sneaky March - musings on baby shirts

The sun is shining right in my window, so I can't watch anime - right now I'm on the Deathnote bandwagon and it's a little disappointing. I guess if you haven't seen much anime, this might strike you as the awesomest anime ever, but it's rather plotholey, shark-jumpey and too shounen (male-targeted) by half. Interesting that they've made the evil guy so good-looking and the good guy so strangely bird-like. Also, the one smart female character is treated like shit by her fiance and is killed off in one episode right at the beginning, while the annoying fanservice female character stays on and on and on ... gah. It is still an interesting thought experiment, though, which is always the best thing about anime.

Ok, enough of that. On to knitting. Lately, I've kind of been inspired to knit a few more baby things. I think the intended recipient must have been born already, I'm just waiting for the email. I wanted to use up some of the cotton yarn I had bought and so at first, I thought about making a knitted dress with large block stripes in turquoise and red, but it didn't look so hot (different yarns) and it would have fit a five-year-old.

I've actually already made a baby shirt a while ago, in summer 2008, as part of a set of playclothes, to try and use up cotton yarn leftovers (Lana Grossa Toccata, to be precise). I never got around to the pants, though. I had to reknit this because I wasn't careful enough about carrying the yarn between the stripes and there were large gaps and it looked awful. So, reknitting. And reknitting. And reknitting. I hate reknitting with cotton yarn. But I really love these colors together:

This was knit from the top down, following the construction I had put to use on an unfinished project that needs a lot of rethinking. I decided to end it with a rolled brim, because nothing else looked good. Consequently, I've been using the rolled brim in all my other baby shirts, too.

Leftovers can provide a lot of inspiration. As I repeatedly mentioned when writing about the Snow Bunny, I love the Lana Grossa Latte yarn - they also make rather a nice blue. So when I ended up with over half (too lazy to measure) a ball of the white Latte, I decided to buy a ball of blue latte and give in to this year's fashion. Yes, the French blue and white stripes have returned in force (from doing a turn in the 80s and again in the mid-90s). I love that look. Can't wear it, but I love it. So, why not make small children wear it, they can't defend themselves and look cute in it. (Muahahaha). I give you the Classic Baby Shirt. Done bottom-up, because ... no reason. I love it, it's soft and beautiful.

After this, I was on a roll. Having decided to abandon the block stripes, I thought about how little texture I had been using for the baby clothes I had made so far (with a few exceptions, but still) and how little lace! That had to be remedied. I wanted some sort of smocking effect, but not too much. And something lacy and textured. Well, one of those stitches that is really, really easy and never leaves my brain is the Trinity Stitch. Makes little cluster balls that look like berries.

I gave it the rather stark name of One Texture, I guess a cuter name would be Summer Raspberry, but let's not get too twee here. The yarn is Lana Grossa Bingo and it has been in my stash for a long time, so yay! More space for new yarn. I wanted to do a different top construction and ended up with this kimono-like thing - I just hope it actually fits. As usual, worries about arm and head size abounded, since I don't actually have a real life baby to put this on.

From One Texture to Texture Two (aka Pie Crust Shirt or something). This time, I chose the Classic Baby Shirt construction again, but decided to do a twisted stitch rib on the straps so they wouldn't grow so much. The yarn is Lana Grossa Linea Pura Organico, which has plenty of beautiful colors. Originally it should have been a summer hat - yeah, just what a baby needs, a heavy cotton summer hat. Design fail.

I think I could go on and on knitting baby shirts. But actually, I've gone back to hats, since I decided to make a few more things that can be used immediately. It's rather boring having to wait to use all the handknitted stuff, no? A bit of instant gratification never hurt. So, because there must be some cutesy things, here's a cutesy Litte Flower Hat, knit using Lana Grossa Linea Pura Flora.

