I cast on the Simple Hat a few days ago and have been knitting away at it off and on. The pattern is intended for DK weight yarn so I had to do some math to convert it for the finer gauge of the cashmerino baby. It’s a bit sad quite how long it took me to work this out, I was once good at math. I spent the first night struggling yet again with my DPN technique for managing the oncoming needle until I finally remembered where to put my thumb and it has been plain sailing since then. This hat is not exactly rocketing along as we were supposed to have a house warming party over the weekend, which was cancelled due to the small person developing an upset tummy that we felt obliged not to share with our guests…. First there was party planning to keep me busy, directly followed by a lot of ickyness all round. It has been a strange, quiet few days around here and I have picked up the needles only occasionally.

As for the Jacket With Moss Stitch Bands, a friend has offered up her 4 month old son to model my cardigan for a nine month old girl… I am waiting to see what it looks like on him before deciding whether to rip or not. I am hoping to leave well enough alone.

So last night I finished the last front, in short time as predicted. I agonised over how to pick up as many stitches on the cast off part of the neck as recommended, knit it and was aghast at how badly it sat. So I ripped most of it out and knit it again as tight as I could. No luck it looked just the same. I didn’t short row the neck because the number of stitches supposedly needed in the neckband was so many more than this method would have left on the needles. More fool me, short rows probably would have produced the perfect number of stitches for a perfectly fitting neck.

I decided I could live with it and attached the arms, my first attempt I realised I was getting one cast off arm stitch to two rows of body. The arm would have taken up more than half the body of the sweater so I ripped it out and did it one stitch for one row, which is what the instructions seemed to be implying. Well just look at it now, all puffy. Ugh. Of course I had to seam the whole damned thing before deciding I was worried about the arms.

I am going to go knit a Simple Hat, or perhaps a pair of shoes while I consider whether to fix it out or not, and if so how.

So this run of trouble free knitting had to end eventually. Right? Every project needs at least one “Duh!” moment. Last night as I cast on for the right front I looked at the pattern and thought “Hmm, if I do it that way I am going to end up with a yarn end to weave centre front of the cardigan. Why not knit the first row after the ribbing as a purl row and have the cast on end at the side?”. So that is what I did. It was all looking marvelous until I forgot to add a few rows to the row counter and had to go back and count them. As I peered oh so closely at those tiny little stitches something occurred to me. The moss stitch looked a bit different on this piece. The cast on looked a bit different on this piece. Witness below, right side on the left, wrong side on the right. Oops.

As I further considered my mistake I realised that the twisty pattern of the stocking stitch stitches was reversed. This is a small thing that most people probably wouldn’t have noticed but it would have bothered me forever. Double oops. I forgot to take a picture of last nights stitches before I ripped it out, but you can see how distinct the stitches are in this photo.

So I ripped back to the band and started again. Oh well. Knitting a piece a day was never going to last was it? However, I have had lots of knitting time on buses and in waiting rooms today and am just about to start the neck shaping, I should be finished quite early tonight. The problem is I think it may have been a mistake to knit the button holes spaced as per the pattern for 6 buttons, just less the bottom two, I think they probably should have been bunched up a bit more in the top half of the sweater, but I am not completely sure, so I am going to finish the piece as is before deciding.

And finally, another question. I am thinking about a hat to go with the cardigan and booties. I am thinking about continuing the moss stitch theme. These are the three options I am considering. Debbie Bliss Cable and Moss Stitch Hat, Debbie Bliss Simple Hat and this Moss Stitch and Single Rib Hat. In some ways I think the last one is closest to what I was imagining, I worry the Cable and Moss Stitch Hat is too fussy and the Simple hat has no Moss Stitch, but maybe it’s too plain? What do you think?

I knit the left front yesterday, you can see it here already attached to the back with a two needle bind off. I seem to be knitting tighter as I go along, it’s slightly shorter than than the back despite having the exact same number of rows. I choose to believe it will block out. I also choose to believe that button band will block flat. I seem to have issues with edge stitches. I can’t seem to find the balance between nice neat firm edge stitches and doing them so tight they cinch the whole thing in.

Thank you all for your button advice. I can certainly see where Carol is coming from, suggesting that flowers are still the best option, but I think I am going to go with the majority here and go the lady bird buttons. I will use the time I would have spent trying to learn embroidery knitting a pair of shoes.

In other news we bought Isabelle a trampoline today, you can see it in the phone, right there under the DB Jacket With Moss Stitch Bands. I confess that I was very impressed with myself for building the thing all on my own (Isabelle did help in her own three yearold way). But yikes was that one dirty job, my hands were completely black, my clothes are filthy. I have washed my hands repeatedly and they do now look clean but an hour later they still stink. I keep absent mindedly putting my hands near my face an then wandering where the terrible smell is coming from. I am actually worried that if I knit while they smell like this my knitting will stink too!

A sleeve a day keeps the boredom away… The question is, are these the right buttons?

Amazing what you can get done driving around between saturday activities. I cast on a sleeve as we left home today and had about an inch to go when we returned, maybe less. It’s ages since I have made something so simple, or at least that’s how it seems at the moment. Mindless knitting can be so very pleasant.

