Finally, a baby girl...

Ever since my goddaughter was born (she's now 3 1/2 years old), everyone I know has been having boys... Don't believe me? Off the top of my head, I count 4 little boys amongst my friends, three pregnant friends expecting boys, and my sweet little nephew whose now 6 months old. One friend actually had a girl recently, but since they decided not to find out the baby's gender during the pregnancy, I had to go with a gender-neutral pattern. You can understand how excited I was when I found out that I would finally have a chance to knit something girly...

I had been looking for an opportunity to knit Elizabeth Zimmerman's February Baby Sweater after seeing a few pretty ones in other people's blogs, especially this one over at Brooklyn Tweed. (This is the fourth or fifth project he has inspired, I guess we have similar tastes...) Not that there aren't many other pretty examples out there: mine was the 900th on Ravelry! Because of the lace pattern, it is pretty girly. Elizabeth Zimmerman's patterns are genius! This one is knit in the round from the yoke down, but doesn't involve fancy origami folding like the baby surprise jacket I knit for my nephew last summer.



I had some yarn leftover, so I decided to knit a pair of Saartje's bootees. They're the cutest thing... Probably very impractical, but absolutely darling little things.
Emily knit a couple of pairs as gifts last Fall.



Patterns: February Baby Sweater, by Elizabeth Zimmerman (from the Knitter's Almanac) and Saartje's Bootees, by Saartje de Bruijn.
Yarn: Dale Baby Ull, in red. Less than 2 skeins for the sweater AND the bootees. Purchased at the Fiber Gallery
Needles: US 4 (3.5mm) Addi Turbo circular needles for baby sweater, and US 1.5 (2.5mm) DPNs for bootees.
Time to knit: Sweater started on March 10 and finished on March 25, 2008; bootees started on March 30 and finished on April 1st, 2008. Buttons sewn on sweater and bootees on April 3, 2008
Buttons: Pink with little multicolored polka dots, purchased at Bad Woman Yarn




Who's the happy recipient of these lovely gifts? Pensive frog's upcoming baby tadpole...

Baby alert!

Yes, another baby gift! I know five people who are currently expecting and are due between early April and the end of May. Expect lots of baby knits to pop up here in the next few weeks... One of them had a baby shower on Sunday. Since it was only announced about 10 days earlier, I needed a pattern I could knit quickly.



A friend of mine knit this pattern over a year ago for a different baby shower. The hat was worn as long as it could possibly fit... but that baby is all grown up now... Time flies! Since it came so highly recommended, I figured it was good choice. It's a fairly simple pattern, and Cascade Fixation gives it a nice stretchy quality.

Details:

Pattern: ? (can't remember what it's called), from Acorn Street in Seattle
Yarn: Cascade Fixation Multi, less than 1 skein.
Needle: US 4/3.5mm, in DPN and 16" circular
Started: March 5, 2008
Finished: March 9, 2008



Isn't it cute? And the little slippers are adorable...

The endless cardigan

To be fair, the title is slightly misleading. It makes it sound like knitting this cardigan was a painful process. It wasn't. It's a great pattern, simple but with enough going on that you need to pay attention. The stripes are a great motivator because you can actually see how fast you're progressing. But, dude! It's fingering weight yarn! Even if the stripes add up, it's such thin yarn that the length (actually the width, since it's knit from side to side) changes sooooo slowly... Hours and hours of knitting stripe after stripe, and I was still only halfway through the back! I think it wouldn't have seemed as long if I wasn't knitting against a deadline...



I got an e-mail in early January inviting me to a baby shower for a friend from knitting club. I see her regularly at knitting club, but I don't know her that well so I hadn't expected the invitation (but was flattered to be included). Emily was better prepared than I was... As soon as I got back in town after the holidays, I surfed Ravelry for a suitable pattern: a quick knit using yarn from the stash, but still worthy of a baby shower gift. This baby cardigan seemed like the perfect pattern: knit in one piece, so minimal seaming and weaving in of ends would be required. It called for fingering weight yarn, and I have tons in the stash. It had to be gender neutral, so I chose some white Baby Ull and green Fleece Artist Sock Yarn.