And that's it. Knitting a slightly larger hat with a bit of a lace pattern in the pink Flora and watching Deathnote. Maybe to get in the mood for the next baby thing (not for the same baby), which involves hot pink and black yarn and skulls ...

spring has sprung

Only a day after complaining about the lousy weather it turned awesomely sunny. And even with a few grey days in between, it has stayed sunny. Spring is in the air and I'm torn between wanting to knit more mittens and abandoning all winter projects. Looking at my Ravelry projects, I thought I had more projects that had to do with spring - apparently not! And not all of them are in spring colors either. But I'll introduce them here, anyway.

The oldest project is the Spring Hat for little girls, a pattern of my own design.The yarn is Jaeger Matchmaker, a mercerized cotton yarn. Sometimes I just get the urge to knit something girly, even if I do favour gender-neutral children's clothing (or actually boy clothing because I like the colors better). I do love adding just a bit of ornamentation to an otherwise plain item so that the yarn can really shine, but is accentuated by the pattern. So that's what I did here.

 

Next up is a favorite pair of fingerless gloves, the Spring Flirt gloves, also my own design, the cable pattern is from the Vogue Stitionary 2 book. These werde done in Lana Grossa Furetto and I love their color combination. Sadly, the yarn has been discontinued. I love these especially because compared to other mittens and fingerless gloves I have made, they're pretty short, so they're useful if I wear a jacket or shirt with especially long sleeves.

Then there's the little Spring Bracelet from when I was doing a spot of beaded knitting. It's a modification of Knitty's Maryella design. I've since given up knitting beaded bracelets, because there is too much sewing involved - those snaps are a pain! However, I do want to do more beaded knitting and explore its possibilities ... some day.

The penultimate project (yes! I've finally used this word!) is the Spring Blanket - also my own design. It doesn't have a dedicated owner yet (more about that when I run out of material again) and so I use it to keep my legs warm on my couch in the morning. I used Lana Grossa New Cotton for this and recycled the white and green from a scarf I knit back in ... who knows when, at the beginning of the knitting obsession. I do love it very much, but it isn't blocked yet, though, so the squares still are as sloppy as they look her.

Waiting for Spring is the last project with "spring" in the name - these gloves are currently undergoing a redesign. I wanted stripes and zigzag, but the zigzag thing is seriously messing up my thumb construction and I don't want to bother anymore. Plain stripes it will be! which involves unravelling everything I've done so far, which does kinda suck. But if the finished product isn't nice, then what's the point.

Here you can see the inspiration from the baby cap put to use! And there's sunlight as proof. Dang zigzags ... I'm not completely convinced that I should undo everything yet.

only five things

My father died a year ago today. I knit five things for him. I don't have a picture of the wristwarmers I knit for him - those he probably wore most often.

The second item he wore most often is probably this one:

The Architect's Hat, an original design by me, just for him. He wanted it to be very plain, I wanted it to have at least something special, so I used a very understated sequence of k1, p1, k1, p2 with 5 rows stockinette in between. I've since used that sequence in other projects, too, to infuse them a little with his spirit. When I did the decreases, I accidentially created a star on top of the hat:

The third item I knit for him was a sweater, using a pattern by Renée Rigdon and Zabeth Stewart, published in Anticraft. I took the measurements from other sweaters of his, but by the time it was finished, he had lost a whole lot of weight and it didn't fit him at all anymore. I'm still not sure what to do with it now.

One of the last things he actually wore was the nightcap I knit for him. The pattern, a vintage one recreated by Franklin Habit for Knitty, gave me a lot of trouble, since the original pattern numbers lead to something that could have fit two people. In the end, I picked up stitches mid-cap, cut the thread and knit from the top down and ended up with this:

I don't remember if he actually ever wore the improved version. I do have pictures of him wearing the ridiculously large version, though.

The last item I knit was one he never got to wear. It is a woolen recreation of a hat I designed and knit for my brother using bamboo yarn. I finished it and gave it to my cousin.

