Ruthless Knitting

People seem to love to knit blankets for babies. I myself have knit one baby blanket, and I more or less enjoyed the process. But it is a long process, and it’s hard for me to imagine taking on another baby blanket any time soon, especially as a baby shower gift.

Perhaps others agree with me that the baby blanket is a rather large commitment for a gift, since knitters always seem to be looking for the next big thing in baby shower gifts.

I may have found it. I present to you the Carseat Blanket.

The idea for the Carseat Blanket came to me when my friend Rebecca was kind enough to tote her newborn infant to my house along with gobs of maternity clothes that she no longer needed and had carefully selected to suit my personal taste. (Thanks, Rebecca!) While her daughter Madelyn was lounging on the floor in her carseat –

(perhaps you wish to see a picture of Madelyn wearing the dress I knit for her? yes?) 

– while this specimen of chubby baby cuteness was lounging in her carseat on the floor, I noticed how very small the infant carseat is, and I thought, "Man, you don’t really need much of a blanket to cover up such a little baby!" Indeed, the bigger the blanket is, the more you have to fold it and tuck it out of the way so it doesn’t drag on the floor while you carry that stupid behemoth carseat around.

What the parents of a newborn really need, I decided, is an itty-bitty blanket. A blanket just big enough, say, for Leona. A blanket about two feet square. Voila!

The Carseat Blanket is the perfect project for the overworked knitting enthusiast and/or slightly weary pregnant knitter, since it can be knocked out in four or five hours of knitting time, tops, on biggish needles. It is also a good project for the lazy knitter, since you can cast on as many stitches as it seems might be appropriate, knit the middle part, and then just keep cranking out that edging until you run out of yarn. If you cast on too few stitches, so what? Your edging will just be wider and therefore cuter. Too many stitches? You’ll have a narrower edging, but it won’t matter, because rose stitch doesn’t require a border to lay flat in any event.

Can you tell that I’m inordinately pleased with myself?

Pattern: My own.

Size: 22.5 x 23.5 inches

Yarn: Aslan Trends Guanaco (60 percent alpaca, 40 percent merino wool; 145 yds per 100 g skein) in blue jeans and papaya

Source: Loopy Yarns, Chicago, IL

Needles: US 11 (8.0 mm) circular needles

Gauge: About 11 stitches over 4" in both rose and garter stitch

Notes: Rose stitch is one of my very favorite stitches. It’s much simpler than it looks: on the front side, you knit one into the stitch below, then purl one, and repeat these two actions all the way across. On the back side, you knit all the stitches. Then on the next right-side row, you offset by one stitch. If you want striped rose stitch, you change colors every other row. Through some bit of knitting alchemy, it ends up looking like this. Easy peasy, and it spreads like all get-out. The body of this blanket only has 40 stitches across (for about 18 inches of the width) and is about 90 rows tall, so it didn’t take much longer to knit than a little 40-stitch swatch would have.

On a negative note, I feel obliged to say that I only sort of liked the Guanaco yarn that I used for this project. I really enjoyed the colors (which David picked out), but the texture is a little problematic. According to the Ravelry page for the yarn, it is billed as "snuggly bulky soft Alpaca wool." "Just touch it and you will love it forever," the company urges, since it is "specially designed for softness and comfort."

I hate to rain on Aslan Trends’ parade, but if you want alpaca/merino yarn to be soft, you have to remove the guard hairs from the alpaca. Otherwise, you will have a very soft base yarn that is bristling with, well, bristles. It’s acceptable for an outer layer, but I wouldn’t want it against my skin, and I sure as heck wouldn’t put it directly on a baby’s skin. Maybe I just got a bad batch?

At any rate, this was such a simple and fun project that I’m thinking of making another in a solid color. I have two skeins of red cotton yarn that need a purpose. Anyone interested in the pattern for this? I could probably refine it in the next go-round and write it up for public consumption without too much difficulty.

My friend Rebecca had her new baby, Madelyn, yesterday. She is perfect and adorable. The dress will hardly do her justice.

