Brittany jumper
My second project was the Brittany jumper, featured on pp. 51--54 of Jill Eaton's excellent book Minnowknits Too. When I was on my first yarn-shopping trip, I saw a sample of this pattern in red hanging in the store, and it was just too adorable for words. I decided to do it up in yellow for Loren Kinkade, yellow being her mother Lee's favourite colour. (Time will only tell whether Loren will inherit the colour preference, or whether this jumper puts her off primary colours for life. :)
I learned an important lesson early in the making of this piece: when knitting in the round, make very certain that you don't let the piece get twisted when starting the second row. I thought vaguely that I had, but didn't realise how much of a problem it would cause, or I would've tried harder---about row eight, halfway through the tricky lace pattern, I discovered the problem (well, Theresa did, actually), and there really is nothing you can do at this point but pull the whole thing out and start over. :P I made use of the opportunity to learn a new cast-on---the basic twisted-loop cast-on looks lovely with the lace pattern, but is not good for baby clothes, so I tried the cable cast-on, which doesn't have a lot of loose loops for fingers and toes to get caught in. I also learned at this point how to loop the yarn over my little finger, which stopped me from dropping the yarn all the time and improved my tension considerably.
Boy howdy does this sucker have a lot of ends to weave in. One at the start, two for each new ball, one for each split (that's three), one at each end (four), and two for each batch of crochet (another four). That's a total of twenty ends. There's going to be enough spare yarn in the edges of this to mend *anything*.
I started this project the second week of May, 2003. I finished the knitting on 6 June, and crocheted the edging and wove in the ends in the next couple of days.
Pattern modifications
I mostly followed the 6-month variant of the pattern, though I was knitting to a tighter gauge than specified; my actual gauge was 22-1/2 stitches per 4" (20 stitches per 3-1/2"), 30 rows per 4" (28 per 3-3/4"). As a result I cut short most of the "work even for X inches" by a tad, making this a, maybe, 5-months size. :)
Instead of switching to straight needles when working the bodice, I just kept using the circular needle. This had the added benefit that I didn't have to move the back off onto a holding needle; I just left it on the loop of the circular while working the front back and forth on the main needles. This worked just fine.
I didn't like the buttonholes, so I changed that to have a single
large buttonhole in the middle of the row---changing the buttonhole row
only to
Rib 3, k2tog, yo, yo, p2tog, rib 3
for the size I was using. The amount of ribbing on each end will vary
with different sizes of the pattern to keep the hole in the middle, and
the k2tog and p2tog may be swapped depending on whether the initial bit
of ribbing is an even or an odd number of stitches. The next row can be
a little tricky (knitting into the second yo feels a bit strange, but
works fine).
Materials
I borrowed Theresa's metal US-6 24" circular needle, which served for most of the project. The edging was done with a metal US-E crochet hook.
I bought five 100m (50g) skeins of Tahki Cotton Classic yarn, colour #3533, for the project; two were used up completely and the third is perhaps two-thirds gone. I did have to ball a fourth and use part of it because of the way the shoulder straps worked, but it came in considerably under the published estimate of 344m. I probably could've finished the project on three balls if I'd had to (especially because I could've raided the swatch for extra yarn).
Pictures
Loren's jumper |
Jumper in incandescent light |
Another shot of the jumper |