Finished: Veera's Hello Kitty Sweater

I finished Veera's sweater a good while ago, but I haven't gotten around to taking photos of it until now. After finishing the sleeves as per the pattern, I measured them, unpicked the bound off stitches and added another four or five centimetres. I also made the body quite a lot longer; It doesn't hurt to err on the side of big with a growing girl! In general, I was surprised how small the pattern was, considering it was supposed to fit a 6-8-year-old and Veera is only turning 5.

I am rather pleased with the result; the Hello Kitty face (which I lifted from a scarf pattern) is recognizable and fun with the fluffy yarn. It was a pain to stitch on, but a good exercise in working with different kinds of yarns. The Novita Jasmin mentioned in the previous post really didn't work with this, so I ended up using black Novita Nalle (75% wool / 25% polyamide) instead. When I bought the main pink yarn for the sweater, I had no idea how many skeins I should get. I ended up getting 5, which was a lucky guess - I had half a skein left at the end.

Now I'll wrap the sweater up in wrapping paper and put it away until December. Let's hope the birthday girl likes it!

Veera's Hello Kitty Sweater

My niece, Veera, turns five next Christmas Eve. She loves Hello Kitty - last year her top wish from Santa was a packet of Hello Kitty band-aids! And like all nearly-five-year-old girls, she loves the colour pink. When she saw me knitting a few months ago (I was working on a chocolate brown Lucky Clover Wrap from Stitch'n Bitch Nation, a project I am now considering frogging despite having worked on it for a year), she was intrigued. (Yes, I do plan on initiating her into the art of knitting at some point.) Last time I saw her a few weeks back, she asked if I had finished the project yet and if I would knit her a pink sweater.

Now, you have to cross me pretty bad for me to say no to a knitting request, especially such a small one, so I started pondering and planning what her pink sweater could look like. I had a few prerequisites:

1. It should be a top-down project. I'm not spending half the time sewing fronts and backs and sides and sleeves together.
2. It should be machine washable. This one is a no-brainer considering she's going on five and five-year-olds do messy things.
3. It should be soft and comfortable, not itchy.
   
4. It should not be 100% acrylic or any other synthetic fibre that is likely to melt on her should it catch on fire.

I rummaged through the excellent pattern search engine on Ravelry and found a suitable top-down pattern for a little girl's top (minus the stripes and the bell sleeves). Turns out that Novita Samos (50% cotton / 50% acrylic) knits exactly to the gauge and ticks all the boxes that I set for the yarn. For a fluffy Hello Kitty face, I decided to use Novita Jive (100% polyamide), with the red bow-tie made from the Novita Luxus Cloud from my cardigan and the black outline done with Novita Jasmin (60% cotton / 40% acrylic; not on the website as I believe it's a seasonal yarn).

I cast my stitches on and the project was going ahead swimmingly... until I came to the part where I wanted to start the intarsia. Now, usually intarsia is worked on flat pieces, in which you work from right to left, then left to right, then right to left, etc. etc. This makes carrying yarn relatively simple. However, when you're working in the round (right to left over and over again), intarsia becomes problematic, as you leave the yarn on one side and then arrive on the opposite shore with no way of reaching said yarn. I found an excellent tutorial on intarsia in the round and, although I've never worked intarsia even on a flat piece before, decided to bite the bullet and try it out. After all, how hard can it be?

Pretty hard I tell ya, especially if you're working with four colours at once (with two of those colours split into two smaller balls each), your main intarsia yarn is a very very elastic one and the rest not at all. I completed approximately seven rows of the Hello Kitty pattern, decided that there was no way those stretched-all-over-the-place stitches were going to do, and frogged the lot. I have no pictorial evidence of this offending piece, but trust you me, it was pretty offensive.

So I frogged it, re-knit those seven rows, lost two stitches in there somewhere (no idea where as there are no dropped stitches - maybe missed two raglan increases?) and prepared for the tedious prospect that is the knitting of a sweater body in plain stocking stitch. At least it's a small body, and the yarn is pretty chunky, so it's quick going.


Here's where I am at the moment. It should take me another 2-3 evenings to finish the sweater, and then I get to the interesting part: duplicate stitching the Hello Kitty face on! The pink yarn underneath should give it the sturdiness to stop it from stretching all over the place like it did before. I'm also considering stitching Veera's name onto the sleeve, but maybe that's a bit too much? I just remember how I loved everything with my name on it when I was her age.

I might just knit everyone's Christmas presents this year. I'll be sitting on the train a lot this autumn thanks to my other university being in a different town, so I'll have a lot of time to kill. What, studying? What's that?

Finished: Favorite Cardigan by Wendy Bernard

As I mentioned in my last post, I have mostly knitted socks and small things in the past. In fact, I have yet to finish anything that is worn on the actual body. Until today.

Two weeks ago, I was grocery shopping at a supermarket when I noticed they had yarn on special (cue mad dash). Despite having a strict yarn shopping list, I picked up seven skeins of Novita Luxus Cloud (65% wool / 35% bamboo) in a delicious scarlet shade, without a clue about what I was going to knit out of it. When I found out at the checkout that they were only 2€ a skein (normally 5€), I went back the next day and got seven skeins more, all that they had in stock.

When I got home, I went through my knitting books and found the perfect use for the Cloud (or so I thought at the time) - the Favorite Cardigan by Wendy Bernard, from her book Custom Knits. See the model photo at left. The gauge matched, it offered a gentle introduction to top-down knitting, which I was keen to try, and last but not least: I really wanted a scarlet cardigan. So off I went.

I am not usually what they call a project knitter, but I really liked working on this one. I cannot explain why - it must have been the top-down construction - but it was an incredibly quick knit. Consider that I have another cardigan in the works that I started a year ago... Whatever the reason, I took a strong liking to top-down projects, trying it on as I worked was great!

I made several mods to the pattern, as encouraged by the book: My gauge was off by two stitches per 10cm so I changed the needles from 4.5mm to 5.5mm. Since I fell between sizes, I CO'd size S and added an extra row of raglan increases for a larger bust, then decreased back to size S for the waist (two extra decreasing rounds). I moved the front cables two stitches further out for a nice knitted edge, I also moved the sleeve cables by a stitch to match them with the collar ribbing. Sleeves were size M minus two stitches, so I skipped the first round of decreases and then worked as per size M, making them longer until I felt they were right. Lengthened the body from 12½" to 14½" before the bottom ribbing. Tossed the buttonhole instructions out of the window as they produced the most god-awful "buttonholes" I've ever seen. Did regular "BO 2 sts, next round CO 2 sts" buttonholes, used seven buttons instead of eight. Phew, I think that's all!

The final result can be seen at right (click for a bigger photo). I wish I could say that I positively adore the first torso-wearable thing that has come off my needles, but I don't quite. It's certainly OK or even fine, but the fit is slightly odd - too short to start with, despite the extra two inches. The big annoyance is the yarn; although it's incredibly soft and a dream to work with, it has already started pilling... bad. The cardigan certainly doesn't look as though it was finished today. On the other hand, it does look like a favourite cardigan, slightly worn out. It could be worse, I guess!

If nothing else, I am proud of actually finishing this thing, and in two weeks to boot! It has given me confidence about starting "big" projects that I have so far always discarded halfway through, bored and/or disillusioned. I've got several more cardigans/sweaters/jumpers on my to-do list now. Gotta dream big! For my next project however, I'll think small - my niece requested a pink sweater, so a pink sweater she will get. She loves Hello Kitty, so I'm scheming intarsia (another first for me) in fluffy white yarn. We'll see how it turns out. Luckily her birthday is not until December!