I had 10 days to knit the whole thing and I thought that was plenty of time. Of course, I then proceeded to waste the first evening because I cast on with the white yarn first and decided the next day that it would be prettier with a green border and white stripes (I still think starting over was the right decision). So, 9 days to go. I knit and knit and knit every chance I got. On the bus, over lunch, while reading e-mail, and every night. The day before the baby shower was a Saturday, and I knit most of the day. Still, it wasn't meant to be. The morning of the baby shower, I still had to knit a whole sleeve and one of the fronts. Fortunately, I figured that might happen and I had a backup gift (baby pyjamas and bibs). It took me another week to actually finish it. Now it's all nice and blocked, with white buttons sewn on. And the expectant mother will get it this week at knitting club... I hope she likes it!



Pattern: b14-27 Jacket by DROPS design
Yarn: Dale Baby Ull (white) and Fleece Artist Basic Merino Sock Yarn (green)
Needles: addi turbo US 21/2 (3.0mm)
Started: January 9, 2008
Finished: January 29, 2008


I'm really happy with the cardigan! It's cute, and the color combination comes out great! I can see myself knitting another one, but next time I'll make sure I have a three-week time frame...

Fair is fair

Well, after having blogged about my nephew's blanket and Raphael's blanket, my friend Nora asked: "Are you going to blog about H's blanket?"
Touché... So here it is!



Truthfully, H's blanket is probably the nicest one I've made. Or the most polished, I should say. That may be because I actually followed a pattern...
Nora didn't want any pastels for her boy-to-be, so I looked for bright colors. This pattern seemed just right.

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Details:
Pattern: Navajo Throw, from Candy Blankies by Candi Jensen
Yarn: Tahki Cotton Classic, multiple colors. I used the colors suggested in the pattern, except for "lavendar" and "wine" because they weren't available at my LYS when I bought the yarn. I picked the closest I could find.
Purchased at: Weaving Works
Started: August 2006
Finished: May 2007



Now, following a pattern didn't come without a few adventures. Nora's baby shower was planned for late October 2006, and I was determined to be done with the baby blanket in time. I was going to a conference the week before and was more than halfway done. When I got back, I only had about 10 rows to go, and a border to crochet. In 5 days. No problem, right? Wrong.

Because I worked on it on planes and in conference halls, I had the blanket on my lap most of the time and didn't really spread it out. When I got home, I realized that the blanket had gotten narrower and narrower, to the point where my working row was about 2/3 the width of the first few rows. I think I missed a stitch every time I changed colors. I didn't have time to deal with it before the baby shower, so I let it sit (fortunately, I had other gifts planned for the shower). I tried to "fill out" the missing stitches by crocheting additional stitches on each side, but that definitely looked bad, really bad... So, after a few months of denial (hoping the problem would fix itself) I finally sucked it up and frogged the blanket back to the first 3-4 rows. And started all over again.




When it was done, I washed it and blocked it. It blocked really nicely, all soft and drapy. I finally gave it to Nora (or rather to H) just in time for Mother's Day. I think it (secretly) is my favorite of all the baby blankets I made...

H seems to like it...

By popular request...

OK, not really. One person commented on Ravelry about this baby blanket I made last year for a friend's baby, and she asked if I had more pictures of it. Since uploading all my stash into Ravelry has gotten me pretty close to my monthly Flickr upload quota, I figured I'd post about it here.



This blanket is the first thing I crocheted. Ever. And once I finished it I was convinced I would never knit anything again: I was a crochet convert. I proceeded to crochet gifts for everyone I knew, mostly an insane amount of scarves (and at least one other baby blanket). Since then, I've realized that some things are not well suited to crochet (like socks or mittens), and I go back and forth depending on the project at hand.



A friend of mine tried to teach me how to crochet in the spring of 2005. She's left-handed, I'm right handed. I didn't get it. I went home and I tried to chain and couldn't get the hang of it. Over the following summer, my mother showed me again. Although she hadn't done it in years, my mother is an experienced crocheter. Not counting all the outfits she made for me as a child, she crocheted two (yes, two!) bedspreads, a twin-sized fake granny square for me and a king-sized bedspread for my parents' bed. She managed to slow down her movements enough that I finally got it. And I was hooked! (ha! pun intended...)

My friend had just told me she was pregnant. I had just finished a (knitted) baby blanket for another friend of mine, and I was looking for a new project. The timing couldn't be better. We went to "A La Tricoteuse" in Montreal and she chose a color palette in their range of superwash yarns. She also pointed to a few square patterns in Jan Eaton's 200 crochet blocks.



