posts tagged: babies

Pull Gaspard

This pattern has been in my Ravelry favorites for quite some time; I was excited to finally knit it! My cousin and his wife are due in May, and this little “sweatshirt” type sweater was just the thing. The whole front “apron” part is a big pocket!

I dove into my stash and found two remaining skeins of Cascade 220 in this gray. It was exactly the amount I’d need—though I ran so close to the end of the yardage, I didn’t even attempt the crochet edging in the same color. I did make the body slightly longer, as other reviews on Rav indicated it was off proportionally. (I think I added 10 rows.) I cast this on during a KBC retreat weekend in Lancaster, PA, and had finished nearly all of it except for one sleeve by the time I got home. I knit the body in the round to the armholes, then knit both the front and back simultaneously so that it took as little brainpower as possible.

The folding open of the lapels before starting the sailor flap seemed straightforward enough, and I’d read a few Rav posts that warned that this was tricky so I was prepared. I could see it clearly in my mind—I understood what was intended! And yet I got it wrong on the first try anyway. It was an easy enough fix, though I didn’t realize it until I was a few rows in because of the way the piece kept flipping on me. Not a big deal; ripped and restarted.

After knitting on both sleeves, though, I had a moment of crisis: The neck opening was too small, and it did not have a lot of give. I have relatively limited knowledge of babies, but I know they usually have giant noggins. With my mantra of “when in doubt, rip it out” echoing in my head, I laboriously frogged the sleeves, un-Kitchenered the shoulders, undid the sailor flap, and frogged down to the neck split. I decreased a few more times at the neck edge until I felt it was satisfactorily wide. This time, the sailor flap gave me no issues—aided, I think, by the fact that I did not bind off the top of the back on the second go-around. That time I left the stitches live, so I just knit them into the flap.

I wanted a neon yarn to do the edging, but also needed so little I didn’t want to buy a whole ball of neon (and I couldn’t find any neon around the office!). So this spring green made do, but I love the effect even still.

Of course, knitting for a baby due in May means making something for cold weather and then having to wait… and wait… to see them in it! Hopefully the 6-month size I made will be a perfect fit come next fall/winter for little Henry!

wee envelope for william

Another cousin is expecting a baby! This time, I decided I’d do something other than the basic Child’s Placket-Neck Pullover that I like so much. But when you research baby sweaters on Ravelry they’re just all so much the same. I favorited several but ultimately I chose Ysolda’s Wee Envelope precisely because it’s completely different from all the others.

For this you start with one sleeve, work across the front yoke, then knit the back yoke, then the other sleeve. At the end you pick up stitches and work the body. It just seemed so much more interesting to knit. I had a decent amount of Malabrigo Arroyo from my Spinster Slouch leftover, and I was able to get close to gauge and a nice fabric on size 6 needles. (I swear I’m not a tight knitter, despite the drastic difference in needle size from the pattern!) I debated what size to knit, since the little one is due in November—and he’ll live in Georgia—so I had to match up my best guess on the kid’s size (his parents are both very tall) with what the weather will be like plus how warm this sweater would actually be . . . so I knit the 3-6 month size. It looks impossibly tiny to me, but I don’t know babies, so I figure he’ll fit into it at some time.

As I’d hoped, this was an interesting knit. It’s not mindless like the Placket Neck would be, and there was some weirdness (you need to pick up across the front yoke, but there’s an I-cord edge there! How do you pick up for that?! The blog post to explain doesn’t address this at all, so I just fudged it, which I have to remind myself is totally the point of being the boss of your knitting), but there were nice long stretches where you didn’t have to think at all. I suspected I wasn’t really going to want/need 2 buttons on each side  (I basically hate dealing with buttons) but since I didn’t know the pattern—and there’s no actual schematic included—I just followed the directions rather than try to make modifications on the fly. In the end, though, the whole thing seemed so small that I just seamed the buttonholes shut. I am not sure that the parents would’ve even noticed the holes, but just in case, I made them go away. If I made the sweater in a bigger size I might include them, but future wee Wee Envelopes are more than likely going to be buttonless from me.

This definitely won’t be the last Wee Envelope I make: cute, fast (knit it in just 2 days), and the pattern includes a huge range of sizes. Yay for a new go-to pattern!