A Sweater for Daniel

Every housewife needs a hobby to keep herself contented -- particularly something she can do to make her surroundings more beautiful.  As you know I've recently rediscovered knitting.  Emboldened by Elizabeth Foss's foray into the world of yarn, I decided to join the Baby Surprise Jacket bandwagon.  Of course, I didn't start it until months after everyone else in the Knitalong had finished, but I couldn't even think about knitting a heavy, warm sweater until I could see autumn on the horizon.

casting on!  do you like my wine charm stitch markers?

So I bought the pattern, agonized over sizing, and finally bit the bullet and went to a real live yarn shop for supplies.  (No acrylic from Michael's for MY baby, tyvm!)

The fun thing about this pattern is that all you have to know how to do is a knit stitch.  There are other tricks that you need to learn, like increases and decreases and picking up stitches, but there a gazillion links online for how to do them!  YouTube is a new knitters best friend!  And of course, there's Ravelry.  (Observe a moment of respectful silence, please.)

see the corners?  those are made by decreasing the number of stitches at the markers.

It's the weirdest blobby thing while you're making it.  I thought I had taken one more picture of my progress, especially of my super-klassy stitch-holding method using a piece of red yarn that was really too short, making it even blobbier.  I agonized over a part where you have to re-join the held stitches onto the live needles, spending way too much time over-thinking The Best Way to do it.  I trustingly followed one method, and knit several rows, but then realized that I didn't like how it looked.  But I didn't really want to UNknit 200+ stitches, and I didn't know how else to go back and redo it.  But a) Daniel won't care, and b) no one else will even notice, so why stress?  Lesson learned for next time I use the pattern.

fresh off the needles!  I'm proud of my buttonholes on the left, even though they turned out to be way too big for the cute little buttons...

After you cast off and weave in all the ends, you fold it up in a magical way, sew the shoulders together, aaaand...

Surprise!  A baby jacket!

It was fun working in stripes -- for one thing it helped keep the row count.  And so I named it The Fibonacci Sweater.  Can you guess why?

hint: count the white ridges

Mr. Pickles says he is so proud of me. :)

I did have to tighten up the buttonholes -- they kept popping out.

The sleeves are much shorter and the body is much longer than I was expecting.  I probably should have shortened it quite a bit.  But it was a good first big knitting project.  I learned that knitting is much, much different from sewing.  With sewing, you can almost always go back and fix any part of your project that you don't like.  But knitting is such a start-to-finish process -- at least this project is -- that in order to change something you would have to undo hours and hours of work.  And it takes so long that in order to make it enjoyable you have to appreciate the process.  That's why I needed to choose a material of which I liked the feel.  It's a weird sounding fiber -- cotton, linen, silk, some acrylic, and something else I can't remember -- but it's got a fun heathery look and a very soft feel.  Daniel is very cuddly in it.  Now I just need to figure out how to lengthen the sleeves!