Knitting Projects

I haven't posted much lately. We've been busy. Not busy doing too many things that are worth blogging about (some, though, and I'll get to them eventually), but one thing I have been doing is knitting.

If you've read my previous posts, you know that we just got four new babies in our family. I decided to get ambitious and knit sweaters for all of them. Prior to this, the most complicated thing I'd done was mittens. Flat knit mittens, not even the kind you knit in the round.

Anyway, I made some sweaters and I think they turned out quite nicely.

The first two I did were the ones for the twin boys, Calvin and Liam. Since they were twins, I expected them to come first. They didn't, they came last.

Their sweaters are both made from the same pattern using the same yarn in two different colors. They're pieced together, so I made the two front pieces, a back piece and then the sleeves and sewed them all together.

If you care, the yarn is Mission Falls 1824, it's a worsted weight superwash wool and very soft. They're knit in garter stitch. The yarn looks lighter than it actually is, it's a dark navy blue.

This is the first one:

And the second one, it's also darker than the picture, a dark teal:

Next up, is the sweater for my nephew Edmund. It's knit with KnitPicks Swish DK, a superwash wool, DK weight. For this one I learned something new: knitting a top-down raglan sleeve sweater. It's knit in stockinette, with a garter stitch button band, cuffs, hood edge and bottom edge. The sleeves I did in the round so there are no seams on this one, except at the top of the hood. The background is a chair at the yarn shop where I go to knit.

And last, but certainly not least, the cute girl sweater I knit for my niece, Ruth. She was the middle of the three births. For her sweater, I learned to knit fair isle/intarsia patterns. Ruth's sweater was also a top-down raglan sleeve with the sleeves knit in the round. The yarn is KnitPicks Shine Sport, which is a sport weight yarn. It's a Cotton/Modal blend and it's very soft and has a lovely drape. It's knit in stockinette with a Knit2/Purl2 ribbing at the neck, cuffs, button band and bottom edge. Since both the yarn and the needles were smaller for this one, it took a lot longer to make. And I had a lot of yarn left over, so I made a hat. I designed the pattern on the hat to echo, but not copy the design on the sweater.

Here's a close-up shot of the tulips on the sweater. This picture was taken before I blocked the sweater, so the stitches are kind of messy. They looked better after blocking:

One of my resolutions/goals for the year was to learn to knit socks. So I took a sock class at the yarn shop and made some socks for my sister. She likes them and they keep her feet warm in the cold New England winter. They're knit with a Dream In Color worsted weight, hand-dyed superwash wool yarn.

For her birthday, Ruby asked for some slipper socks, so I took her to the yarn shop and let her pick out her color and I knit her some slipper socks. I really like them they turned out cute. They're a dark magenta. They're done in a nylon/acrylic blend, nothing fancy. She loves them.

And then for fun one day, I threw together a couple of matching San Francisco Giants hats for my favorite little Giants fans, Liam and Calvin. These are done with bargain acrylic yarn, just for fun. They go for lots of walks, and need to keep warm on the streets of San Francisco.

Calvin was most unhappy with his hat, but Liam thought he was the bee's knees in his!

So, that's what I've been knitting lately.

A couple of definitions:

blocking-shaping the finished garment while wet

raglan sleeve-a sleeve that goes all the way to the neck with no shoulder seam

superwash wool-machine washable wool

worsted/DK/sport-yarn weights, worsted is the thickest of the three listed here, DK is thinner and sport thinner still