Skip to main content

Sunnyside Baby Cardigan

About a month ago my friend from Minneapolis, Nancy, asked me to make a baby sweater for friends who are expecting a newcomer in September.  I looked at this as a great opportunity to try something new in the baby sweater world.  The gender is unknown, the sweater should be fully washable and made in the 6 to 12 month size.  Over the years Nancy has housed me frequently when I've visited the Twin Cities.  In fact she went so far as to let me take over her kitchen for an entire week to make my son's wedding cake in 2009.  So this request was a very easy yes for me.

Nancy and I agreed this designed called the Sunnyside Baby Cardigan was perfect.
I'm making the cabled model on the right. 
Tanis Lavallee from Tanis Fiber Arts designed the pattern.  You can find it here on Ravelry for free.  It is not a difficult thing to knit.  One does start at the neck and the entire shoulders and neckline area are knit at once.  (What's not showing in the photo above is that there are cables in the back running to the bottom of the armpits, just like on the front.)  Then stitches for the sleeves are held while the two front pieces and the back are knit as one piece below the arms.  Using DPNs the sleeves are then finished.  Easy-peasy indeed.

The instructions call for a light-weight sock yarn, which as it happens I already had in my stash. (And in my reorganizing on Monday I found more so there's plenty of yarn to get the sweater made.  [This was a bit of concern last week.])  It is a Regia Stretch sock yarn in a heather gray colour made of 70% washable wool, 23% polyamid and 7% polyester.  This yarn will make a perfect indoor sweater for the chilly weather in Minnesota when it is needed.  I even talked about starting this project on May 4 in my Startitis post.

Perhaps that's why/when all the mischief began.  I said I was then in the mode of starting lots of things so perhaps the knitting gods decided that meant I should be reminded that I do like to start things, even if it is over and over again.

In the first fifteen or so rows of this little sweater there are several things to remember.  The vertical cables need to be established, there are increases to be done in proper places and in a certain way as the sweater grows from the neck to the shoulders and button holes and button bands need to be remembered.  Again this is relatively simple stuff to do, but when I'm in startitis mode it seems difficult for me to remember to do all the parts at the same time.  Either I'd forget to do the increases, or did them improperly, or I'd miss the cable cross row or mess up the button holes.  Needless to say, I found I had to start this little sweater 12, yes count them T-W-E-L-V-E times before I got it right.  So I have renamed the sweater; it is no longer the Sunnyside but rather for me the Tenacity Baby Cardigan. 

There were some lessons learned from this adventure, despite my trying to ignore them:
  1. I can, at times, be very stubborn.  (Too bad I'm not as tenacious about exercise!)  This sweater was not going to win.  I would have started it as many times as necessary to succeed.  
  2. A lifeline did get me over the hump.  I highly recommend using one always.
  3. I really learned to read my own knitting for this pattern. Once I had figured out what everything was supposed to look like, it was easy to determine what to do next.  After about start #7, I hardly had to refer to the pattern.  (Needless to say that caused its own set of mistakes.)
  4. Counting stitches, especially when the left and right side of the sweater are to be mirror images of each other, is vital.  I had misinterpreted the instructions (in hindsight I see they were very clear) and added an extra stitch in each increase on the right side.  So when it came to separate the sleeves from the body of the sweater there was no way the stitch count could work.  A mistake like this means frogging down to where the increases begin, which was only ten rows into the project.  
  5. This sweater is going to have a very soft neckline.  Knit up and take out that neck about a half-dozen times and the wool really relaxes.  This should be good for the baby.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.   
  6. Finally, I love the feeling I now have that I finally conquered this thing.  Perhaps this is something like what it would feel to climb Mt. Everest.  Pure exuberance.
After approximately 60 rows (or starting just under the arm), things get very easy.  All I have to do is remember the cables on either side and knit in stockinette, very super simple.  My goal was to have this cardigan ready to go in early June and (I hope I'm not about the jinx it) it looks like that deadline can be met.

Here's where I am today with the Sunnyside Tenacity Baby Cardigan. (She says as if victory is just within her grasp.)
The back
The front
A close-up of the front

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anatomy of a Sock

I've been knitting socks for a relatively short time.  One of the disconcerting things for me as I started following patterns for socks is the pattern designer assumes the knitter (in this case that would be me) knows all the parts of a sock.  So I thought I'd devote a post to improve my own knowledge about the anatomy of a sock and maybe some of you will learn something about the humble yet necessary sock as well. Here's the names of the parts of the foot as I know them. #49 ankle, #50 heel, #51, instep, #52 ball, #53 big toe, #54 toe, #55 little toe, #56 toenail. There are some parts more important for this discussion; first the heel of a foot is generally used to refer to the entire C-shape from the ankle to the instep.  Speaking of the instep, it refers to that curve near the bottom of the foot.  And what seems to be missing in the design above is the sole which generally refers to the bottom of the foot in total or plantar aspect in more technical terms.  (BTW
2 comments
Read more

Ode to the Cat

It has been six months since Mike, the cat's, passing.  I think of him every day and miss him especially when Paul is away.  Mike was a being in the house with me and we were close.  Grieving his death has been muddled with my Dad's passing and sometimes I feel guilty about that happening.  As time passes the ache becomes less hurtful for both and I am starting to get mostly good memories in its place. Recently I helped celebrate Pablo Neruda's birthday with Jami, my poet and overall very creative friend.  Guests were asked to select one poem written by Neruda to read to the small group who gathered for the celebration.  I picked this one: Ode To The Cat -- Pablo Neruda There was something wrong with the animals: their tails were too long, and they had unfortunate heads. Then they started coming together, little by little fitting together to make a landscape, developing birthmarks, grace, flight. But the cat, only the cat turned out finished, and
1 comment
Read more

Knitting-Related Guinness World Records

I had to share some of the Guinness World Records connected with knitting.  It is amazing to me the type of skill, stamina and unique characteristics these record holders have in common. How about trying to knit with these SPNs?? Ingrid Wagner and her large needles and knitted swatch The largest knitting needles measured 3.5 m (11 ft 5.8 in) long and had a diameter of 8 cm (3.15 in). Ingrid Wagner, a rug and art creation artist, from the UK used the needles to knit a tension square of ten stitches by ten rows at the Metro Radio Arena, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, on March, 10 2008.  (And I complained about getting certain SPNs stuck in my clothes.)  See how this swatch was done with merely 5 people managing the needles.  And what about the yarn?  It is truly ex-bulky.  It looks like they're knitting in a warehouse, but with a wingspan of almost 24 feet or 7 m, you'd need all that space.  Or how about the longest piece of finger knitting that measured 4,321.4 m
Post a Comment
Read more