I've decided to keep the architect's hat as it is, but don't know what I'll do with the nightcap and the sweater. Maybe I'll find good places for those or maybe I'll unravel them and knit something entirely new with them.

falling in love with short rows

For a long time, I've successfully managed to avoid short rows. If they were in a pattern, I clung tightly to that pattern and hated how they looked. I understood the principle of the short rows and had used them in freeform crochet without problems, but in knitting, I didn't really know what to do with them.

Looking for a way to make short rows look nicer, I read about Japanese short rows done with pins, but found that to be kind of material intensive, a big minus for me, since I like to knit with as few accessories as possible. Using accessories like cable needles, pins or stitch markers, and doing things like knitting stuff in pieces and seaming them up later takes a lot longer than making stitch markers out of left-over yarn on the fly, cabling without cable needles and knitting seamlessly whenever possible.

Still, I wanted to learn how to deal with short rows since I hated being afraid of them. With all this baby knitting, I found the perfect opportunity to get over my fears: the Aviatrix baby hat by Justine Turner. I love the look of it and just had to make it for my friend's baby. But how? How could I get over the short rows?

Solution: the internets. TECHknitting is an excellent blog with lots of how-tos, tricks and tips and really clear explanations and pictures and there I came across the method that cured me. At the end of this article on short row methods is my new method of choice: Japanese short rows done with yarnovers and slipped stitches, no pins, no wraps, just knitting. Once you get used to slipping the first stitch, everything becomes a cinch!

Now I can proudly present my two Aviatrix baby hats. The first one was modded a little, according to the instructions of a fellow Raveler, but with the second one, I stuck to the pattern. Funnily, the hats turned out roughly the same size. I just hope the straps aren't too short or too long. They were both made using Lana Grossa Superlana, which is rougher and not as tightly plied as the Cool Wool 2000, but soft and durable all the same (also, cheaper and the right weight for these hats).

Yes, I had gotten over my short row anxiety. Now how to put the new knowledge into practice? Why, by modifying a pattern, of course! Enter my love of pixie caps. I bought the first Knitty book only because there was a pixie cap in it. It turned out to be not very cute, even though I travelled to the US to get the exact yarn specified (ok, there were other reasons for travelling there, as well). But if I can't wear them, I know who can - babies.

 
Yes, babies can wear pixie caps. And I found the perfect pattern: the Vintage Pixie Cap by Hadley Fierlinger. To make the pointy end more pointy, stitches are bound off at the beginning of rows, which always leads to ugly stepped edges and ugly seams. I used Japanese short rows and could do a comfortable three-needle-bind off in the end, saving myself from having to do a seam. Jubilation! I used Lana Grossa Cool Wool 2000 yet again, since it's superwash, supersoft and superdurable.

The last baby hat I knit doesn't have short rows. But the Norwegian Sweet Baby Hat by Gro is cute all the same. I picked up a ball of dark blue-green Lana Grossa Cool Wool 2000 (what else, by now), but when the time came to cast on, I was a little split. It's lovely yarn, slightly heathered, but the color was maybe somewhat austere for a baby that wasn't mine. After much wrangling with how many stitches to cast on (gosh, is it ever hard to settle on a size when there aren't any babies around you that you can test things on), I decided to add a little more color.

I had recently finished a headband for my mother (no picture yet), because the first one I made for her got stolen. Looking at the leftovers, I discovered that the color suited my dark green-blue perfectly - and since the pattern called for stripes, I put the yarns together and got something much more beautiful than if I had used either yarn on its own.

In fact, I love this color combination so much that I'm going to make myself some fingerless gloves with the same yarn and a zigzag pattern. At first I thought about making the same baby hat and saving it for my own future babies (yes, I am a little crazy), but in this case, rational thought (and selfishness) won.

So that's it on baby hats. I have a few more baby items in my queue, but my baby knitting elan is petering out. After all, I have to weave in all the ends on all the things I already made, there are seams to sew, there's blocking and finally sending everything off. In the meantime I'll be working on the 200th project I recorded on Ravelry - and it will benefit heavily from my short row craze.