Hoodie Update

The picture pretty much says it all -- the modified Hoodie is actually wearable! 

The hood part is just decoration since it's too small, but the body is still a bit baggy and the sleeves are still too long so it may have a future yet. It's not likely to get a lot of use during the hot and humid summer, but with any luck it will still fit when the weather turns cooler.

And although he may look a little somber in the first picture,  it's just because that was one of the rare moments where he was still enough to actually see the sweater.  Most of the pictures looked like this one and it's a little hard to see the sweater when it's moving so fast!  Go happy arms, go!

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!

A Favorite Knitting Tool

I'm making steady progress on my Nonpareil sweater, but since it's knit in pieces I don't yet have much in the way of photographic evidence of that progress.

So far I've finished the back piece and am well over halfway through the left front piece and it seems relatively successful, but I am worried about the size since it's the first time I've made something like this that I couldn't try on along the way.  My fingers are still crossed as far as that's concerned, but the knitting has grabbed my attention and the yarn is nice and soft to work with so I'm making progress either way.

I have been relying heavily on one of my favorite knitting tools for this project -- a nifty calculator for increasing stitches evenly across a row.  There's probably a reason for it, but I'm still getting used to large patterns like this one that only give you directions like:

Cast on 40 stitches... purl across row, increasing 10 stitches...

that leave it up to the knitter to figure out how to make those increases work out neatly.  Since someone bright has already figured out a good formula for it, I rely on the calculator for those points in the pattern.

But now I also find myself relying on the calculator for other things as well.  This particular pattern has you knit the waistband as a separate section, then pick up stitches along the edges of the waistband to knit above and below it.  Of course, the pattern tells you how long to knit the waistband in inches and then how many stitches to pick up along it, but at least in my case that length never works out to the right number of clear points for picking up stitches along the edge.  So, I've been giving the calculator the number of possible stitches I see along the edge and the number I'll need to find somewhere to get up to the required number to pick up, and then I use the provided formula to tell me where to cheat in the extra stitches (in place of the m1 in the formula).  I think it's made the process for this sweater much, much smoother than if I'd been trying to just eyeball the pick up and knits to get to the required number along each side.  (There was a baby sweater where I picked up the stitches for a button placket at least 4 times before I got the right number of stitches that didn't seem puckered all in one spot or generally uneven, so I'm definitely familiar with doing it poorly.)

So while I'm not halfway yet, I'm getting there.  Of course I'm not sure if I bought the right amount of yarn for a sweater in this size, since I originally bought the yarn for a different pattern in the booklet, but I'll worry about that when I'm closer to the end.  The yarn is pretty new still and seems fairly popular, so I don't think it would be a problem to get more.  I also remember someone at Stitches mentioning that the patterns seemed to err quite a bit on the high side in yarn requirements for that booklet, so maybe I'll luck out with what I have.  Besides, it may never get to the sweater stage if I can't make it past all of the seaming, which is not something I've had a lot of successful practice with yet.

Knit Gifts for Baby X

I've knit a lot of baby items for a certain special nephew, some of which kept me occupied in an attempt to finish them in time for Christmas.  Even though I got them done in time, I didn't quite think how close Christmas was to a baby shower for Sariebeth's baby.  The shower wasn't planned yet, but the due date wasn't too far off so I knew it was coming.  So, as soon as I wrapped up some other Christmas gifts I cast on for a sweater set for little Baby X.

Now Sariebeth and her husband agreed early on that they didn't want to find out the sex of the baby.  And although some of our friends have given them a hard time about it, I'm totally cool with it. (Having attended the shower I'm even more on board with the not finding out part - they got such adorable little baby clothes with happy yellow duckies and giraffes instead of a million shades of pink or blue!)

My only concern was whether the colors for my project would be gender-neutral enough.  I'm not very picky about that sort of thing, but some people certainly are.  When I asked my husband if he thought the picture of the pattern looked too boyish, he said he thought it was girly instead.  (So far, I think he thinks all knit items for babies are inherently girly!)  I figured the conflicting opinions were probably a sign that it was neutral enough.

So I dedicated almost every spare knitting moment to the little baby set and when the date for the baby shower was set I was already well through the sweater and confident I could finish the entire set on time.  Fortunately I wasn't procrastinating, because I still have a difficult time finding the right number of stitches to pick up for the button bands and seaming the little booties took many, many tries before I decided it was the best I could do, even if it wasn't very good.  Considering the set was made for a 6 - 12 month baby, I'm assuming the soles of the booties won't be taking a lot of abuse anyway.  And in the end the finished set had the adorable factor I was going for.

