Well, we've moved house and we have no Internet for another three weeks, booo! Which means its pretty hard for me to blog and show you what I've been up to :o(
I'm doing this from the mobile app, so apologies for the poor format and misplaced photos. I couldn't not do a post though because I have been knitting some seriously cute things! An old school buddy is going to be a Daddy around Christmas time and he happens to make the coolest sun glasses ever (coming soon to www.bam-boostore.com) so we're doing a little trade off; I knit some cool stuff for baby Emilia and in return I get a pair of his rad shades. Sounds little a pretty toot sweet deal to me!
So to start with I wanted to make a little hat for her. I scoured through all my patterns but I just couldn't find the right one, so I made it up as I went along! To get the right size, I google searched the average circumference of a newborn baby's head (14 inches apparently) and did my gauge swatch so I knew how many stitches to cast on (I used size 3 and a quarter mm needles and cast on 91 stitches). I used Debbie Bliss cashmerino DK in apricot for the main body of the hat. I did a K1P1 rib for 6 rows, then switched to 4mm needles for the rest.
I wanted to personalise the hat and decided to do a little E on it, in a contrasting colour using fair isle. For this I used Debbie Bliss Cashmerino DK in cream. I usually work out my fair isle patterns on my computer using a good old excel spreadsheet, but I happened to be at my sisters house when the idea struck me, so I took to good old pen and paper (and a few yellow stickers to act as corrector pen, that's improvisation for you) to lay out the design. I wanted to do the curly swirly kind of E so that it wasn't too harsh, and I came up with this little pattern. It actually didn't translate very well to the final product, partly because it was only a single line (row, stitch, whatever you want to call it) and partly because I'm still not great at fair isle and the contrasting stitches were not very even or uniform in size.
Anyhoo, I finished the hat and wasn't quite happy with it, so I decided that a little bow fixes everything. I knitted up a little seed stitch bow and sewed it onto the bottom of that hat and it instantly looked better. The E still really doesn't look like an E (I've been asked if its a smiley face three times) but oh well, baby Emilia will never know :o) Hopefully Ashley and Ali will like it!
Next I'm making her some little socks out of the same apricot cashmerino. I got the pattern from the Debbie Bliss baby knits book, and they are frickin cute. I'll do a proper post when they're all done, but here's how I've done so far...
Knit on knitters
x
