Well, of course it turns out my sister-in-law is having twins.
And of course my knitting plan for all the babies would become CLEARLY overly ambitious as it went on. I might have had a fighting chance if I only had to deliver knitted things shortly before the moms delivered the kids, but that's not the way modern society works. All of the summer babies are having May showers and I am up a creek.
Well, not entirely. It's good to have back up knit things, even if unintentionally.
My plans to knit sweater for most of the expected-s went down the tubes quickly. This is the only sweater I've started:
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| Half finished, as you can see. |
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| The bottom needs finishing as well. |
This is the
Wee Lima again, which I find to be very like the Puerperium Cardigan I like so much. It's almost 2/3 done, just need to do the grey edging on the bottom and the sleeves. This will be going to a dear friend's second son, rather than a coworker. Sorry guys, them's the breaks.
The reason this is only still partly finish is because I had to quickly shift gears for a baby shower for Coworker K-F and her twin boys.
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| I'm quite pleased. |
I am not a huge fan of matchy-matchiness for twins, particularly identical ones. Sure it's cute the first few years, but man it must be hard to tell them apart. So when planning for Coworker K-F's twins, I wanted something that coordinated tightly, but weren't the exact same thing. This also turned out to be a good way to stave off boredom. For those new to knitting, Second Sock Syndrome is a proven condition where you get done with one sock and realize that you have to knit another one, exactly like it. BORING. Therefore you put off casting on the second sock, or in this case, the second hat, in favor of more interesting projects. Even though these hats are precisely the same in construction and color pattern, just switching up the color kept me interested and engaged.
This pattern is the
Dizzy Baby Hat and I think it's charming. Nothing complicated whatsoever, except for jogless stripes. So, when you knit stripes, given the vertical stacking of rows that constitutes knitting, your stripes will end up uneven at the start of the row.
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| See the weird jog at the first change from gray to blue at the bottom? |
There are lots of tutorials on the interwebs for how to correct for this to knit
"jogless stripes". I tried this out with the Dizzy, and found it annoying to do and it didn't really work. I am willing to accept I might have been doing it wrong, but with the single stripes it just looked bad. So I gave up. Trying to find an example I had to work at finding the jog, so I don't think it's aesthetically destructive.
Once the Dizzy hats were done (thank God), I turned my attention to the other 2 coworkers having a shower soon. As in, next week. There was no way I was going to get anything like a sweater done. So I turned to my stash of mostly-completed things:
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| I know, it's terribly well organized. |
And found this for Coworker D's first son:
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| Okay, this isn't quite done either. |
It's the pieces of
Reversible Stripes and Dots from my favorite baby hat book. I still need to sew them together, and it's a little big for a newborn, but I'm out of time. He'll grow into it, and Coworker D is a Michigan fan, so he'll like the colorway anyway :) I remember these being a lot harder to finish than I thought they should be. See all of my raggedy silk stitch embellishing around the dots? Yeah, a lot harder than it looks to make a smoothly-colored circle. Anyway, I just need to neatly whip stitch them together and we should be good to go.
The last one I need by next week is something for Coworker E's second boy. I originally wanted to dig out a robins-egg-blue circle blanket I knit ages ago. But it's all packed up with a remodel at my parents' house, so no dice. So I started this little number:
It's basically the Dizzy pattern with wider stripes. Dull, but fast.
Also, if you're observant you'll realize that all of the newer knits: the sweater, the Dizzy hats, and that last stripey hat...are all in the same yarns. Dear God, I am so sick of mid-gray and that freaking blah baby blue. So done. Ready for something new. Looking down the knitting plan and available yarn... a blue-grey baby cardigan. Kill me now.
