Smallest person has a cake sale at school tomorrow so I spent today making cookie dough and then cutting out and baking about fifty Daleks. Of course now I have fifty Daleks to ice in various colours. It’s going to be a late night.

On the plus side, I have my extra ball of Kauni and can now knit the second sleeve! I’m off on holiday next week, so will take the Tomten Jacket with me, along with the manly socks (about half a sock left of the pair to finish) and something else, just on the off chance that the weather is crappy and I get to spend a lot of time indoors playing with yarn!

If I don’t post before I go, see you all in a week’s time.

The hood and one sleeve of the Tomten Jacket have been completed and I’m almost at the point where I have the “fun” of zip hunting.

Now, I’m not usually *that* anal about matching colours when using variegated yarns, but that’s usually because the yarn is for socks and no one really notices them when they’re very far away from your eyes. But having odd sleeves Bothered Me, so despite having plenty of yarn left to knit the other sleeve, I’ve ordered more yarn so I can match the colours.

So in the meantime I had to do something else and I decided to do the i-cord edging instead. I’d planned to knit the border in Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift because it has a similar texture to the Kauni and comes in about a million colours. I spent a long time looking at the shade card and deciding which colour went best with all the colours of the jacket, before choosing one of the reds. And then when I found out that it would cost as much as the price of the yarn itself in postage to get one tiny 25g ball of yarn sent to me I thought “sod that” and went to my stash.

I have a couple of colours of Spindrift that I bought two years ago and have been helping bulk out my stash ever since. The Foxglove colourway is a sort of mottled purple and though I wasn’t convinced it would work, I decided to give it a go, figuring I could always rip it out if it looked terrible.

Well, it didn’t. It blends with the reds and blues, and contrasts with the oranges, yellows and greens really well. Possibly better than the red would have, so being tight-fisted clearly has its advantages at times.

The Applied I-Cord Edging is one of those things that I think are just impossible to get my head around until I actually do them and then it becomes blindingly obvious. A bit like figure of eight cast on, or Magic Loop! You begin by picking up stitches all around the jacket with the contrast yarn. And I mean all around – along the bottom edge, up the front over the hood and down again back to the bottom edge. It took ages. Then simply cast on three stitches with a new needle and transfer them to the pick up needle, k2, sl1, k1 (picked up stitch), psso and return the three stitches to the pick up needle and start over again. After the first few rows, suddenly a strip of i-cord appears attached along the edge of the jacket and it Looks Good.

Now all I have to do to bide my time until the extra ball of yarn appears is to sew up the sleeve seam..!

Oh, Donna asked how I was finding the yarn. It’s true it’s not as soft as something like Baby Cashmerino, but I don’t find it rough at all. It’ll be worn over clothes rather than next to the skin, too, so there shouldn’t be any problem at all. Plus any baby of mine is not allowed to be sensitive to wool.

Also just wanted to share another baby knit. Not knitted by me, though. Kai and Diane came to visit yesterday and we spent a lot of time knitting. Me with the jacket and manly sock, and them with mysterious and identical miniature projects. In the afternoon, I was presented with this tiny pair of baby socks. Tinier than the Hugs and Kisses Socks I knitted. Absolutely minute and newborn sized. They make good finger puppets for the moment, too.

Whoever came up with the phrase “I knit so I do not kill people” had it right. I’ve spent most of today on the sofa in my pyjamas with the Tomten Jacket, calming myself down with every row that I knit and feeling much better by the time I reached the hood. It makes sense, really. Murder is messy and I bet you can’t get decent yarn in prison.

Getting the colours to match up on the fronts after the divide for the armholes wasn’t hard, fortunately. As each strip is only 14 stitches, I used very little yarn for each section, so there was plenty of the green left over for the second part. For the back, which you can’t really see, I did wind on the yarn until I got to the next green section, though. Hoping the sleeves will start from a purple section to be a nice contrast to the green, but I can always help that along if it doesn’t work out…

It’s such a simple but clever pattern. The fronts and back are joined together now and the hood will grow upwards. Then there’s just the sleeves, which are picked up and knitted down from the armholes. The reserved stitches are included at the end of each sleeve row so that there’s very little sewing up to do at the end, and it’s such a quick knit! It’s been said many times before, but Elizabeth Zimmerman was a genius.

It feels like AGES since I bought some yarn. I think it was probably back in January, when I bought the New Lanark DK for my Deep V Argyle Vest. I still have the gift certificate for Stash which I got for my birthday and I must go and spend it!

