Knitting for baby

One of my best friends is pregnant. This is fantastic news - they had been trying for months before they got the good news, and I know they will be fantastic parents. Notwithstanding some of the names the prospective father has suggested …

Anyway, for me this means the chance to try my hand at knitting baby clothes. And as luck would have it, just as I was finishing up my lacy t-shirt (designed by me, don’t you know), Knitting magazine showed up in the post box complete with a pattern for a lovely, simple baby cardie.

All five pieces had to be threaded onto the circ. Preferably without dropping any stitches.

Substitute
As a Debbie Bliss pattern, it calls for Ms Bliss’s Baby Cashmerino. But I’m all for supporting local businesses, so I went along to my friend’s SoSusie Yarns stall at Archway market. She doesn’t stock Debbie Bliss, so I had to for something else. Baby Rooster is 100% merino, machine washable and soft as the fur on a kitten’s nose. It’s cheaper than Baby Cashmerino and comes out at the same tension. It’s also lovely to knit with. In short, buy some. From SoSusie.

Now the wonderful thing about baby knits is just how quick they are to make. I did one of the cardie fronts in a couple of hours at a knitting group. Amazing! I started the cardie at the beginning of this month (July) and I’ve already nearly finished. And that includes putting it aside for about a week because I simply couldn’t understand how the yoke worked.

Panic!
Yeah, that yoke. I was convinced there was a mistake in the pattern. I’d happily (and correctly) made all the separate pieces - back, two fronts, two sleeves - up to the armhole shaping and then transferred all the stitches to a holder. Next it was time to transfer them all back to the needles. There were 188 of them - I bought a circular. Then it was time to knit the yoke, decreasing all the time to the collar.

Sounds simple, and it is. But I just couldn’t see how the armholes would be made. I looked on Ravelry, I looked in the next two issues of the magazine, I looked on the magazine’s forum, I searched the whole internet. Nothing. It took a very clever knitting Badger to explain it to me. It works. But I’m not sure why.

It’s not important. I’m racing through the yoke now, and it’s surely only a matter of days till the cardie is finished. And in plenty of time for baby’s birth.

Close up - see how even those stitches are? I put that down to the yarn. And my own greatness, of course.