Pattern: My own
Size: 3-6 mo. (16" chest, meant to fit snugly)
Yarn: Blue Sky Alpacas Skinny Dyed Cotton (100 percent cotton; 150 yds per 65 g skein) in mallard and maize
Yardage: 140 yds mallard, approx 100 yds maize
Source: Jimmy Beans Wool
Needles: US 5 (3.75 mm) circular needles
Gauge: 5.5 sts and 8 rows = 4" in stockinette stitch
Notes: Since Maddy is a summer baby, I designed this with the image in my mind of her hanging out on a pretty summer’s day by the inflatable pool, watching while her big sister splashes around in the water. I think it turned out pretty cute, given that I pretty much made it up as I went along.

I cast on provisionally for this dress and ended up knitting in both directions, first upward until I had finished the tube for the top, then downward for the skirt, and then upward again to make the straps. This method allowed me to (a) cast on an almost random number of stitches and knit for a while before deciding how many I needed to decrease for the top and (b) use up as much yarn as possible for the skirt part without running out.

I like the Skinny Dyed cotton okay — the colors, in particular, are just lovely — but it’s sort of a strange yarn. It seems to be made up of about a million teensy strands of cotton plied together with very little twist, and this means that you have to be careful to catch them all on every stitch. If you miss even one strand, your fabric will show it. Nonetheless, with pointy needles and in stockinette, this was not a big deal. I’d use it again for a baby garment.

Onward to the next baby knit! I have a little sweater in the works to use up leftovers. Stay tuned.

New ideas are being hatched here at Ruthless Knitting. Maybe it’s because spring finally seems to have arrived, or maybe it’s just that my pesky Secret Design Project is nearly finished, but I have knitting excitement percolating in my brain for the first time in what seems like a long time!

To go with it, I present to you a new swatch:

I’m working on a design that will combine these two colors, with a patterned intarsia pattern inset between plain stockinette. The maize-colored part looks sort of interesting in the picture, as if I had come up with some sort of elaborate design featuring both lace and cables, but in fact I was just experimenting with different patterns. The bottom is a variation on feather and fan, but I didn’t think it was open enough to work for the project I have in mind. The top is supposed to be staghorn cables, but I messed up the pattern several times, producing both something that looks like a mean owl and one cable that sort of reboots partway through. No matter — I got the information I wanted from the exercise, which is that I like the cable and the needle size (US 5) and that the overall plan will probably work. Now I just need to figure out some measurements, and I can get moving on something new. Yay!

Tomorrow, I’m headed to Neenah for the Midwest Masters conference, where I will take an all-day socks class with Lucy Neatby. On Sunday, I’ll take an afternoon class on brioche stitches with Janet Szabo. While I’m looking forward more to the second class, I am definitely interested in finding out what Lucy’s class will be like. I’ve never actually taken a knitting class before, and I understand that she is an excellent teacher. I’m looking forward to learning new things and getting lots of great ideas.

When one has been working on a commissioned design project for several weeks and is thoroughly sick of it, it turns out that there’s nothing more thrilling than knitting a little bit on a plain old stockinette sock. The allure of the Shiny and New can be powerful, indeed.

I’m still not quite finished with my Secret Design Project, but having something different to knit a few rows on now and then is really taking the edge off. And I’m pleased to have a project on the needles that I can blog about!

Gather ’round for a tale of knitting gone awry.

It all started more than a year ago, when my good friend Rebecca sent me an e-mail link to a garment at an online shop known for its beautiful knitwear, along with the question, "We could knit this, couldn’t we?" The garment in question was a pullover sweater with very short sleeves, a deep U-neck, and a full skirt. The zoomed-in views available on the website revealed that the bodice was knit side-to-side in stockinette with purled rows every inch or so, while the skirt portion seemed to have been picked up from the bodice and knit straight downward. "Sure," I told Rebecca, "we could totally knit that." But we didn’t — at least, not right away.

