Well then.

So about a week ago, I got super excited about Finishing All The Things! and reached into my basket of things to finish.  I was all set to seam my Zelda sweater, when I realized two things.  First, I knit the sleeves with the wrong stitch pattern - no big deal, they look pretty good anyhow.

The second thing is a much bigger problem.

When I set in the sleeve, I noticed this gigantic blob of fabric in the front that wouldn't go away no matter how I eased it in.  In pictures it doesn't look so bad, but in real life, it's quite bulbous.  I don't need an extra pouch by my armpit, no matter how convenient it might be to keep my keys/wallet/spare ball of yarn handy.

Sooo after all of the problems that I've had with this sweater, this made me go all

But then I remembered that I've been practicing this fitting stuff at school every day for the last three months!  So I got my pins and pinned in some of the excess fabric.

The problem, though, is that unlike woven fabric, I can't just hack off that extra inch of fabric.  So I'm going to re-knit the sleeve, probably fix my "oops I accidentally the pattern" mistake, and change the shape of the front of the sleeve cap.

So why did this happen?  Well, as near as I can figure, it's because I have forward-rotated shoulders.  This means that I usually need a shorter armhole & corresponding edge of sleeve shaping on the front than the back, and it would explain why there's too much fabric in the front of the sleeve.

Although in sewn garments, there has to be a difference between the front and back sleeve shaping in order to fit most people correctly, knitted garments have more versatility in fit, and most times knitted sleeves look roughly like this:

Normal knitted sleeve

They are identical on both the front and back sleeve shaping, and most of the time this works fairly well.

But this sweater pattern has a very distinct shape and fit in the sleeves, and there is no way that the above sleeve pattern is going to attain that fit on someone whose fitted sleeve looks roughly like this:

Cory's wacky sleeve of amazingness!  Hooray!

So it makes total sense, even if it is infuriating.  It just goes to show: the difference between a "pretty much okay, I guess" sweater and an amazing sweater is purely in the details.

I might have to let this simmer for a bit and then give it another shot.  I'm sure glad I have an extra ball of the yarn!