Since deciding to wait and see what colour bump I was having before I started the Cabled Raglan Sweater, I’ve been itching to cast on for a larger baby project. I briefly considered knitting a shawl, and got as far as casting on before I realised that I really wasn’t going to use it and it was a big undertaking to then be put away in a drawer for evermore. Plus my grandma has my baby blanket needs covered already (knitting it in green so it’s nice and unisex!) so I went back to looking at cardigans.

Browsing the baby cardigans on Ravelry, I found so many cute versions of Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Modular Tomten Jacket that I was won over. I have three versions of the actual pattern, though it apparently appears in about seven different places. I have a reproduction of the original newsletter pattern in The Opinionated Knitter, an updated version in Knitting without Tears and yet another version in Knitting Workshop. The pattern in TOK has the advantage of including notes by Meg Swansen. So the three combined are pretty much the “definitive” jacket!

The beauty of this jacket is that just using a different weight yarn and needles makes it come out to fit different people without changing stitch counts. In KWOT, EZ suggests using baby yarn for a newborn size, and looking through the finished ones, fingering/4ply seemed the way to go. I knew I wanted to knit one using a variegated yarn as the garter stitch is quite plain, and eventually after much umming and ahhing, I chose some yarn!

Kauni Effektgarn in the Rainbow (EQ) colourway. The swatch shows the colour variegation better than the photo of the actual ball; all the greens and blues are hidden inside. I got a whopping 160g ball, which should be plenty. I now need to find a nice coordinating yarn for the i-cord edging. Still debating whether to add buttons or a zip. Zips don’t scare me, but it’s such a hassle getting one as my local department store only stocks dress (closed end) zips – lovely range of colours and lengths, but all totally useless!

Either way, I won’t have to worry about that for a while. I’m just really looking forward to starting my first non-hat or sock baby knitting.

Poor Mr B. Not so long ago, he had half a dozen pairs of handknitted socks and was pretty much wearing them all the time (depending on the efficiency of the laundress… ). Then I swear they all got holes in at precisely the same time. Some were worse than others; I made him throw away both the pair knitted with Opal Rodeo Cotton and the Jules socks, as they were just more hole than sock, and tragically, the Having Hope socks had felted, which is the first time I’ve ever heard of a sock yarn with nylon felting, so perhaps it was the BFL content. Still gutting, though, when they’re the fanciest manly socks I’ve ever knitted.

So I promised I’d knit a few pairs this year to help build up his collection again, but then you all know what happened to my knitting mojo. I felt so guilty about his lack of socks that I even went out and bought a cheap pack of 7 pairs of plain black socks. Which means his feet are warm but not fetchingly attired and obviously I need to cast on something that isn’t a baby hat…

The yarn is the only skein of remotely manly yarn I have left in my stash that I know won’t felt or wear out in a matter of days. My old friend Trekking XXL comes to the rescue again! I’m planning to keep these for odd moments and travelling as they’re fairly mindless, though I also got a lot done this morning while sitting at my pc for two hours getting an antivirus problem sorted out.

I suppose the question now is whether the socks or the baby will arrive first..!

Pattern: Cupcake from Wee Woolly Toppers by Woolly Wormhead
Yarn: Debbie Bliss Pure Silk DK, 1 x 50g skein in colour: 27006
Needles: 4mm circs and dpns

For me, this is the epitome of a spoilt baby hat. The other small people were lucky to get a couple of acrylic baby knits each (sorry boys; but I’m making it up to you now, aren’t I?!) and already this wee one has Wollmeise, cashmere and now silk for their noggin warmers. I’ve had this one lone skein of DB Pure Silk in my stash since 2006 when I bought it on a whim because it was new and lovely and expensive (hence one skein). Ever since I’ve been trying to find a suitable project for it and then last week I realised that all these baby hats I was knitting used small amounts of yarn and wouldn’t it be nice to use it for something that is very unlikely to get drool (or worse) on it…

Cupcake is the first design from the book that I’ve knit, but I think I’ll probably knit most of them. They’re perfect for using up small amounts of stash yarn and the patterns are just right for my urge to knit “funny” hats. I love the bobble on top, which is knitted and then stuffed before sewing shut, as it really does make the hat look like a cupcake!

The pattern warns that the hat will need severe blocking because of the cables pulling inwards, but the silk helps the cables to stay floppy, and the hat ended up a little bigger than I expected, but as I said before, who knows what size head this little one will have?!

* * * * *

Thank you all for the suggestions and advice (and lack of name calling!) about the Cabled Raglan Baby Sweater. I think you pretty much confirmed what I’d suspected: it will look fine for either a boy or a girl, but will need tweaking to make it more “boyish”. I think this one will have to wait until I know for definite one way or another how many buttons I need to sew on.