The top stayed in the back of my mind for a year or so, until last month I got a cold and wanted to work on something that involved larger yarn, interesting construction, and plain knitting. I pulled out some yarn from Gryphon that had been in my stash for a while and set to work on a knockoff of the top Rebecca had introduced me to.

The bodice portion went quite well, all things considered. I worked a tubular cast-on to create what would be the edge of the right sleeve, made a 1×1 rib edging, increased for a few inches to the full sleeve length and width, and then did a provisional cast on for the front and back stitches on either side of the sleeve. I worked straight for four inches or so, bound off the stitches for the right side of the neck, worked just the front to the far side of the neck, went back and worked the back across to match, cast stitches back on for the left side of the neck, rejoined and knit for another four inches, put all but the left sleeve stitches on holders, made the left sleeve to match the right, and worked a tubular bind-off. (Whew! Did you follow that?) I grafted both sides together and seamed under the arms, made a strip of 1×1 ribbing for the neckline and sewed it in, and sat back to admire my handiwork.

So far, so good. The only problem was that I was clearly going to run out of yarn.

Now, I knew when I started this top that I didn’t have enough yarn, but I sort of hoped that I miraculously would have enough, somehow. The yarn I used has 280 yards per skein, and I had two skeins. Last time I used the yarn, I was amazed how far 280 yards would go, so I crossed my fingers that it would do the trick. But the bodice itself used up about two-thirds of the yarn, so there was simply no way I would be able to knit the skirt-like portion with what remained.

I could have ripped the whole thing out at this point, and maybe I should have. But I knew that if I did, I would never reknit the top, and it would probably be a very long time before I reused the yarn. Also, I had a cold, and I didn’t want to have to think too hard about anything. So I just pressed on, and when I ran out of orange yarn after about four inches, I changed to some blue yarn of the same type.

When I ran out of blue yarn at about eight inches, the skirt part still wasn’t long enough, but I had a plan, so I changed to yellow yarn of the same type and continued. Finally, when I was almost out of yellow yarn, I worked a few rows of ribbing and bound off.

At this point, the top looked like something a clown might wear. Individually, the orange, blue, and yellow yarns were lovely, but together, they were frightful. I had a plan, though: I had already decided to dye the whole thing black. So that is what I did. Then I blocked it, dried it, and tried it on. 

The result was rather disappointing. So disappointing, in fact, that I wasn’t able to bring myself to look at the top again or write about it for a few days, and then I drafted this post and avoided taking pictures of myself in the top for ten days, leaving me unable to complete the post. Then I took the pictures and left the draft post unfinished for another week or so. Clearly, I just haven’t been ready to think about it.

After all that stalling, here, at last, are the pictures. They are not terribly good pictures, but they are as good as they’re going to get.

The sad truth is that the skirt is too wide, resulting in more gathering than I would like. That would not be so bad, except the way that the neckline pulls in and the bust pushes out makes the front of the skirt ride quite a bit higher than the back of the skirt, and I don’t like the result. It would almost make a cute maternity top, except that even if that had been my intention, the height discrepancy between the front and the back would be a problem.

What I need to do, I suppose, is rip the skirt back and reknit it with smaller needles. (I don’t think I need fewer stitches, I just need to stick with size 9 needles instead of increasing up to size 11). What I’m not so sure about is the high front / low back issue — I could use short rows to remedy that, but I dread the very idea of having to work out the math. Perhaps short rows won’t be necessary if the skirt itself is not so dang voluminous. I don’t know. What do you think?

At the moment, the project has been sitting in my sweater chest, and I’m pretty content to leave it there.

I had a cold earlier this week, and I wanted to work on something fairly simple, so I pulled some orange yarn from Gryphon out of storage and started making a top that ought to be good for the transition to spring, should the transition to spring ever arrive.

The project is certainly keeping me entertained. Can you figure out how I knit what I have so far?

I’ve used a bit more than half of my yarn already, so it’s an open question how much length I’m going to be able to eke out of what remains. It should be fun figuring it out.