Found a little bit of time yesterday to work on the Dale sweater. I'm about half way done with the second sleeve now. I'm really looking forward to starting the body, not only because it will be a lot more fair-isle work than the sleeves, but also because I won't have to do it on double pointed needles (grrr!) and I won't have to do a lot of increases (boooh!).

I am very happy with how the sleeves are coming out overall, but one thing that is bothering me are the increases. They just look bad in some places, especially where I was doing the pattern. I'm still learning all the knitting secrets like when to use which increases (for some reason the decreases seem more intuitive to me), so I thought I could try out some different methods on this sweater. I usually use a knit-into-the-stitch-below increase, which someone at Knitsmiths showed me and called an invisible increase. This method always looked good in regular stockinette before, but this time some of the "invisible" increases were coming out visible, even unsightly! Well, over the weekend I received my back issues of Interweave Knits and one of them had a very helpful article by Ann Budd on increases. So I switched to what she called a raised increase -- and what I've elsewhere seen as just make one -- that is, picking up the bar between the stitches and knitting it twisted. I had hoped this would really neaten up the increases, but the new increases kinda looked the same just a bit more bumpy. So I went back to my original method. Elizabeth Zimmerman suggests doing the same increase I was originally doing, but twisting the stitch picked up from the row before. I tried that too once or twice and it seemed to pull the color from the previous row up too much for my liking. Hrrmpf.

So, I think I've messed with the increase line enough on this sleeve! Maybe on the next set of sleeves (got two sweaters to knit, you know!) I'll try EZ's loop method from Knitting without Tears.

Do you all have a preferred method for increasing?