The baby sweater/jacket it done! I finished the knitting (well, just casting off) last night at work, and wove in the ends this morning. I love the pattern, and the yarn, and the convenience of buying it in a kit. I did run in to some yarn troubles, but I think I dealt with them neatly.
I was concerned about the amount of teal yarn I had, so instead of doing the body, then the body edgings, then the sleeves (like the pattern directs you to), I did body (with seed stitch edging left on a holder) then completed both sleeves. I took stock of the yarn I had after both sleeves were cast off. Then I made the button bands, as directed, in the teal colour.
That’s when I was certain I really didn’t have enough teal yarn to do applied i-cord all the way around the sweater, and for the tie. The front tie was an easy decision – I had lots of pink left, and the baby is a girl, so I went with pink for the neck tie.
Then I had to figure out what to do with the rest of it. I bandied about the idea of doing applied i-cord with the scraps of other colours, to give it a very Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat look. I decided against that because I didn’t want to deal with the ends. I decided to try binding off the bottom edge in teal.
I chose to do a very elastic cast-off (my favourite: K2, *insert the left needle into the front of the 2 sts on the right needle and knit them together–1 st remains on right needle. K1, repeat from * until all sts have been bound off). After the first try, I had literally 1 inch of yarn hanging after binding off the last stitch, so I undid that, and did it again with the smaller needles called for in the pattern. It is a stretchy bind-off after all, so small needles shouldn’t really matter – and the didn’t! I was left with a longer tail to weave in properly, but it meant I was out of teal.
After much waffling, I decided to see if I had enough pink to bind off the front edges – it was either that or the orange, and that didn’t look so nice with the teal. Once again, I had the right amount!
Because the pattern was written to have continuous icord around all the edges, there was a funny little gap between the bottom seed stitch band, and the corner of the edge bands. That would easily be fixed by following the instructions for the borders, because it has you pick up some extra stitches in the corner. I could not do that, because of the yarn shortage. I ended up slipping the bottom edge stitch from each side to the bottom band’s needle, and treating them like they belonged there. That did just enough to get rid of the little gap.
All in all I’m very pleased with the sweater, and would definitely knit it again. I might even buy one skein of each colour, and make many, or matching hats or something. Someone else will have to have a baby though – the sweater is much too big for my Blue Bear.
I’ve been enjoying cooking, being in my own kitchen, cuddling on my own couch, listening to podcasts, sitting at my desk, sorting things out, and all sorts of other wonderful little homey puttering tasks.
