Ruthless Knitting

I have (almost) finished the baby pants! I just have to put the elastic in the waistband. Aren’t they cute?

It’s good that they’re so very adorable, because they were a major pain to knit. Even though I was only responsible for 1.25 legs (Rebecca knit the entire seat and most of one leg), I have to be honest and say that I loathed the whole process nonetheless. It’s just not a good idea to knit with that many colors at once. I blame Dale of Norway, whose pattern this is. For the record, I did find the whole process more bearable on a single, short-cabled circular needle than on double-pointed needles.

One problem with knitting with five colors is that you have to carry all the other colors along, creating a rather thick and stiff seam at the inner leg. I tried a variety of things to make this seam as bulk-free as possible, but there’s really no way to carry four strands along without ending up with something that looks like this:

Grumperina had an interesting series of posts not too long ago (late March - early April 2008, to be exact) about how you can knit single-color stripes in spirals, thereby avoiding the pesky seam. I find that my mind can only barely comprehend how this technique would work, and I didn’t think I could start it mid-leg, so no dice this time around. Maybe I’ll try it in the future, though.

In any event, the pants came out cute, which I suppose is all that matters. They did bias rather severely in the wash for reasons totally unknown to me. Can you see in this picture how one leg of every stitch is more pronounced than the other?

Strangely, they didn’t look like this before I washed them, nor was there any difference between Rebecca’s stitches and mine — they all biased. I suppose it has something to do with the pants being made up of tubes. And with the way the yarn (Louet Gems Pearl) is plied. It’s not terribly noticeable, though, so I’m just ignoring it.

Meanwhile, I started a little baby jumper for Rebecca’s impending baby, but it wasn’t working out and I had to rip it back. I have another idea I want to try, but I needed to get away from the cotton for a while, so I decided to make a white Baby Surprise Jacket. I’ve never made one before, and the idea of white wool and garter stitch appealed. This is how far I was yesterday:

Though I have stared intently at the diagram, I still have no idea what portion of the jacket this represents. I think it may be part of both sleeves and also the back neck. Or not. We shall see.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 11:45 am and is filed under Finished Objects, Projects in Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.