Welcome to this Arnall-Culliford Knitwear tutorial on setting in sleeves using mattress stitch.
This is a beautiful sweater by Natalie Warner from
Something to Knit Together Winter Edition and this side has already been seamed.
First of all the shoulder seams are joined by backstitch, and then the sleeve has been sewn into the armhole,
and then finally to finish off the construction, the sleeves and the side seams were joined in one.
When you're joining a sleeve into an armhole there are various points that need to be matched up and
the first of these is the centre of the cast-off edge on the top of the sleeve head.
Here we've very helpfully got this cable right up the middle so the very centre of that cable
needs to match to our shoulder seam. So I'm just going to pin those two together in place here.
The next part that needs to match is the
little section of cast-off stitches that you do at the start of the armhole,
and that needs to match to the cast-off stitches you do at the start of the sleevehead shaping.
And this time we're pinning them together with the right sides outermost
because one of the nice things about mattress stitch is you do it with the right side facing you,
so you can see how your seam looks as you work along it. Here's on the other side matching up the cast-off edges.
Once those three main points have been pinned into place you're then looking
to match up the curved seams, and provided that your row tension
isn't too far out, you should find that those seams match pretty neatly all the way along.
So I'm just going to pin them in place
just to help keep myself on track as I sew the seam.
If they're pinned then you can see quite quickly if you've got a bit of bunching up of fabric,
if you've got too much fabric on the sleeve and not enough on the armhole, or the other way around.
As you can see that's joining up really nicely on that side, so we'll do the same on the other side,
just taking care not to stretch one side or the other.
So there's our sleeve head all pinned into our armhole edge.
And the next task is going to be to seam it with mattress stitch.
I've woven in my end so that my yarn is attached to the fabric before I start
and then we start our mattress stitch by making basically like a figure of eight
between the two corner points. So we're going up through the left hand corner
and then up through the right hand corner. It doesn't matter which side you start.
So it makes like a little figure of eight and then we pull that nice and tight,
and now we're going to be working from looking at the right side of the fabric,
and we're going to be going under because this is stitches running along the edge here.
So we're going to be going under a stitch on one side and then under a stitch on the other so the
yarns come out just at the right hand side there. So we're going to start by going under both legs
of the stitch underneath the cast-off edge here. So we've gone under both legs of that stitch,
and then we'll do the same on the other side
And that's really all there is to mattress stitch I'm going to show you in various
different contexts, but you just go under two legs on one side and then two legs on the other.
It's much easier here once we're into the stocking stitch section because you can see the V
of the stitch and you just pop under both sides of that.
You go back in on the other side where the yarn came out, so you go under a stitch there
going in where the yarn came out previously and then on the other side we came out here,
and so we go back under both legs of the stitch on the side next to it. I tend to leave it a little
bit loose for a few stitches and then you get this lovely zipping up when you pull it tight.
And we carry on along the edge...
So once we've finished matching up the cast-off edges,
we'll be starting to work, instead of across the tops of stitches, we'll be working
along row end edges and I'll show you how that looks in just a second.
So I've finished joining the cast off edges and I'm now starting up the row end sections.
And I've kept my edge stitches in stocking stitch.
B y keeping my very edge stitches in stocking stitch. It just makes it a bit easier to see what's
going on here. So we've just finished coming out of the left hand side on the sleeve, so now we're
going to go into the armhole on the body. We're going to put the needle in where it came out before,
and then running in between the two columns of stitches, we're going to go underneath
two strands of yarn. So that's two rows and back up in between the column of stitches.
We then do the same on the other side, so we're going underneath where the yarn came back up,
and then if you pull with your needle you should be able to see
one, two strands of yarn. It's just running straight along the column of stitches.
So as you work along, taking two rows on each side each time,
just keep an eye on how the seam is lining up. If you notice that you're approaching the next
pin and you've got a little bit more fabric on one side than the other, which is very common because
especially with a sleeve head and an armhole, it's not actually necessarily the same number
of rows that have been worked in the sleeve head in the armhole. The length of the seam
will be the same because of the slope and the number of stitches that have been decreased, but
the number of rows won't necessarily be the same, so you'll need to just adjust it as you go along.
So as we come up here two rows each time,
just have a look and just imagine that we've got a little bit more fabric in the armhole than we have
in the sleeve head which is likely to be how it is. So you've got a few more rows worked in here, so in
order to ease these few more rows into the sleeve head side we're going to continue to take two rows
each time from the armhole edge but then we're just going to take one on the sleeve head side,
and in doing so you'll just allow that extra bit of fabric to be eased in. I've not done
them next to each other, so I've just taken two on the sleeve there and two on the armhole here.
We'll do that for another couple of stitches and then we can look again
and see whether we still need to adjust it. So how's it looking now?
Yeah, there's still a little bit more on the armhole side than
on the sleeve side so we'll take another one row on the sleeve here
instead of two. So you just go under one strand of yarn and then two on the other side as normal
and that's evened it up and hopefully you can see that where that seam is being worked.
It's really all but invisible: mattress stitch gives a really, really nice finish like that.
You'll continue to seam all the way up and round here and when you come to the
top of the sleeve head you'll be matching rows so going between the columns of stitches again.
You'll be matching the rows on this side to stitches
as you did at the beginning on the top of the sleeve head and here you just need to bear
in mind that generally speaking you can match two stitches across to three rows on the back,
so to do that you'll match one stitch to two rows and then one stitch to one row one stitch
to two rows and one stitch to one row. I'll show you how to do that in a minute.
We're going across the sleeve head now and I've gone under both sides of the stitch on the sleeve head top,
and then I'm going to go under two rows at the top of the armhole,
and then under both legs of a stitch at the top of the sleeve head, and then under one row
at the top of the armhole. By doing that pattern, I will be matching overall two stitches
to three rows and I'll show you how that looks in a second. I will tighten it up and we'll get
that satisfying zipping up of the seam and hopefully it'll be looking really smart.
There it's loose, and then as we pull it tight it's matching up really neatly the rows to the
stitches. Obviously the same still applies if you've got a little bit more fabric on this side,
then obviously do two rows to each stitch, just to use it up as you get to the middle, just to
make sure that that centre seam at the shoulder is going to sit really nicely in the middle of that cable.
But I think we're well on track for that here. And here's how it'll look when it's finished.
You've matched the shoulder seam to the cable at the top there, and then we continued seaming with
mattress stitch all the way around, and then finally matching the stitches at the underarm.
Once you've sewn that sleeve head into the armhole you can then fold your sweater in half
and join the side and the sleeve seams in one and I'll do that on a separate video.
So I hope you found this video showing you how to set in a sleeve head helpful.
You'll find lots more information about Something to Knit Together Winter Edition,
this beautiful design by Natalie Warner, and all of our other techniques related books by
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