Tutorial:The Perpendicular Join

I have a fondness for the perpendicular join. What is this, you ask? It's a method of joining two pieces of knitting going at 90 degrees to one another. Most frequently, it's used to join a saddle shoulder to a body or, as I'm about to demonstrate, a set-in sleeve to an armhole. My Wakefield jacket features this join, and my new design, a cousin of Wakefield, follows suit. Yesterday, I began the second sleeve and took a few photos of the process.
Here you can see the perpendicular join in progress, with the underarm stitches held on a length of waste yarn and the rest of the picked-up sleeve stitches on a 16-inch circular needle.

 

I find it much easier to leave the underarm stitches on a length of yarn and work straight off of it, rather then have them on a dpn, poking into everything. At this point, I'm working back and forth. At the start of each wrong side row, I slip the first stitch with the yarn in front, until I have one stitch left on the needle. Then I slip that stitch, slip one stitch off the waste yarn, 

 and purl those two stitches together.

Now it's time to turn the work around, slip the first stitch with yarn in back, and knit back around until one stitch remains on the needle. This time I slip that stitch KNITWISE, 

slip the next stitch from the waste yarn, also KNITWISE, and insert the left-hand needle to perform an SSK.

After a while, the line of the perpendicular join becomes apparent. Magic!

I continue in this fashion, working back and forth, eating up the stitches on the waste yarn, until only one stitch is left on my right-hand needle and one stitch is left on the waste yarn. At that point I work a cdd (centred double decrease) to bring everything together. So neat.

 

I want to show off the cuff of the first sleeve, which I finished up a couple of days ago. In keeping with the overall pattern of the Wakefield design, this cousin also has a tiny bit of cuff detail. Here's my rough chart after a bit of messing around,

and here's the finished result (you're looking at it with the border about to be worked at the top).

We had a birthday here a couple of days ago, complete with a surprise appearance by members of Queen's University's anime club. I cooked Greek food, and thanks to a heads up from James, had more than enough for all to enjoy. Indeed, there were leftovers, as this note on the fridge the next morning illustrates.

The weather remains fickle--two steps forward,

 

Snowdrops up the street.

Open water on  the lake.

 one step back.

Dusting of snow on the front garden.

At least Isabel will get some wear from her new cardi.