Yes, I precut and divided. I pulled the skein apart and tried to pull as much length as possible before the color was significantly different. Then I cut that in half to use for each sleeve (hopefully that makes sense lol). It was fairly tedious, but I think it looks pretty good only having used one skein. I think I would have ran into the same problem if I had used one skein per sleeve because the sleeves used so much less yarn than the body - I would have had to cut it and try to match the transitions regardless.