Sad Yarn

The longies are happy but the yarn is not. It's gone. I'm on the hunt for some yarn to make the cuffs/waistband with - wish me luck!

Alternatively I'm trying to decide if giving up a few stitches will be enough to finish the waistband/cuffs, without compromising the non-pooling yarn. Also if it's worth re-knitting. I'm leaning toward NO.

(Grey's Anatomy is good for my knitting - I started these on Friday PM, ran out of yarn on Sunday afternoon.)

Better Patterning

So, I started over on the longies to see what would happen. Not bad, is it? Much better than the previous pooling. I'm much further than this now - partway down the legs - and the yarn is striping nicely, no more pooling. Yay! 

More Longies!

This pair of longies is made with Irish Baby Knits' Elenya Alpaca yarn in the colorway Nolan. It's really pretty - the orange isn't quite as bright as it is in this photo. I really love the yarn, it's so soft. A little thinner than worsted weight but still very nice. I am not sure if I should be worried about running out of yarn or not but I am. We'll see.

I cast on 96 stitches, and I'm using the Curly Purly waistband with short rows. I'm beginning to wish I had started 2" in so I could work the cuffs/waist in a contrasting color if I need to. Oh well.

These top two photos show the front and the back. I am working 4 short rows - one at 2", 3", 4" (where the ribbing pattern changes) and a final one at 5". This is because Leif needs a bit more room in the rear, based on the trial pair. As you can see from this photo that creates a little jog in the color pattern - but it's still cute.

I'm half tempted to rip it all out and try again with only 88 stitches (multiples of 8 are needed for the waistband). It might change the striping just enough to avoid the pooling.

I am really loving the colors. I wouldn't have chosen them but they really are lovely. There are small bits of green where the blue and yellow intersect and a deeper almost brown color where blue and orange meet. Oh so pretty! It makes me want to take up dyeing. Like I need another hobby!

The Elenya Alpaca is an alpaca/merino blend. It's very soft and ever so slightly fuzzy. I have heard it may pill slightly but it stays just as soft as it is now - which is lovely. It will be nice against little Leif's delicate baby skin :)

Mikenzie's Baby's Soaker

My coworker's baby shower was today. I finished the soaker on Wednesday. I ripped out the first cuff and re-did it differently. I picked up ~56 stitches on a sz 3 needle and worked k1, p1 ribbing for 8 rows and then did *k1, p1, k1, p1, k2tog* followed by *k1, p1, k1, p1, k1* for six? rounds. It's a little more than the 1" cuff that the pattern called for but I wanted to make sure it was going to be snug. I think at the very end I had a k1, p1, k1, p1, k1, p1. Not sure why I did that now, but it made sense at the time. Here's a closeup of the cuff. I think I could have done ssk or something to make the transition a little bit smoother.. but I wasn't about to fuss with it too much. I bound off very loosely with sz 8 needles and it seems to be stretchy enough.

I tried to take a good photo of the yarn color and couldn't manage. This one is the best I could do in terms of showing off the subtle variations in color. I like it much better double-stranded than I did singled. Beautiful yarn, too. It's brighter than this photo, but not quite as bright as the photo below. It's lovely. Anyway, she seemed to like it and she knew what it was so hopefully it will work properly. Keep your fingers crossed! She promised me an update but couldn't guarantee a photo - they don't have a digital camera! I wonder how long that will last...:)

That's an 8.5x11 inch piece of paper to give you an idea of how big it is :) 

*&$#@*#$@#$

I have re-named this the "sweater of doom". Seriously. Anything I could have done wrong, I did. I would have been better off knitting the Shine Sport singled and just working however-many-more-stitches to make it work with the pattern. This making-up-patterns business is hard!

What have you done this time, you ask?

Besides going ahead with 6 rows of variegated, 10 rows of red, 6 rows of variegated? (The red *really* stands out! I haven't decided if I like it. This would be a good time to make that decision but I just can't decide.)

Besides knitting a 29-stitch sleeve before realising it was entirely too large?

Besides being a little worried that the sleeves are too long? (The trend seems to be to have the arms be as long as the body or as long as the body minus a half inch or so - I went with as long as the body, and I'm thinking they're too long.)

Besides all that......I neglected to include my 3-stitch seed stitch buttonbands when splitting for front and back. I turned my 81-stitch body into a 41-stitch back and two 20-inch front panels. It wasn't until six rows later that I decided to write out the decrease pattern to make sure I'd be able to work enough decreases to end with the appropriate stitch counts. When I discovered I couldn't, I puzzled and wondered and thought about it for awhile. Then I realised my mistake.

R-i-i-i-p.

This has *not* been my day. I do think it will be cute, though, and it's oh-so-soft. I think it would be nicer with thin-variegated, medium-red, thin-variegated, medium-red, thin-variegated striping but I can't decide how much I really care.

Soaker for Mikenzie

A coworker is having a baby and her shower is Friday (er, yes, I know that is 6 days away). Here's the soaker I'm working on for her. I think I need to rip and re-knit the cuff, so I haven't done the second one yet. I'm still not confident in the height - the leg opening is ever so slightly larger than I think it should be - but I can't decide if it matters. I'm leaning toward thinking it doesn't, provided my cuffs are loose enough. I KNOW the cuff needs to be un-bound-off and redone more loosely. I tried a sewn bind off and it looked tacky so I tried just being extra loose - no go. Outside of that, I suspect I might have made the cuff slightly too small at the end. It fits up to my elbow which seems like it should be big enough for a chunky baby thigh but I am just never sure! So, I'm undecided. Until I decide, the other cuff will not be knit.  
 
