I'm sure you had all despaired at ever seeing another FO on this blog, but today we have not one, but TWO! (One of them is sort of cheating. But as Crazy Aunt Purl says, y'all understand.)
The colors of the sweater on the left are true in this picture, but the one on the right is a darker green color, as you can see in the picture below.
The first one is the toddler jacket that I started in September. It fits Just Right, which is much better than being Too Small; but a little disappointing as I was hoping that the little one could wear this through the early spring. We'll see. It's very very thick and warm, definitely not for inside wear.
The pattern is a variation on the Rumplestiltskin Toddler Jacket from Knitter's Stash. Iinstead of the recommended chenille, I used the super bulky thick-and-thin wool from handpaintedyarn.com, which I expect to get nicely fuzzy and felted from wear. The gauge was different so I made some adaptations along the way. I really enjoyed knitting with this yarn as it's very soft and squooshy, and the colors are gorgeous, and who doesn't occasionally enjoy a gauge of 2.5 spi?
(By the way, my child is actually not cross eyed, but she appears that way at times due to pseudo strabismus.)
The second one is a bit of a cheat. This is actually a cardigan that I knit for my nephew in 1997 using Lamb's Pride worsted yarn. When I look at this one I can see how far my knitting and finishing skills have come since then; the seams are awful!
This sweater was knit from a Minnowknits pattern which called for a hood, but the hood was too shallow and never really wearable. I'm not sure if this was a problem with my knitting or with the pattern. Also, there is no button band in the design; the front edges are stockinette (done in intarsia, no less) with two rows of single crochet that are theoretically supposed to keep the edges from curling. Then the pattern directed the knitter to crochet some button loops on the edges. Yeah, it all sounded great in theory (to an inexperienced knitter), but it was not so fab in practice. The edges, of course, DID curl, and the button loops never stayed on the buttons, and all in all this was not such a functional little sweater. But it was cute.
My sister sent this one back to me about a year ago, after the last of her kids outgrew it. I examined it with my now-more-experienced knitter's eye and I immediately ripped out the hood and created a different neck line as best as I could. This was a bit tricky as I did not have much of the original yarn left, and I also did not want to take out the shoulder seams and deal with changing the intarsia around the edges. As it was I still had to recreate some intarsia in the back and redo the crocheted edge in places. Then I lost interest and the sweater sat in my work basket until last week, when I finally sewed grograin ribbon inside the front edges to keep them from curling, and I took off the buttons and sewed on a single metal clasp. Voila! A cute sweater for my cutie-pie, and just in time, as the fit is great and it's the perfect weight for fall.
I admit that I feel a bit sad that Rebecca will outgrow these in mere months, and that there is no younger sibling who will grow into them. (Although let's be clear that I am not sad about the lack of a younger sibling except as it pertains to handknits.) Thankfully, my very good friend, who is also an avid knitter, just gave birth to her second daughter. I have assured her that little Mary will be very well (wool?) dressed in the coming years.
*Addendum: Since Sam so nicely pointed out my funny spelling error in my last post, I decided to try using the Blogger spellchecker this time around. Can you believe that it did not recognize the word "knitter"? I mean, how many zillions of knitblogs are hosted by blogger, and the word knitter isn't in the default dictionary? Please! And I must admit that I found it amusing that it wanted me to replace "Minnowknits" with "Mincemeat." 'Nuff said.
Except--Sam? The spellchecker ate my post so I had to retype it. So I may just keep amusing you with spelling errors in the weeks to come. ;)
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