Flint Knits

Destashing on Flickr and Ravelry.

With apologies to my niece Claire, who is all that is perfect and joyful and full of goodness and light. And who, judging by this picture, has a healthy mistrust of acrylic fibers.

Enough! Enough with the babymaking, I say!

It must be a late twenties thing, because I swear to blog that all the straight ladies I know who didn’t get knocked up as teenagers (and even some of them who did) have had babies in the last 3 years. But now, for the first time in what seems like forever, I appear to have a brief and shining window of time where none of my friends is pregnant. And while I love my friends dearly, I will not miss the long conversations about hemorrhoids, or choosing the right doula, or the embarrassment of inconvenient breast leakage.

I have to admit, though, that I will miss knitting teeny tiny gifts for teeny tiny newborns. They’re so cute, and so satisfying, and so fast!

And so I give you the last of them. The last of the wee handmade infant duds.

pattern: Offset Wraplan, by Sara Morris [pdf]
yarn: Knitpicks Shine Sport, in “grass”
needles: US 3 and 5
[raveled]

pattern: none, just a hat and some tube socks with leaves attached.
(If folks want a tutorial, I’ll post one–let me know)
yarn: Knitpicks Shine Sport, in “leaf”
needles: US 4
[raveled]

And that’s it! The end of the teeny tiny knits for the foreseeable future.

But stay tuned for totally adorable toddler clothes, obvs. And I think Claire might need a collection of knitted cephalopods…

The Failure: I didn’t win that contest. I didn’t even make it into the semi-finals! Since I had waaaay more votes than everyone else (thanks, guys!), I can only assume this is because I didn’t follow the rules (big surprise). When one of the people organizing the contest sent me a Flickr message inviting me to submit my picture, I just did it. What I did not do was bother to read the terms of the contest, which apparently include a rule declaring that photos must be head-to-toe. Fail!

On a happier note, Laurynn (who just knit a thong, by the way) is the lucky winner of a $20 woolgirl.com gift certificate. Woo hoo!

The Success: The stripey/pooley Charade sock? Turned out gorgeous.

Just a tiny bit of pooling around the instep, which I think I can live with. In fact, I was so thrilled by how lovely Sandra’s pattern is in variegated yarn that, instead of knitting the second sock, I immediately cast on for another pair in a different variegated colorway.

The Robot: My niece Claire had her first birthday this week, and she obviously needed a wildly inappropriate gift from Cool Aunt Pam.

pattern: Bender Bending Rodriguez, by Soph Viklund
yarn: Plymouth Dreambaby DK and Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Baby 
ravelry link (includes list of my mods to the original pattern)

If you aren’t familiar with Futurama, Bender is a foul-mouthed, cigar-smoking, poker-playing robot who bends metal and is fueled entirely by booze.

Perfect for an infant, no?

Fortunately, Claire’s parents are Futurama fans, and were thus superjazzed about the gift,

and her grandparents don’t watch the show, so they just saw a cute robot toy,

and Claire herself discovered immediately how flingable wee Bender is, with those long, grippable arms and legs.

So everyone wins. Happy Birthday, Claire!

ETA: MORE maths corrected, plus I added sizes XS and XXS. Check out the revised sizing. The re-worked file was created on June 10 at 2:50pm, and should say “Version 2.0″ at the top.

As soon as a zillion people started queuing my sweater pattern on Ravelry, I knew I was going to find a huge mistake. I just knew it.

And guess what!

I surely did!

Like, a really big one.

A really, really, massively big one.

Luckily, it’s not til after the raglan increases, so hopefully not many people have gotten that far yet. But, yeah, that part where it says to add 13 yarn-overs? That’s bunk. It’s supposed to be a number between 38 and 41, depending on your size. I have no idea where the number 13 came from. Let’s not even discuss it.

If you downloaded the pattern before June 9 at 12:30am Eastern US time, get the new one!

And please enjoy this recycled photo of my cat Wilma wearing yarn.

I mean, how can you be angry at someone who has such a precious kitty? Answer: you cannot.

Thanks in advance for your patience and generosity and not, you know, kicking my ass or sending hate mail.

If you haven’t entered the contest for the woolgirl.com gift certificate, there’s still time! Go! Go!

Big thanks for all the kind responses to the February Lady Sweater!

If you’re interested in making a version that’s more faithful to Elizabeth Zimmerman’s original, several folks have made larger versions of the original baby sweater, by doing some serious math. I mentioned Jenny’s in my last post (could she be any cuter?), and you should also check out this super-gorgeous version. In fact, I just found out that Ravelry has a whole discussion going on about how to re-work the math for an adult size, with a few pictures of finished ones. (Shoulda known–there’s a Ravelry thread for everything.) And someone even made a grown-up version just by using superbulky yarn and the original pattern.

EZ’s original baby sweater is, of course, fucking brilliant in its construction. It has a lot of increases over a small number of rows, to create a rounded shape that will suit a wee baby’s round body. The pattern I wrote, on the other hand, is just a basic top-down raglan. This construction means that, instead of fitting a baby’s round body, it’s made to be fitted across an adult’s shoulders and upper back, then drape all swingy-like down from the bust (yeah, no, I could not get a job writing for J. Peterman). If you’re familiar with top-down raglan construction, you really don’t even need the pattern, just this one-sentence command: “knit a top-down raglan using EZ’s gull stitch pattern, with a row of 40-45 increases just above the bust.”

Finally, some folks have emailed because they’ve had problems making the raglan increases work. The issue seems to be around the phrase, “mark the next stitch.” This is not the same as “place a marker.” Rather, you mark the next stitch you knit. You can either place a marker on either side of that stitch, or slide a split ring marker through the knitted stitch, so that you know to put a m1 increase on either side of it for the raglan shaping. If you’re good at reading your knitting, you don’t even need a marker–just increase on either side of the same stitch each time. Hope this helps! (I’ll also go clarify in the pattern itself.)

I do actually have other knitting projects, too! I just started a pair of Sandra’s Charade socks in some Wollmeise sockenwolle that Kris sent me a while back.

But I’m not sure I love the striping. Should I embrace the striping? Or frog it and find a better pattern/yarn match? I beg you, be ruthless in your advice