely in the round (I really hate sewing the seams!). Following Elizabeth Zimmerman's technique, my plan is to knit the sleeves from the wrists up, knit the body from the waist up, join the live armpit stitches with the body stitches and decrease for the shoulders. I'm planning a V-neck and not entirely sure yet how the V will come into play...I guess I'll have to knit back and forth when I get there but at least there won't be any seams to deal with.

So knitting two sleeves on two circulars is interesting...I know I won't have to make a second sleeve when I'm done, but the two seem to go so slowly together! With the two balls of yarn and trying not to get everything all tangled up it's definitely less portable than one sleeve would be, so it will probably end up taking me longer than doing each sleeve separately. I'm still keeping an open mind about this technique...

Here's the tutorial I followed for setting up the sleeves. I set it up with one long circular as suggested, but found it awkward to keep pulling the extra wire through so after a few rows switched to two circulars which I find easier.