Arwen and more baby knitting

Top-down baby sweaters are really easy. This one was knit in 1x1 rib using Swish superwash and following the usual formula for a top-down raglan with cables from the harmony guide thrown in for the entertainment of the knitter.

Following EZ's advice to make a hat as a gauge swatch proved to be project-saving advice since my row gauge went from 7 stitches / inch to 8 stitches / inch when washed and dried (a loss of 12%, I think). Always, always launder gauge swatches in the manner that the garment will be laundered.



After finishing the back and left front, and using short-rows to subsequently widen the sleeves, the Arwen sweater got put on hold in November. I recently resumed work on the right front, sleeve and hood. So far, using my LK-150 to knit the stockinette sections of the sweater has been fairly easy: the only really tricky part to handle was casting on stitches for the sleeves, then weighing the newly cast-on stitches down so that no stitches get dropped when the next row gets knit. The cable panel is also a quick knit, so I'm hoping I'll actually get to wear this sweater this winter.





And finally, here's Miss Dashwood on Christmas morning.

FO: baby sweaters

The baby sweaters for the cousin's babies are finally done. They languished while waiting for a high-performance computing course to end (painful!), zippers to be inserted and ends to be woven in. They're only about 7 months late.

From a distance:

And closeup:

Pattern

The pattern is Baby's First Tattoo out of Stitch 'n Bitch Nation in the 18 month old size.

Yarn

KnitPicks Merino Style and Plymouth Alpaca Boucle from the LYS for the border detail (replaces seed stitch in original pattern) on US 5 needles.

Mods

The original pattern calls for Rowan 4-Ply Soft, which is a fingering weight yarn. I did most of the work on these over the winter break and was impatient, so I decided to go with a larger gauge yarn. I used the pattern dimensions as a guide to recalculate row/stitch counts in DK gauge.