Pattern: Little Bubbles Baby Set
Yarn: Knit Picks Comfy Sport
Needles: US 2 / 2.75 mm - 24" nickel circular
Completed: January 28, 2010

The gift was very well received and Sariebeth's husband mentioned that it looked store-bought - and that he meant that in a very positive way (which I would have assumed anyway).  And although I had a terrible time making things that my nephew can actually wear, I'm hopeful that this set is flexible enough to fit little Baby X at some point, whether it's in the 6-12 months range or not!  Maybe we can even get a picture or two for a blog update in the future.

 Why yes, those are wine bottles in the background behind the Mom-to-be.  What, doesn't everyone surround their pregnant friends with copious amounts of wine from time to time, especially for baby showers?

The Finished Sweater

My first hand-knit sweater is complete and has already been worn several times. Unfortunately, by the time it was finished and ready for photos, a busy travel weekend and Daylight Saving Time conspired to make it difficult to get photos of it in any sort of natural light. But this past weekend was unseasonably warm and presented me with the best possible scenario to get some quick pictures.

As for the rumors of Dream in Color Classy growing when exposed to water - they're definitely true! When I laid the sweater out to dry while it was damp it had grown almost 4" in length, even after a short time in the dryer on a very low setting. But the Classy seems to have amazing memory and having worn it a few times it has sprung back closer to the original knit length.

Now I was counting on the crazy growth everyone was warning about after the first wash, and in hindsight I probably shouldn't have counted on it quite so much. I probably should have knit the body slightly longer, but it’s very stretchy and it's been very comfortable to wear and surprisingly warm for a cardi.

And fortunately the extra material that bunched near the armpits before the first wash has smoothed out considerably. It's still there, but it's much softer and not as noticeable and obviously hasn't kept me from wearing it. Whew!

So there it is - I've knit an entire sweater for myself! It's not perfect (the sleeve decreases I added are too obvious to me, but not as noticeable when it's being worn), but it didn't take as long as I thought it might and there's definitely something rewarding about getting to wear it. My first attempt didn't kill me so I might become a sweater knitter after all.

My First Sweater

The February Lady Sweater pattern is hugely popular on Ravelry - a viral knit, of sorts, that's known for being flattering to a lot of body shapes and of simple construction. In fact we saw many, many incarnations of it being worn at Stitches Midwest. So, when I bought my first sweater quantity of yarn I tried to make sure I had enough yarn to try this popular cardigan. It seemed like a good place to start for someone like me who knows next to nothing about knitting sweaters.

Now it's knit from the top down, and from the moment I started I was unsure if it would fit me. I went through many stages of taking it off the needles to try it on to try to decide if it was too small and where the garter stitch yoke section should end and whether or not it was almost meeting under the arms like the pattern said or needed to be closer to almost meeting. (Of course, if I bought a cord that was longer than the 32" circular I've been using I wouldn't have to take it off the needles, but I couldn't bring myself to place an order for just one cord for a sweater that might or might not succeed anyway.)


Fortunately, Ravelry is a good place for reassurance and having read through many other people's February Lady project notes I discovered that I unwittingly made a pretty good choice of yarn - at least if I want it to be bigger instead of smaller. Apparently Dream in Color Classy has quite a reputation for blooming into a much more stretched out version of itself when washed, so while a lot of people report freaking out at how much their sweater had grown when wet, I was reassured to think that at worst it was going to get bigger and I could work on shaping it to fit me if I was a bit off on my guess of which size to knit.

So after a few months of off-and-on knitting I've finished the body of the sweater and the first of the sleeves. It's a snug fit so far, but given a certain amount of blocking I think it should be about right. The biggest issue that makes me question whether I'll end up wearing it in public or not is the extra material that bunches near the armpits (which you can see a hint of in the picture below). When following the pattern, I ended up knitting a lot of plain rows past the raglan shaping to get the right size for the sleeve, but apparently this causes too much build-up of fabric near the arms. As an admitted sweater-knitting newbie, I don't actually know what I should have done to fix that, so I'll live with it and keep an eye out for that on future patterns. I'm certainly not going to rip out the whole sweater to fix it and there's probably little that can be done once it's all knit. If anything, I'm kind of hoping it's one of those things that becomes less noticeable when washed or worn.


Now for the last sleeve and some buttons and then we'll see how it works as an actual garment. I have to say, I love the color and the subtle variation of the yarn, so if it fits well enough it could easily become a favorite. And since I have some yarn from Stitches Midwest in sweater quantities I really need to get some decent sweater-knitting skills going here sometime soon!