Interestingly enough, I didn't feel so trapped on Sleeve Island while working the sleeves as the upfront part of the project. In fact, these sleeves just seemed to breeze by. Perhaps it was having the nice bit of cabling to work through? Bigger yarn? It's not clear. But both sleeves are now complete and I'm thinking about getting the body of the sweater started. (In case you would like to know, the second sleeve is the one on the left side of my blocking board).
The last time I talked about this project, I had decided to wash my yarn after finishing one sleeve with unwashed yarn. There was some concern over whether I would run into changing gauge problems, but that doesn't really seem to have become an issue. The guage measurements I was working from were from a swatched that I knit from the unwashed yarn, but then washed and dressed before taking a final gauge reading. It was clear to me when I made the gauge swatch that the yarn made a significant character change. It seems in this case that by washing the yarn, the character change occured before the knitting and I didn't see that much more change after that. Granted, it is a somewhat unfair test because I blocked both sleeve pieces into the size and shape I wanted them to be, and with the swatch I let it dry without any tensioning.
At any rate, I think everything is good enough to proceed to the next step. Rogue is going to be a cardigan, so I am going to knit the body of the sweater using the cardiganization instructions that Jenna published along with the pullover pattern.
Was the bartlett a lot easier to knit with once it was washed? I am going to be using the same yarn to make mine and when I knit the swatch it was really tough on the hands