I took the colors and the pattern book, and came up with a plan. 24 squares for the outside border, with alternating red-navy and navy-red for the inner and outer stripes around blue, green, or yellow middle stripes. 4 nine-patch granny squares in the center (with alternating colors for the flowers) and 4 for the four corners of the inner section. 16 granny stripe squares for the rest of the inner section, alternating red and navy for the inner and outer stripes, and yellow, blue and green for the middle stripes. And I pretty much stuck to the original plan.



Details:
Pattern: Jan Eaton's 200 Crochet blocks for blankets, throws, and afghans.
Squares #61 Nine Patch Granny (8), 76 Granny Stripes (16*), and 149 Solid Square (24).
Yarn: Superwash DK by Emu in red, yellow, navy, royal blue, and bright green.
Started: August 2005
Finished: September 2006 (I pretty much set it aside from January to June 2006, so it could have been done much faster).
* My original plan was to make 16 of those. Because some of them would be side by side and this block was crocheted from side to side, I decided to make "strips" instead of blocks. I chained double (or quadruple) the number of chains in the pattern, and went from there.



When I finished this blanket, I hadn't discovered the wonders of blocking and the strips didn't line up perfectly with the other squares. I had to crochet small "joining sections" (in yellow) between the nine-patch-granny squares and the 2-square sized strips at either end of the blanket. And then I sewed the whole thing together. I had a bazillion ends to weave in. Just weaving in the ends took me several hours.



I'm really proud of the final result, and I think my friend likes it too. Last time I visited, it was on the rocking chair in her son's bedroom .

p.s. No yarn yet from the Yarn Harlot. I'm guessing it'll take another week, with the border and everything...

Rainbow

I'm very proud of this last baby gift: a very colorful baby blanket!
When I learned last January that my sister-in-law was pregnant, I knew I would have to come up with a very special baby blanket. I waited patiently until she made it to 12 weeks of pregnancy, but couldn't wait to buy yarn until they found out if it was a boy or a girl...



I had to decide on a color palette. I knew the baby's room would be yellow (they were not planning on repainting the room). I wanted something colorful and childlike, and no pastels. And it had to be superwash, of course... I settled on Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted and decided to try on a few colorways. I first bought it in Daffodil, which is very pretty but has too much yellow in it to be used in a yellow room... I had also bought it in Icehouse, which I ended up using for a baby surprise jacket. But what I finally settled on is the Rainbow colorway... isn't it nice and bright? And appropriate for a girl or a boy! So I went back to Acorn Street and bought a whole bag of it...




I remembered seeing a pattern for a knitted baby blanket awhile back that made an impression: the Northern Lights Nursing Blanket, by Handmaiden. (Fleece Artist does a full size version.) I really liked the idea of corner blocks knitted from variegated yarns all assembled together, but I was worried that knitting such a blanket would take forever... so I decided to make a crocheted blanket loosely inspired by the Northern Lights blanket.

I found a crochet block pattern in Jan Eaton's 200 Crochet Blocks . I used pattern #21 (page 44), made up of single crochet stitches. Because I was using variegated yarn, I only used that one yarn for the whole block (no stripes).



I crocheted about 6 blocks between April and the beginning of September 2007. I had other projects going, and was somehow convinced I had plenty of time left to finish the blanket in time for my sister-in-law's due date on September 29. Lo and behold, my nephew was born early on September 4! I had my work cut out for me... My friend Emily was nice enough to let me use her swift and ballwinder to wind the 9 remaining skeins, thereby saving me hours of doing it by hand... From September 5 to September 20, I averaged 2 blocks a day.



I had originally planned on making 48 blocks for a 6 x 8 blanket, but when I got to about 30 squares I realized that 5 x 7 was plenty big for a baby blanket. I started mist-blocking and sewing up the squares as I crocheted the last few ones. When I traveled to see my new nephew, I sewed squares during my layover at the airport (the last one had been blocked that morning). Final sewing took place on site, as well as the two rounds of single crochet edging. One final wet-blocking of the finished blanket, and voila! A psychedelic baby blanket for my very cute new nephew...



