When it comes to quick projects, baby clothes, especially for newborns, are super quick knits. They are also bite size pieces of knitting that are perfect for learning new skills, like increasing, making button holes, etc. My dear friend Mare wrote her Newbie and Baby Cardigan pattern and asked some people in our knitting group to test it for her. Coincidentally, just as Mare sent out the pattern, I bumped into my cousin at the market. It turns out my cousin is expecting a girl in December, so a quick little baby cardigan turned out to be the perfect project. Serendipitously, I happened to have exactly 50 g of DK weight yarn, Sirdar Cotton DK in Light Taupe, on hand.
If you have never knit a sweater before, this is definitely a good pattern to start with. It starts out easily with a few rows of garter stitch, and after a few rows of increases and plain knitting the cardigan quickly takes shape. The most wonderful thing about this pattern is how simple it is. It makes for a good project to take on the go and knits up satisfyingly quickly (for those of us that need instant gratification).
Newborn cardigan just after dividing sleeves from body
One sleeve finished
The cardigan's simplicity also makes it perfect for embellishments. I browsed through Pinterest to get inspiration for some simple embroidered flowers, picked up some solid green, and variegated pink and purple embroidery floss, sat down and got to work. In order to keep things simple, I decided to use duplicate stitch (aka Swiss darning) to apply some flowers onto the back and fronts of the cardigan. I must say, I never thought that I would be recommending duplicate stitch because I used to loathe the finishing process and really wanted to be done with the project. Now, after countless hours and stitches, I've come to appreciate the little finishing touches that turn good hand knits into amazing hand knits.
This blog is just over 2 years old, and I haven't made any entries since December 2015. To be completely honest, I've planning on detailing my yarn adventures since then, but I've been stuck. Not stuck in the sense that I've been in the same place for the past year and a half, but more like I've shattered into a million pieces and have just recently started to put myself back together.
What could precipitate such a dramatic disintegration of self?
Before I answer that, let me take you back to 2014. In August, I gave birth to a sweet baby girl, Victoria. Prior to her arrival, hubby and I learned that she had several congenital heart defects, which could have been easily corrected separately, but all together made an impossible situation.
Victoria, about 12 hours old and miraculously
breathing on her own.
Fast forward through her initial 3 month hospital stay, 2 major heart surgeries, multiple cardiac catherizations, and we arrive in March 2016. By this time, I had expended all my energy on keeping Victoria alive and caring for her, and I was running on fumes. Then the unthinkable happened. On 26 March, I put Victoria to bed after having dinner with my family. Within a few minutes, I heard shriek resonate from Victoria's room. I ran in and found her in her bed, purple in the face and convulsing. Hubby and I raced her to the hospital where doctors and nurses tried for over an hour to revive her, but their efforts were in vain. In the early hours of 27 March, my baby girl was gone.
In the first 48 hours after Victoria left, I was in shock and completely lost. It wasn't until the third day, the day hubby and I went to formally identify our daughter's corpse, that I thought up a way to work through my grief: knit a funeral shroud with which Victoria could be cremated. I had the perfect pattern, too. Bernat's Gift of Love Afghan had been sitting in my library forever. Traditionally, white is a mourning colour in Chinese, so I chose an off white merino from my stash and cast on.
For the next two weeks, I knitted like a maniac. I was knitting from dawn to dusk and the wee hours in between. I channeled all my grief and heart ache into knitting, and 60,317 stitches later (that's an average of 4,308 stitches per day), and on the day I said my final goodbye to Victoria, I felt empty. Within three hours of finishing the afghan (I neglected to knit the border because there really was not enough time), the afghan was laid on Victoria, then they were sent off for cremation.
My last gift of love to Victoria, including a quickly knit tunic in which Victoria was cremated
I've knit pretty much every day since then. Every stitch has been a sort a meditation, focusing my mind and forcing me to live in the present. And here I am, 19 months later, finally starting to feel like myself again. Let's see where my stitches take me next.
One of the last photos taken of Victoria and me together.
The first sweater that I ever knit actually wasn't for me. It was for my baby girl (who is more toddler now than baby) because I wanted to start small. So, went off into the Internet to find the perfect pattern for my needs.
My pattern requirements were simple:
no seaming required - I was not an adept sewer when I started
no working flat in fair isle - of the demonstrations and tutorials I've seen, it looks like a pain
After sifting through mounds of adorable toddler sweaters, I finally found this Icelandic set pattern on Istex's website under free patterns. It was perfect! So I set off to start knitting.
Part I - The Body
The construction of the sweater is bottom up, so I started with the ribbing and worked upwards. This project was actually the first time I tried the German Twisted / Old Norwegian Cast On, and I must say that I like it a lot better than the standard cast on. It looks prettier and stretches more. Down side it takes just a tad bit more work than the standard, but not too much.
Moving onto the fun colorwork, since I had a circular needle approximately the same circumference as the body, there weren't any tension issues with long floats. Also, I've read / seen a few people suggesting to catch long floats every 5-7 stitches, but considering I was going to dress a wiggle baby with pointy fingers, I opted to catch my floats at most every 3 stitches for a smoother fabric on the inside.
Part II - The Sleeves
The first sleeve I knit was tricky. After knitting monster pants using magic loop, I figured that I would do the same with the sleeve. Once I had finished a few rounds of colorwork though, I realized this wasn't the method for me, fair isle or otherwise. To keep the right tension on my stitches (especially the ones held on the needle cord) was tricky and mostly consisted of guess work. Since I was incorporating stranded colorwork, I not only had to consider if the stitches on the cord were pulled too tight (making them difficult to slide back onto the needle), but on top of that if my floats were too short / long. Once I realized how bothersome magic loop and fair isle knitting were together, I switched immediately to DPNs.
