Category: baby sweaters

Knitting content on the blog has been fairly sparse mostly because August and September were devoted to finishing a sweater for a friend’s daughter’s 2nd birthday.

I don’t know if you remember the nearly–finished lace twist front top that I’d decided to rip a few months ago? I’d started it back in June 2006, and it was a ton of fun to knit. Later that summer, I used the lace from the twist front top to knit a sweater for the same friend’s daughter-to-be.

And then I returned to the original top, knitting away, and in fierce denial about how narrow it was.

I finally ripped it this August. Since it was actually the correct width for the 2-3 year sweater patterns I was finding, I decided to refashion the back and then knit a new front and sleeves. It turned into quite the long project (so much bigger than the baby sweaters I’ve worked on recently! Crazy how much they grow!), and I had several attempts at the correct amount to increase for the sleeves. They look incredibly long to me, though the measurements matched the patterns I was basing the dimensions on.

I love the buttons – they are simple, but an exact color match. I debated on the number, but three seemed good to me.

And one last photo on the counter – this one is harder to see, but it’s a much better catch of the color. The light blue is hard to catch in the grey fall light!

Details about the pattern and dimensions on my Ravelry site!

Now it’s up to seaming instead of knitting!

I finished sewing in the collar and weaving in the last of the ends yesterday, and now I’m finally done with a gift sweater that was due last winter. Yeah! Here it is, complete, with my new (8.5″ x 11″) quilting book for size reference.

And here’s the back:

Project details and notes are on Ravelry.

I am quite pleased with the way it turned out, though I probably won’t buy this yarn again (soft, pretty color, but quite fuzzy after very little friction — I worry about wear). And now I can finally mail it off this week! Yay!

I’ve been knitting, though I know it hasn’t been making it to the blog recently. I have a few gift sweaters for friends’ babies in different stages of completion. This is the one I’ve been working on the most, and my project during passenger time on the road trip:

I’d knit the body, put it on holders, and then started working on the arms individually. Then, around the time we hit Crater Lake, I started putting the arms and body together. I made it about 7 rows after the join and was feeling very discouraged – the sleeves were about 3″ too skinny, and the whole thing just didn’t look as cute as I remembered from the photo. Plus, the chest from the join up was starting to look oddly tight… It wasn’t until I saw the back side of the sweater that I realized what had happened:

See how the ribs have neat lines of knit stitches between them at the top and a jumbled mix lower down?? The pattern calls for a broken rib, where you alternate knit and purl stitches row-by-row between the ribs. The pattern also calls for the sleeves to be knit flat. I tucked away the body in a ziplock once I’d put it on holders, and somehow I seemed to have reverted to plain k2, p1 rib without the body for reference – not nearly as cute. So disappointing to realize the mistake. I ripped right away (everything was wrong, including the proportions), but only back to the join, and then I decided to just go back with a crochet hook and correct the sleeves’ all-purl columns to the nice p/k alternating pattern. It was a somewhat sensible idea, but it would have been faster to rip the sleeves entirely and reknit – lesson learned. Here’s the halfway fix — you can really see that the fixed sleeve’s width is more what you would expect, compared to the ugly, skinny original (not to mention, such a prettier pattern!):

I finally finished the last three columns tonight (hurray! only three weeks later, to the day.) and can finally rejoin the pieces and continue with my life. 🙂

I’d been thinking I’d never knit this pattern again (so slow, not coming together well), but now I’m realizing that it was just user error. Ooops. Hopefully the rest will fly right by

I needed cute, fun, wash & dryable white flower buttons for my mystery knitting project, and so I made a point while we were in Boston of taking a trip to Windsor Button. It’s between my old office and the Park Street T station – and so a fun and nostalgic place to visit. I haven’t been there in three years, and it’s gentrified quite a bit. Much more yarn — I had fun browsing. And all the buttons you could wish for, except they’re all behind a counter, which makes color matching hard. That serendipity of an unexpected match can’t happen because you’re squinting from two yards away. Kind of a pity.

In any case, I found my flower buttons.

And, I found good gender-neutral Cotton Fleece for a friend’s fall baby, and adorable elephant buttons.

The buttons don’t quite match, but it’s a near enough miss that I’ll probably use them anyway. 🙂

When the project is this tiny, a little bit of knitting goes a long way. Here’s the knitting after day two:

Can you believe that the split for the armholes came after only 3 and a quarter inches?

Here’s a closeup of the shell edging at the hip — totally worth the effort. 🙂

The exciting part is that decreasing at the end of every row is conforming perfectly to my 45-degree graph paper slope. Very cool. I’ve divided for the upper body, and just have the back, two fronts, and very teeny sleeves to go.

Friends from my Brown dinner group just delivered a baby eight and a half weeks early. I’d been plannning a sweater, but when she arrived so early, the need became a bit more pressing. The baby seems to be doing incredibly well (even if all of my news is filtered through a pair of very proud parents), but at 2 lbs, 12.5 ounces, she’s tiny. The parents are also amazingly positive — I’ve been so impressed. I want Kathy and James to have some sort of girly, cute baby clothes to put on her (regardless of whether they’re really useful in NICU — I called the hospital to ensure that they’d at least be allowed), so I’ve been researching and designing. The internet resources are sparse — I’ve never encountered that before for knitting patterns. So many of the patterns and clothes available online for premies are burial gowns, which made most of the research phase sad and depressing.

Given how lively she is, and the lack of great patterns online, I decided to design Claire her own sweater. Lots of research on premie sizes and NICU recommendations for clothing, and I’m still not sure I have the perfect mix. She seems very tall for her height at almost 15 inches.

My plan is a wrap cardigan that will be fastened by a cute plastic button and have a fancy edge. I find it’s hard not to put a million details into everything when I make my own version, so I’m trying to exercise restraint. I designed it on graph paper (4 squares = 1 inch), and have been knitting off of that. I underestimated the complexity of the knitting. It’s the Lacy Shells pattern from Knitting on the Edge, modified to have only one row of eyelets. I was planning for it to take about 45 minutes, but it took nearly 3 hours. Oops. Here’s a picture of the progress before I head off to bed.