Pattern: Hugs and Kisses Socks from the Better-Than-Booties Baby Socks collection by Ann Budd from Interweave Knits, Summer 2005, some designs also available free from Knitting Daily
Yarn: Hazel Knits Artisan Sock in “Pacific”, approx. 25g
Needles: 2mm Susan Bates Silvalume dpns

I think it’s a very good idea to start this little one off on the right foot (ha ha ha) with some handknitted socks. I’d liked this pattern ever since the magazine came out, but it was back when my sock knitting skills were fairly new, and the idea of a short row heel and toe made me wibble a bit. But now I am a confident sock knitter and can just whip up any old sock I fancy.

And I really like the short row toe. It avoids the fiddle of grafting if you hate that sort of thing, and the stitches are just bound off using a modified 3 needle cast off which makes a pretty ridge at the end of the foot.

The yarn is the last few grammes of the squishy Hazel Knits yarn I used for Birch Leaf socks, though I have a very tiny amount still left. I do love this yarn, though it’s pricey for everyday socks, it makes nice gift knitting!

I’ve only just started baby knitting, but I do want to progress beyond hats and footwear (more about those soon!) and knit sweaters and cardigans. The trouble is that I won’t know the sex of the baby for another month (and that’s assuming he/she plays along and poses legs akimbo for the scan!) and I don’t want to knit anything that’s definitely girly or boyish.

Then this cardigan popped up as a free pattern on Knitting Daily:

The Cabled Raglan Baby Sweater is knitted with alpaca (swoons!) and is so cute that I really want to knit one for The Bump. But is it too girly? Even if I knitted it in a fairly neutral colour? The photo has it knitted in cream and even that looks a bit feminine to me.

I wonder if I’m just bigoted when it comes to knitting baby clothes and should just knit what I like and not care if it looks like it should be on a baby of the opposite sex. People are unobservant anyway. DS2 was often mistaken for a girl when he was little because he had curly hair and long eyelashes, despite him being dressed top to toe in blue and green clothes with pictures of cars and tractors and other manly vehicles on them. If he was a curly haired girl, why would I not have dressed him her in something pink and frilly? Gah.

Anyway, all opinions welcomed. Even “you’re just being sexist”.

My knitting mojo has returned!

It pretty much coincided with the nausea vanishing and starting to feel less tired (though I can still fall asleep at 9.30pm without any problems!) Progress was slow at first, but when I managed to finish a whole hat over the past couple of days I knew I was feeling more like the knitting fiend I used to be.

Firstly I have finished a couple of baby hats. I love funny hats. And it’s best to get the funny hat knitting done when the small people are too small to protest or even care what’s on their head. I don’t knit for the bigger small people without having a list of strict demands requests for the design and colour of said knitwear. But babies just want to be warm and actually I think I’ve started off fairly conservatively..!

Pattern: Top Down Bonnet With Anime Character by Adrian Bizilia
Yarn: Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino, ½ x 50g ball in shade: 203
Needles: 3mm 80cm long Prym circs for magic looping (not my favourites, but bearable for a small project)

I loved knitting this hat. It was the first time I’d used the figure of eight cast on since I knitted Mr B’s Having Hope socks and it just goes to show that Learning New Stuff is Useful. The hat is really just a very big toe-up sock toe with a bit of shaping, anyway. It was a straightforward knit and I didn’t change a thing other than the eyes. The pattern suggests crocheting onto the knitting, but I tried this and it looked terrible so I gave up and went with a simpler option. I think my bunny looks sleepy and this will encourage the wearer to behave in a similar fashion (well, I can dream!).

The yarn was squidgy and lovely to knit with. Pleased that I managed to find a use for the odd ball of Baby Cashmerino I’d had floating about for a couple of years in my stash.

I didn’t like the needles, but for a small project, I could bear them rather than resorting to buying more KnitPicks circs for the kink-free tips.

Pattern: Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap/Djevellue by Gro
Yarn: Wollmeise Sockenwolle 100% superwash, about 10g in shade: Vergißmeinnicht
Needles: 2.5mm and 3mm circs, plus 3mm dpns

This hat I actually finished first and I won’t say how long it took me, but it’s quite embarrassing for a tiny baby hat. *blushes* I had a good chunk of Wollmeise left over from the Swallowtail Shawl I knitted for my MIL, but not enough to make anything adult-sized, so this pattern was perfect. This probably makes this a very exclusive baby hat and I’m just asking for trouble with a fussy baby who will want cashmere for their first cardigan, but it’s too nice a yarn not to use!

The pattern was again very simple, which is what I needed to ease me back in to knitting. It’s bigger than the bunny hat, but as I’ve no idea how big the baby will actually be, I figured that knitting hats in various sizes was a good idea. Though obviously I’m hoping that he/she has a small head when it comes to the actual birth. They can grow all they want afterwards!