An embarrassment of stitches

Mum and I had a lovely time together yesterday knitting and watching the footy. Mum raced through the beret and was dismayed to realise that she still had a good half ball of chocolate cashmerino aran left over *. She thought this would work well as a stripe or edging on a cardigan and I, in accordance of “gently encouraging”** her to get back into knitting, sorted her out with a pattern for a raglan baby cardigan to match her yarn and needles which I’ve adapted from the raglan baby sweater in The Baby Knits Book. Hopefully I haven’t made any dreadful errors in adapting it but I’ll be on the end of the phone for one to one pattern support at least!

Whilst looking through Ravelry for something for Mum to knit for baby with the leftovers I came across something for me too. That is, something for me to knit for the baby, although I wouldn’t say no to an adult version of this.

It’s the Sheep Yoke Baby Cardigan by Jennifer Little and it’s just gorgeous. You can see all the different versions knitted so far here on Ravelry. A few people are knitting it without the sheep which I don’t quite get, but then I do love sheep.

I’m using Rowan Pure Wool DK (which is very nice) indeed and I’m knitting a variant between the boys’ and girls’ versions - no pink (sadly the shade of pink that I loved was only available in 4 ply) but including the flowers.

I cast on on the train (luckily I got gauge right away with my 3.75 mm needles - the only pair of needles I had with me) and made pretty good progress although I soon realised that I didn’t have quite enough stitch markers to mark all the pattern repeats. Fortunately I was able to make up the shortfall with jewellery:



The next slight snag came when I realised that the yoke increases meant I was going to run out of space on my 20 cm needles by the time I reached the sheep.



Eek. I managed to keep on knitting though it was a tight squeeze on there by the time I got home.

I’ve made on tiny modification to the pattern so far in that I decided to stitch the flowers on later using duplicate stitch rather than knitting them as the printed chart doesn’t take the repeat into account and I really didn’t feel like working it out on the train, especially as that’s one of the increase rows. [Edited 25/03/2008] Oops! That's my bad. There is in fact a very clear note in the pattern pointing out that you should ignore the repeat for the flowers and just knit them as printed right across. D'oh! Still, I think that with my colourwork skills duplicate stitch will turn out much neater!

* The beret itself was a project using leftovers from the moss stitch baby blanket . She hasn’t sussed yet that there’s always yarn left over – that’s how you get stash!

** If by “gentle encouragement” you mean bringing two knitting books up from Oxford, re-writing a baby sweater pattern as a raglan cardigan and getting Mum to drive us both to John Lewis this morning.