  

The Infamous Cardigan

 
Here is the current incarnation of the Shine Sport cardigan. I am afraid that the stripes are going to be too wide. I haven't ripped yet - I decided instead of experimenting on the 80? 90? stitch wide body, I'm going to experiment with the 30? stitch sleeves. Makes much more sense, doesn't it? Especially since the width will be much more disproportionate on the sleeves :) 

New Comment Setting

By the way,
I have been having some trouble with spam commenters and since I don't check this blog every day I don't always notice quickly. I hate the thought of spam (with links to questionable sites) being on my blog so I have switched to the comment style where you have to type what you see in a box to comment. Sorry for the inconvenience.. Blogger doesn't seem to have an option to ban a certain user, and the comment moderation option didn't seem that great to me. Is anyone aware of a better way to do things that I may be missing?

Striped Baby Cardigan

I'm working on making a striped baby cardigan. The yarn is Knitpick's Shine Sport, held doubled, and I have river (a nice bright-ish blue, but not neon by any means), cherry (a BRIGHT red, ever-so-slightly-pink but overall just a bright red) and cabin, a four-ply with a strand each of river, cherry, a light blue and a goldenrod type color. Photos are here, if you are interested.

The way I want to stripe it is as follows:


The cardigan is going to be about 7" long from hem to underarm and then another ~4 inches from there. The striping pattern I was planning was 4" of blue, 1" of the variegated, 2" of the red (this brings it to the underarm), 1" of variegated and 3" of blue to finish it off. I have begun this, though, and I'm worried that it is just Too Much Red, and somewhat too much of the variegated all in one bit. However, I don't think I have enough blue yarn to do 5" of blue, 1/2" (or 3/4") of variegated, then 1.5 (or 1.25") of red, then 1/2" (or 3/4") of variegated, then 3.5" (or 3.25") of blue.

I'm therefore thinking about keeping the 4" blue bottom edge and 3" blue top edge, and alternating variegated-red-variegated-red-variegated for the middle section. I'm not sure this will help though.

Any thoughts? Any pictures of similarly-striped infant/toddler sweaters/cardis so I can get an idea of proportions? Any leftover skeins of river?

Knit-rip, Knit-rip, Knit-rip

That is the story of my life lately.

A coworker is having a baby. We're having a shower for her. I don't want to spend a fortune. I thought, hey, why don't I knit something? I can even use stash yarn!

First thought: sweater. I have a bunch of Knitpicks Shine Sport to use up (In cherry, river and "cabin" - a mix of cherry, river, light blue and orange-ish). I thought that would be great. I love Knitty's Daisy. No problem. Except I can't get gauge. Single-stranded it's way off, double-stranded it's equally off. No problem. I'll just adjust the pattern. Oh, wait a minute - it's a bottom-up raglan, but it's SEAMED. What? Seaming?! No way. I thought it was a seamless knit-in-one-piece raglan. Very funny.

Well, I decided I could probably figure it out so I did a rough swatch (with the yarn doubled - I like the fabric that way, nice and sturdy and it knits up quickly on sz 8s!). At first I thought I'd just try knitting the smallest size (I was aiming for the largest size, 6-12 mos) and just go with those stitch counts. Then I realised my row gauge was way off... and anyway, the thing was turning out HUGE. 26" circumference anyone? That would fit a four year old. Riiiiiiip.

Then I pulled out another (seamless!) raglan pattern I have that calls for worsted weight and tried to just use one of their stitch counts, figuring I could work out the numbers from there. Nope, still too big! The gauge swatch is fine and dandy but this is cotton, and when you add the weight of the piece it changes things just a little. Riiiiiiiiiip!

Finally I recalculated and picked a stitch count that would (theoretically) give me a 20" circumference (survey says a 9 month old has an 18" chest circumference.. works for me!). Well, I guess it sort of did, but now I can't for the life of me figure out how to coordinate the shaping. I think I'm just going to wing it but for now I've put it down. I also can't decide exactly how to stripe it. I'm thinking solid blue top and bottom, middle red stripe (top of this stripe even with the underarm, repeating across the sleeves) and a Cabin stripe on either side of the red stripe. I'm going for a total of 7.5" in the lower body (before underarm) and 4.5" (approx) of raglan shaping, so I'm thinking 4" of blue, 2" of red and 1.5" of cabin on either side of the red. I'm worried about having enough blue, though, in which case I really *should* do 3" of blue, 2.5" of red and 2" of the cabin - but that might be too overwhelming. So then I thought about just doing random stripes - you know, 2-3 rows of each color? Anyway, I'm stumped, so I've set this aside for now. Another baby will get this sweater!

I thought booties - but that requires a hat - and maybe matching mittens - and cotton isn't best suited to that, and I wanted to use the cotton darn it! I haven't any nice baby-soft wool on hand.

Then I discovered coworker is cloth diapering. She's open to trying prefolds and soakers. So she's getting this (it still needs cuffs and finishing):

This has been several rips in the making, too. The waist band has been fine from the get-go. The variegated part, not so much. I didn't bother swatching. It's small enough. I just went at it. The yarn singled wasn't turning out tight enough for me so I decided I should double it. This was, of course, after 3" of knitting. I convinced myself I could leave 1" singled, but still had to.... Riiiiiiip.

After working to about 4" (out of 5.5 total!) I remembered that boys wet in the front and the yarn probably needed doubling from the start. Riiiiiip.

Then I misread the pattern and knit for about four rows too many - and kitchenered the seam closed. Whoops. Riiiiiip.

Now, it should be DONE. If not, I don't care, it's going to be done. All that's left are the cuffs. That's a job for another day. I am rubbish at evenly picking up stitches so it's likely to involve lots of Riiiiipppppping.