Knit Baby Sweater

It's not sewing... but I'm pretty happy with how this turned out! =)

  I came across this pattern a few months ago and decided to test the waters of garment knitting- while I'd knit a few basic rectangular items, I hadn't yet tried anything with shaping.  A few weeks ago, I bought the pattern, the yarn, and some buttons and got started! I wanted to make it for my littlest to wear this winter, but I'm a slow knitter so I thought it would be best if I started it early.

  I'm still rather surprised that it's already finished! I didn't expect to finish it until at least October!  I knit this in the smallest size, which is 0-3 months. My babies tend to be long and slim, so I added a half-inch to the sleeves but otherwise followed the pattern.

  There were a couple things that were either wrong in the pattern, or that I did incorrectly- at this point I'm not quite sure which! The first is the button spacing- the buttons in the example pictures are much farther apart than mine are. I noticed that they seemed close and added a fourth buttonhole, but I ended up only using 3 buttons after all. ;-) Next time I would space the buttonholes out a bit more.

  Secondly, the seed stitch for the button band and hem wouldn't match up if I hadn't fudged it- with the number of stitches there are in this size before the hem, I would have ended up with a wrong side and right side row with bumps in the same spots at the hem. I knit two together just before the band to hide the mismatch, because I thought it would show up less than a doubled row, and I can't tell it's not perfect unless I'm looking for it- but next time I'd start the wrong-side button band with a knit stitch instead of a purl stitch!

  The third odd thing was the underarm area- no additional stitches are cast on at the underarm area for the body of the sweater, but you are supposed to pick up 4 stitches in that area when knitting the sleeve. Which meant some strange finagling that I'm not entirely sure was necessary, and I'm curious if the sleeves would work just as well without picking up those extra 4 stitches. There were some gaps at the underarm area from that, but I was able to close them up when weaving the yarn ends in.

  I learned a LOT while knitting this! Here are a few things I'd never done that I had to learn for this: the backward loop cast on, binding off and casting on mid-row, using a stitch holder, using double needles (I had to buy some to finish this- I didn't own any!), picking up stitches, and knitting in the front and back of a stitch. Most of those things felt really awkward at first, but were a lot less awkward after doing them a few times.

  I haven't blocked this yet. I keep meaning to and getting side-tracked with other projects! I used Lion Brand Wool-Ease Chunky in Charcoal for this. I have half of a skein left so I'm thinking of making a matching hat, but haven't decided on a pattern yet.

  I read when I was 75% of the way finished with this that one should not choose a top-down garment as their first foray into garment knitting, but it seems to have worked out well enough this time! =) In spite of the things I mentioned above, I felt like this pattern was pretty beginner-friendly, and I'm really happy with how it turned out!

  And that's one out of three things for baby #4 that I've finished! I actually finished the binding for the quilt I'm making her, but I think I need to go back and add more quilting to the borders, because I'm nervous about the batting shifting in the wash.

Thanks for stopping by,