Baby Set

I finally finished this rather overdue set (as in, the baby was just born Friday):

For this set, I used two colors of Coats&Clark’s worsted weight Red Heart yarn. The main color is No. 0668 Honeydew (the name always makes me think of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew of the Muppets) and the contrasting color is No. 0318 Watercolor, which is a pretty multi, but used in very large pieces it can look oddly dark. I don’t normally use Red Heart for baby stuff, but it was the only yarn I could easily locate that included the color choices the mom-to-be gave me, and coordinates acceptably with the Winnie-the-Pooh theme she’s chosen for the baby. Once again, I scribbled some basic notes to create the thing, did the knitting and then wrote the pattern, which is available here. Yes, I’m backwards. Much like the backwards sails on the ship in the picture my older sis painted me years ago, I’m not wrong; I’m just backing out of the harbor.

Booties:

This is a variant on my standard generic sock pattern, much scaled down. While I’ve taken to doing most socks using circular needles with the “magic loop” tactic, baby booties are rather small for that and work up very quickly, so I used DPN’s instead. I also diverged from my normal practice of using a provisional cast-on and then the inside-out three needle bind-off. Instead, I started with two DPNs, alternating between the two as I cast on, i.e. stitches 1 & 3 on needle 1, stitches 2 & 4 on needle 2, using the single cast-on method. You can also use a figure 8 cast-on, but it will be a looser start, so if you’re doing the figure 8, you might want to use smaller needles for the cast-on and then change to the regular needles.

Hat:

This is a rolled-brim baby hat. I like rolled brims for baby girls because it gives a softer edge and you can roll it up or down to adjust sizing. Again, due to the small size and quick workup, I used DPN’s for this, but feel free to use circular needles.

Blanket:

I used Vera for this, as I generally do for baby blankets. As much as I’d like to do it all by hand so I don’t have to feel like I’m cheating, I figure it’s probably better to use Vera so the kid isn’t in college by the time I finish the thing. The pattern is the same whether you machine knit or hand-knit, though some mental translation will be necessary since most machines only purl. The downside of using “The Machine” (no yarn withstands The Machine) is that occasionally, things go rather amiss in ways they just don’t when hand-knitting:

Note the loop of excess yarn I’m going to have to tuck in. I’ve already tucked in the really big one. I don’t even know how that happens.

Note the areas where I forgot to rework the border stitches into garter stitch. Vera works only in stockinette, so any other stitch has to be knitted, then reworked by hand. There are three places where I forgot to do this, all on the same side.

I like to think of these glaring boo-boos as my personal insurance against ever being turned into a spider. However, were Athena available for comment, she would probably say something like “K, so, I can appreciate that you’re trying to avoid pretending to be perfect and all that, but… were you even looking at that thing while you worked on it? Do We not provide you with light? ‘Cause… damn.”

P.S. No blog entry about a FO (finished object) would be complete without a pose with my youngest: