I finished this baby cardigan recently.
It is for an almost-here neighbour. It is knit up in some cotton from deep in the stash, Patons Gem, a smooth unmercenized 4ply from an oppy many years ago.
The pattern is my own. Well, more correctly, it is an evolved pattern.
Six years ago, in preparation for the birth of our second child, I knit up a new born Baby Sweater on Two Needles, that classic pattern by Elizabeth Zimmerman in Knitter’s Almanac, also known as the February Baby Sweater. I knit it straight up without any modifications other than changing the stitch pattern on the body. It was knit with a natural brown Polwarth from Tarndie. I remember being in the Dennis farm shop with a toddler in tow, the beginnings of a baby belly and very clear knitting plans. I also knit the EZ leggings from the same book and added a simple beanie…it was almost a layette. Funnily enough, Our Dear Girl grew into the separate bits at different times so I don’t recall they were ever worn together. As I remember, she wore the beanie first (when less than an hour old) and only the beanie as she nestled in for those first feeds.
I made that cardie a number of times for different babies changing the stitch patterns but little else. Then when Our Dear Girl was in her first summer, I made a cotton cardie, in the pale green Patons Gem. I had seen a pic of a similar one in an old black and white Patons book but I didn’t have a pattern (I knew not of the Ravelry powers then). I found the yoke stitch pattern in a stitch dictionary, and with the encouragement of EZ, I thought I would use the bones of her baby cardigan to knit the one I wanted.
The heart of the genius of EZ was to see into the relationships of a knitting design, distill them in a commonsense way and encourage experiments. So with that in mind, I kept the three sets of yoke increases and inset the stitch pattern in between. And yes, it looks a lot like Granny’s Favourite but I didn’t know that at the time. Where EZ had placed the textured stitch pattern, I put in stockinette. Stitch counts and button bands remained roughly the same.
It was a great cardie, got washed a lot and eventually grown out of. Which brings me up to this last cardie which I call Green Grow the Babies O. Same stitch counts, same sets of yoke increases but this time I have a knitted on garter stitch button band and I increased into the skirt to give it the slight A line shape so handy over the nappy bottom.
This is my favourite kind of knitting: a clear set of shaping relationships and yarn from the stash. Something exciting always happens.
Postscript: I started this as part of Summer of the Single Skein, but the button band needed just a wee bit extra. And if you like reading about knitting modifications on a grander scale, you will surely enjoy The Gift of Knitting
