Hoodie Revisited

I think it was sometime in February that my sister admitted that my nephew would likely never wear the sweater I knit him because with the tight fit over his head they were afraid they wouldn't be able to get it back off of him.  Since the sweater itself was sized more in the hopes of fitting him sometime between now and September and it was just the neck that seemed too small for him, I took it back with plans to cut the neck and rip out some stitches and try to get some more space without unraveling it completely.  I completed the surgery in the end of February, but it wasn't until this weekend that we saw them again and had a chance to see if it would ever be wearable or if he'd already outgrown the rest of it.

I ended up removing most of what looked like the colorful insert behind the v-neck by cutting a stitch at the center of the garter stitch edge and carefully unraveling just that color until I hit a point where I wasn't sure I could go any further without a disaster.  I wove in the extra ends that were produced and I'm hoping the applied i-cord will help stabilize the portion of the neck that wasn't part of the neck before.

And the result is.... wearable!  My sister was able to get it on him with very little fuss and he was smiling as soon as he was wearing it and grabbed one of the cuffs and started sucking on it right away again!  The hood is more decorative as it's still small for his 95th percentile noggin, but I'm not sure how much he would put up with wearing a hood anyway.  The body and sleeves obviously aren't so baggy like they were at 4 months old, but they didn't seem too snug yet.  So I'm hoping he'll be able to get at least a little bit of wear out of it before he outgrows it now.  And since I don't have any pictures of him trying it on I'll have to try for pictures if he does wear it again when we see them next.

Then, since I didn't use up much of the variegated skein for the sweater and he enjoyed sucking on his sleeves so much, I decided to use the rest of the yarn for a fun toy for him.  And so the Star That Rocks was born.

In Progress

Lightly stuffed w/toy inside for noise

I gave it to him this weekend and he seemed to enjoy playing with it and tasting it.  It's not stuffed very tightly so it's nice and soft and the stuffing muffles the bell inside so it's not very loud.  And later I heard that it worked well as a pillow while he was sleeping for the car ride home.  Awww!