Lots of Knitting, Not Much Swatching

Why am I knitting hats for bears? This hat is swell, from the summer Knitty. I was knitting it as a gift for an adult size recipient, but things didn’t quite work out as planned. You know how it’s really trick to judge size on circular needles, and things always come out a lot bigger than you think they will? Almost always.

Despite the size issues this was a delightful and easy pattern, perfect for my first fair isle project. As soon as the sting wears off I’ll be knitting it again in a much larger size.

A Little Sweater

It's finished (almost)! If you look carefully you'll see that the sleeve seams aren't sewn yet, but otherwise here's the final baby sweater.



The color problem ended up being far more significant than I originally anticipated, so I'm just embracing the two totally different oranges as a design element rather than pretending they may actually be supposed to match. Although the colors are gender neutral, I think the lace makes this sweater to girly for a boy baby, or am I just being silly? I don't know the gender of any of the babies I'm knitting for right now, but statistically one of them is bound to be a girl, right? As usual, I'm sure I wont get around to sewing on the buttons until the intended recipient is in his or her crib.

It's going to be a rough 10 days of work and travel around here. Hopefully I'll have plenty of time for knitting, but I'm not sure I'll be doing much blogging.

I Clearly Started Without A Plan

I wanted to knit the baby sweater in the Knitter’s Almanac without a major yarn investment, so I tried to use up some Zara I had hanging around from prior projects. Unfortunately, I ran out of orange…



I bought another ball but the difference was too noticeable, so I switched back to maroon, at least for a little Charlie Brown style stripe. Now I’m trying to decide whether to keep going in maroon or switch to the new ball of orange (and hope the difference wont be detected because of the distracting stripe) or switch to a third color (thus buying a second ball of yarn and thwarting the whole thriftiness aspect of the project). Ripping the entire sweater out and starting over is not an emotionally viable option at this point. Any suggestions?