I am liking this colour more as I knit with it but it definitely needs a little sprucing up, something to make it a little more feminine. I have some cute lady bird buttons, but only four of them and the pattern calls for six. I can skip the bottom two (or three) button holes easily enough but I am still tossing up whether to go with the lady birds or use plainer buttons and embroider or duplicate stitch some flowers onto the fronts with scrap yarn. Heck I could do some intarsia flowers but that would require making charts and more than a little concentration so it’s unlikely to happen. Anyway do you think I should make the fronts with just three or four button holes and decide later which option to take or do you think I need to decide in advance so I can do 6 button holes if I am going to go for the floral version? I guess another way of looking at this is - do you think a baby girls cardi needs to button all the way down? I know I was often annoyed by cardigans that closed only at the neck when Isabelle was wee, but I think I would have been happy enough to button to the bottom of the chest rather than all the way to the hips.

One down, four to go, and they are all smaller pieces. Though it is true that the remaining pieces are ever so slightly more complicated than the back I still don’t think this one will be long in the making, not long at all.

I cast on the back of the Debbie Bliss Jacket and knit a couple of inches last night. I think it is going to be fun and probably quite quick. It has a very basic construction, lots of stocking stitch, lovely yarn, I am even liking the colour more now that I am knitting with it. It’s good to be knitting again.

About the hat, I didn’t knit the whole thing yesterday! I just knit the last two inches that remained after I ran out of yarn back in July! Yikes that really would have been something.

Who would have thought that planning a child’s wardrobe would have so many tricky corners? Isabelle hates to wear warm clothes, so I have been planning for months to make her a cardi and a poncho this winter. Every time she sees me knitting something new she says “Is it a Card? Is it for me?”. Well actually after all those bags she has started asking “Is it a bag? Is it for me?”, but I digress. She is very interested in my knitting and always hopes that the end product is intended for her. Thus I am hoping that a cardi (”Card” as she likes to call it) and a poncho hand knit just for her will be exciting enough to wear. This plan certainly worked with the quilt, she now demands “covers” at night, so much so that once she was asleep last night I had to pull the leading edge down about a foot and a half to uncover her head, which was well buried.

The complicating factor in this cardi/poncho plan is making sure that both knits get worn. I suspect she will like the poncho more, both because I stupidly bought green yarn for the cardi and because I believe her objection to warm clothing (other than running hotter than the rest of us) is feeling restricted. Despite my instinct that it will be the favourite, and the general way of the world that a “favourite” once obtained will never be relinquished*, after much consideration I have decided to knit the poncho first. There is logic here, I swear. You see in most aspects of her life Isabelle has very distinct preferences but no lasting favourites (she has no favourite toy for example, no lovie) but she LOVES new clothes. her favourite dress is always her newest dress. I am thinking that if I give her the poncho first she will get into the idea of how great hand knits are and then if the cardi is presented second its newness might win it a place in her heart… Am I crazy? Here is the poncho by the way:

And people, all that analyzing, angst and hand wringing happened before I had to choose the damn yarn! The pattern calls for Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Worsted, which comes in oh so many lovely colourways. Cara made her gorgeous poncho for Charlotte** from Artful Yarns Jazz. Then I had a bit of a look at Art Yarns Supermerino and fell instantly in love. And only after all that looking (and lusting) did I do some math. None of those yarns are available in Australia and I just can’t bring myself to spend $70 on yarn for a toddler’s poncho which may be rejected out of hand, destroyed if it is actually worn and then no doubt lost two weeks being deemed “acceptable apparel”.***

And so the local yarn shopping odyssey began. Not many choices and fewer still worth a second look. Worsted weight****, washable, natural fibers that come in colours suitable for a little girl are apparently hard to come by round here. And if you can find them, they come only in solid baby pink - would you like clearly visible stains with that? I nearly bought this but in the end I caved and bought something we can both love. It isn’t worsted weight, or machine washable, but it is lovely and marks will be far less obvious than on a sea of solid pink.

I can’t wait to finish Carla!

*My family will never let me forget the (apparently hideous) green poncho I had at Isabelle’s age - which I loved so much that I would not agree to have removed even for washing thus rendering it both hideous AND dirty.

**It was Charlotte’s poncho that made me choose this pattern, couldn’t resist the hood.

***I also can’t bear to wait long enough for the yarn to arrive from the US given international postal delays which will no doubt be extended by the imminent Easter break. Speaking of waiting for things, I was desperate to get my hands on the pattern and when I called < ahref="http://www.kaleidoscopeyarns.com/" target="_new">Kaleidoscope Yarns this morning they were kind enough to fax me a copy of the pattern before posting it, now that’s service.

****Perhaps part of the problem is that we have our own special ways of describing yarn and now of the weights seem to quite match up with US weights.

Yesterday we went button shopping for the Phildar Hooded Jacket, the Jacket with Moss Stitch Bands and the Jo Sharp Silk Road DK Tweed, which I am thinking will be a top down all in one piece cardi for Isabelle. Isabelle LOVED the button shop, and so did I, there was so much for her to look at but she couldn’t really cause any damage to anything. She was happy and distracted for ages so I got to have a pretty good look around, reasonably stress free.

Unfortunately I didn’t find any buttons I liked for ANY of those projects. My mother has had some femo buttons sitting around in her cupboards since I was a little kid that I asked her about for the baby hoody. She got them out when we were last in Adelaide and they were just as perfect as I had remembered. Sadly there were only three of them (I need four) and I think I am going to have trouble finding anything else I like as much. As for the two cardi’s for Isabelle I was so dis-heartened by the button situation for those projects I left the shop seriously questioning my ability to choose yarn.