After the Fact Baby Sweater

Back towards the end of February, The Tim forwarded me an e-mail from one of his brothers, announcing that there was a new family member.  The Tim's oldest niece Laura, and her husband Lee, had a baby girl on February 8, and named her Fiona.  There were a couple of pictures from the hospital, and of course she looked red and scrunchy, with dark hair.

This was a complete surprise to us.  The Tim's family is not known for being particularly close, even though some of them don't live that far from us, and thinking of it, I guess we should be glad we found out as soon as we did - by comparison, his brother-in-law who was the best man in our wedding, died in January, and no one bothered to tell us until March ...

But I digress.  We had a new great-niece, and I wanted to knit something for her.  Since I had had so much luck with my great-nephew Parker's Owls Vest (Ravelry link), I wanted to try another project other than a hat.  A few of my friends had knit the Garter Yoke Baby Cardi, by Jennifer Hoel, with varying types of yarns and modifications, so I thought I'd give that a try.

I poked around the stash, since I'm trying not to buy yarn until I've used some that I already have, and found a skein that I thought would do the trick.  So I sat down to get started, and once I could finally actually start casting on the correct number of stitches and getting started without messing up, I was on my way.  And I was very pleased with the result:

Then I was able to find some really adorable wooden buttons, with  a teddy bear carved into them.  (There are no pictures, since I couldn't get any that showed the detail, you'll just have to take my word for it.)

I think it's so cute!  I sent it in the mail, and about two weeks later got a lovely note from our niece thanking us.  She said she thought it was beautiful and admired my handiwork, but never mentioned trying it on the baby - which makes me think it was too small.  But, them's the breaks when people find out after the fact that a baby is on the way, right???

The color was hard to really capture with my limited photography skills, but it is really more of a pinky-lavender, with the occasional dot of blue, which I thought was nice for a baby without being a) too babyish, and b) too girly.  Though I'd originally bought the yarn for socks, I thought it made a lovely little sweater.

The details:

Project:  Fiona's Sweater

Pattern:  Garter Yoke Baby Cardi, by Jennifer Hoel

Size:  newborn - 3 months

Yarn:  Dream in Color Smooshy, colorway Wisterious

Needles:  size 4US

Modifications:  none

Comments:  This was a very straightforward pattern, and fairly easy to knit.  The resulting sweater is really cute, and I think it's one of those that could be made to be adaptable to any yarn, or design (one friend I know made the yoke stripes, which looked fantastic), or personalized for just about any baby.  The Smooshy yarn is superwash, so it is also nice when you don't know how likely the person is to handwash anything - and I'm doubting that many new parents want to spend time handwashing baby clothes.

I would recommend this pattern to any more-than-beginning knitter, since it is easily completed, and can be made in nearly any weight of yarn.

Most amazingly for me, this is the third FO I have for 2013 - which, considering that in 2012 I knitted 6 things and made a quilt, is already putting me on track to do better than that!