When starting the first sleeve, I knit it right side out. To prevent floats from getting short and puckering my work, I kept the previously used needle parallel to my working (spare) needle, and this worked pretty well. The sleeve was quickly finished.
Sometime close to finishing the first sleeve, I came across some people knitting inside out. The needles are still held the same way, but with the cord (if knitting circular) or inactive needles (if using DPNs) kept between the hands and body instead of further away from the body. The reasoning behind this method is that when working in fair isle, the floats are forced to travel the longest way around the work, leaving longer, roomier floats, which are imperative to small circumference pieces like socks and sleeves. Another reason that I saw was that when working larger pieces like shawls and adult sweaters, the work naturally falls away from you so there is less adjusting needed as your work grows.
Looking to get better tension on my small sleeve, I decided to give it a try. I admit, this was very difficult to get my head around when I first started. I was still getting the hang of knitting fair isle and the new needle orientation kept snagging my working yarn. Finally, I got it and never again will I knit small fair isle pieces right side out. Inside out is definitely the way to go for me.
Notice the lack of puckering in the right sleeve?
Part III - The Yoke
Not sure about all the other knitters out there, but sometimes I get so excited about starting / moving on with a project that I don't fully read the pattern instructions. Such was the case with this sweater. My first mistake was mixing up the color chart; I missed one color repeat and the flea pattern is supposed to be staggered in each round, but I knit one flea on top of the other. Not really huge mistakes when considering construction, and if nobody else ever saw the corresponding color chart they would be none the wiser, so oh well. Moving On.
Second mistake, which proved to be more grave and time consuming, I skipped over the instructions that said to bind off 6 stitches on each sleeve and on each side of the body to make the armholes. I realized that I had not bound off the sleeve stitches when knitting to join body and sleeves (I had too many stitches). So I ripped back and bound off the sleeves as instructed. Then proceeded to knit the yolk of the sweater only to find out on my next round of decreases that I still had way too many stitches. At this point I was unsure if I could finish the sweater. All I wanted to do was rustle it up and toss it into a burning pit. But in the end, reason prevailed. Ripped back. Bound off required stitches. Continued knitting the yoke. Finished the last bit of ribbing and bound off with standard, stretchy yarn over bind off.
Always read your pattern instructions. Had I continued like this, there would have been no armholes.
Part IV - The Finishing Touches What takes me longest when working on projects? Probably the finishing. I'm not a huge fan of weaving in ends so I really dragged my feet on this one. I put it aside for at least a month before I seriously started to finish up. To seam the armholes together, I used mattress stitch. This little bit of seaming has actually given me new confidence in being able to seam larger pieces. Mattress stitch is just so easy! As for the loose ends wrapping around me like demon octopus tentacles, I hid a few of them in the armhole seam, and decided to run the rest along the inside of the sleeves and body where the sweater would get more wear (just like reinforcing socks). After a night of weaving and clipping, the sweater was finished!
Finally finished product.
Excuse the sweater rolls. Baby girl just wanted to wiggle out of her stroller.
In my search for sock patterns, I came across this beautiful Baratheon sock pattern inspired by Game of Thrones. I instantly fell in love with the cable pattern, but soon realized that I would be unable to use it since most of my work is done from bottom up while the socks are knit from the top down. What followed was literally a mess of yarn and frustration, but I finally had a breakthrough on Saturday! The final result turned out to be quite different from the original cable pattern, but I love mine so much more. Not only is it my own design, but the cables actually turned out to look like stags - the sigil of House Baratheon. Here is the pattern in scarf form for now. I'm planning to incorporate it into a cardigan I'm planning for myself. So many things I want to create, so little time.
I don't know about all you knitters and crocheters (sp?) out there, but weaving in loose ends is the bane of my existence. Especially for large project that frequently requiring joining new yarn. In the wee hours of the morning I stumbled across the Russian Join, god's gift to all yarn crafters. Its quite a simple technique in which you graft two ends of yarn together to make a pretty seamless join.
Once the join is made and pulled tight, the loose ends are trimmed, then it's back to working on that scarf (or whatever is on your needles / hook at the moment). Life has been changed for the better. Good bye annoying loose ends. Check out Very Pink Knit's clear, concise tutorial on the Russian Join.
Sunday at the Yeaman house doesn't officially start until we have our brunch at noon. If I was to run on autopilot, we might end up eating extremely unhealthy (although equally delicious) foods every week, like..... Bacon French toast. In an effort to cook a bit healthier for the family, I've been trying to come up with healthier recipes for brunch. Last week it was chocolate chip pancakes with all butter replaced with coconut oil. This week, I came up with Orange cinnamon French toast. The healthy kick is that it is cooked in fragrant coconut oil, which is often lauded for its health benefits.
My original plan was to make completely plain French toast, but I saw an abandoned orange completely missing its peel. Hubby had stripped it for the zest to add to his beer recipe. In order to not let it die in vain, I decided to juice it up and add it to the batter. The result? Let's just say baby loved it so much that she tried to simultaneously shove 4 pieces of it in her mouth.
Recipe:
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons orange juice
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
4 slices of bread
Coconut oil for cooking
1. Gently whisk eggs until yolk and white are mostly combined. Add milk, vanilla, and orange juice, whisking between ingredients.
2. Add cinnamon and cloves. Whisk again.
3. Heat 1 tbsp coconut oil in pan to medium high heat.
4. Dip one slice of bread into egg mixture. Flip so both sides are covered.
5. Fry in coconut oil for 2-3 minutes each side, or until a golden brown char appears on both sides.
6. Top with your toppings of choice and serve! I chose whipped cream and some maple syrup, but chocolate chips would work well, too.