Details:
Pattern: my own, using block pattern #21 from Jan Eaton's 200 blocks. Same block repeated 35 times, assembled in a 5 x 7 rectangle, and finished with 2 rounds of single crochet edging (single, half-double, single in each corner)
Inspiration: Handmaiden's Northern Lights Nursing Blanket
Yarn: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted in Rainbow 601 (9 skeins, with leftovers)
Hook: H/8 (5.00 mm)
Started: April 2007
Finished: September 25, 2007

Another baby, another gift...

My sister-in-law is pregnant, which means I'll be an aunt soon! As soon as the first trimester was over, I set out to find a pattern and yarn for a nice baby blanket. I have a plan, and plenty of yarn, but it's far from being done... I've kept it all a secret, so more on that in a few weeks...

In the meantime, I wanted to give her something hand-knitted for the baby shower scheduled for mid-July. I had been toying with the idea of knitting a "Baby Surprise Jacket" for a while now. I bought The Opinionated Knitter, by Elizabeth Zimmerman, last winter and hadn't knitted any of the patterns yet. I was intrigued by the pattern for the BSJ, and even more so after seeing a few pretty examples in the blogosphere, including one by Brooklyn Tweed last June. So, with a good excuse to knit a baby garment, I looked up the pattern, chose some yarn in the stash, and set out to knit a BSJ. I cast on on July 6, and lo and behold the Yarn Harlot also knit her own version of the BSJ that same weekend! She's a much faster knitter than I am: she says it took her 6-8 hours to knit the whole thing. Granted, it wasn't her first one, but after 8 hours I was probably a quarter of the way done...

It's a really fun pattern to knit, even though I had trouble visualizing which section would become which part of the jacket as I was knitting... I guess that's why it's called a "surprise" jacket! I followed the pattern to the letter, and it turned out perfectly.

I ended up knitting the last 15 rows on the plane the day before the baby shower, casting off while waiting for the plane to take off in Toronto... (after sitting on the plane at the gate for 90 minutes, we all had to get off and were eventually transfered to later flights: I finally landed in Montreal 6 hours later than expected... but that's a different story)

Here are a few pictures of the finished garment, before knitting the seams. Here it is before it is folded (cast-on on top, cast-off at bottom):

In the process of folding the right side (left on the picture):

Right side completely folded (left on the picture), beginning to fold left side (right on the picture):
Still folding left side (right on the picture):


Completely folded:

My mother, who used to knit a lot when we were little, was duly impressed by the genius of the pattern. I gave it to my sister-in-law before knitting the seams. I thought it would be fun to have people guess what it is and try to fold it correctly. Apparently, non-knitters don't appreciate the genius of this pattern as much as I do... The BSJ is now finished: seams done, crochet edging all around, four pale-blue buttons on the front, and wet blocked. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture!

The details:
Baby Surprise Jacket, from The Opinionated Knitter, by Elizabeth Zimmerman
Started July 6, 2007
Finished July 20, 2007 (buttons and blocking on July 31, 2007 (not shown))
Yarn: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted, in Icehouse (about 1.5 skeins)
Needles: US size 8 (5mm) Addi Turbo circular needles
(this is a larger size needle than recommended in the pattern: the end result is a BSJ in a larger size)

Et c'est parti!

As a first post, it's appropriate that I'll be telling you about a gift project. I give away most of what I knit or crochet. It's not that I don't want to knit for myself, it just happens that way. All these new babies, they all need blankets or hats or sundresses...



Pattern: "Pretty in Pink Sundress", from Jane Davis' Simple Crochet for Cherished Babies.
Yarn: Rowan Cotton Glace, color 822 pink (almost 4 skeins)
Crocheted with E hook (3.50mm)
Started June 1, finished June 11. (I still need to sew two little buttons to the right shoulder)

This is destined to a new baby girl born two weeks ago, my cousin's daughter. Because there was no time for me to make a baby blanket, I was looking for a simple pattern I could whip out quickly but that would still make a nice gift. Won't she be pretty in this pink dress?

It's crocheted in 3 parts: front yoke, back yoke, and skirt. The skirt is crocheted as a long rectangle and the first and last row are then sewed together to form a tube. The skirt is much wider than the yoke and must be gathered when the top of the tube is sewed to the yoke. I think the gathering gives the sundress a lovely "flowy" quality. I'm now working on a matching sun hat, from the same book. I'll keep you posted!