Baby clothes are adorable

Want to see why I’ve been doing such a crummy job posting for the last two weeks? 🙂

Good friends (who read the blog) are having a baby at the end of September, and so I’ve been (secretly) knitting my first baby sweater! I wasn’t feeling inspired by the patterns I was finding, and the lace in the twist-top tank seemed like it would be adorable, so I decided to wing it. I went and bought a onesie from Gap and used it as a base for the sweater dimensions. (It’s amazing how small baby clothes are compared to 205 yards of DK yarn…)

My yarn was Classic Elite’s Provence (color #2674, sea foam green), a 100% cotton, which I loved working with. It was perfect on size #5 needles. The pattern I mostly made up by placing the tank top lace against the size reference onesie. I did raglan sleeves because I enjoy sewing them, and I used the Yarn Harlot knitty pattern to gauge the sleeve length, since it seemed like she probably would know what she’s talking about and I was having a hard time finding 3 month patterns that I trusted. (If I did this again, I would use her entire Daisy technique of knitting the bottom in the round, and just superimpose my own gauge & lace on top — very clever. My version required seams at all of the edges — luckily baby-sized seams fly.)

Choosing the buttons was tricky to me (I hem and haw on that always, but even more when someone else has to live with the result…), but I really like the ones I finally settled on. And, after being pretty sure and depressed that it was going to be a good six months too big, the finished sweater was the perfect size.

And the back:

Awww. 🙂 This was so fun to work on.

More football fun

Kevin’s mom’s birthday was last week, and we decided to get her a David Akers jersey. Ordering and shipping took a bit more time than we had allotted, though, so I made her a mini jersey to last until the real one arrived.

I made bias tape to finish the arm and neck holes — it was fidgety but added a lot. Then I embroidered the back. (You may not be able to see in the photo, but the 2 was white with silver and black trim — it was fun to get to use my silver embroidery floss — I’ve been hoarding it since college.)

I also made a little football magnet to hang it out of fimo and gold wire — it was baking when I took the photos. The whole thing was a blast back to fifth grade, when I used to make a lot of doll clothes. Good fun. 🙂