A recent post from Kay Gardner of Mason Dixon Knitting is about sleeves. Specifically a reply to a letter they received
The Trouble with Sleeves
There are no perfect solutions to knitting small circumferences in the round. For me, anyway, it’s a pick-your-poison situation. I have been known to knit them flat and seam them, and I think that’s a perfectly good answer. But I also appreciate the elegance of a sweater with zero seams, so I want to knit these sleeves in the round.
The tried-and-true, traditional way of knitting a small circumference in the round is double-pointed needles. I get along OK with DPNs, but I don’t love them. I have never been able to overcome the tendency to pull out the wrong needle, and they don’t travel very well. I’m either anxious about losing one somewhere in the seat of a plane, train, or automobile, or actually losing one in the seat of a train, plane, or automobile.
The alternatives that I know—Cat Bordhi’s two-circulars method and the Magic Loop—are clever and secure, but they both require frequent interruption of knitting to readjust the stitches on the needles. I know that you can get into a rhythm with these methods, but I’ve never been completely convinced. Maybe I just don’t do it often enough. Maybe I’m a weenie.
What if you could combine the 2-circs method (in which the stitches are divided between just two needles) and DPNs?
There is the first way Kay mentions, of course. Knit the sleeve flat and seam it. I've tried the other ways. DPNs work all right, until you get to the cap of the sleeve. I'm working on the sleeve of my Taina sweater. Make that sleeves, as I like to knit them at the same time so I don't do the increases and cap shaping differently. Since I'm not including any of the three stitch patterns in the fronts of the sweater (I knit both of those at the same time, too, for the same reason), it's going quite well. I'll deal with the seams when I reach that point.
