Life List: Hand Knit Baby Sweater
I added "Knit Sweaters For All The New Babies In My Life" to my Life List. I did this because I enjoy knitting but blow it off a lot of the time and when I had Maddie I got a couple of beautiful hand knit baby sweaters and they were some of my most cherished gifts. I've saved them to pass down to my grandchildren.
The last baby sweater I made was for Mary, who started kindergarten this year. It was time.
Our friends Adam and Deidre had a baby about 6 months ago. I made a baby sweater for them, actually pretty quickly. But then it turned out I expected their baby to be born malformed with one arm much longer than the other.
They had a normal baby with perfectly proportioned arms so the sweater was wrong for them and that's on them. Way to take your prenatal vitamins and avoid radiation during pregnancy guys.
I redid the sweater and I actually like the color combination better than the original. (Sorry about the pictures...stupid phone pictures. Waaaaa I miss my camera!)
Also the appropriately sized arms.
I'd never made a hooded sweater before and this one is cute with a little umbilical cord at the top. Well it's cuter than an umbilical cord.
And look, a tag. Logan gave these to me about 8 years ago and I still have approximately 2000 of them. I should make more stuff. Maybe I'll start putting them in Max's lunch box every day.
I used a pattern found on Ravelry. It's called Duck Soup by Jujube & Lolo.
It was very simple to make (aside from the inevitable mishaps I always have when knitting). But remarkably I found the knotted buttons and fasteners to be the most frustrating thing. The sweater sat in my knitting bag almost complete for over a month because the fasteners made me so furious. In the end I rigged up buttons and closures.
Here's another piece of advice if you're planning to make something for a baby. When babies are newborn they grow really fast. They're also curled up like tiny shrimp most of the time so the sweater you spent hours and hours on will not only fit the baby for about 8 days total, they'll also be all curled up on it so no one will see it.
If you knit a sweater in a 6-12 month size (or bigger) your gift will be worn for longer and be more comfortable for the baby. This particular pattern is meant to be a little big so one season it can be worn as a light jacket and then, toward the end of the winter, as a regular cardigan.
This is good because after the amount of time I spent pulling out stitches, redoing sections and those stupid button closures, that baby is going to need to wear the crap out of that sweater.
