Baby stuff I

Finally, I got around to doing some knitting for the baby! And it's so much fun, producing those little clothes goes so fast I have already started a small collection. I haven't even managed to buy buttons for all the cardigans, that's why in this post I'm only showing the first part of my projects - there's more to come!

Mainly I'm knitting cardigans. I don't like jumpers myself and I imagine it will be easier to put a cardigan on the baby than trying to force something over its head. Rompers and trousers made from wool don't really seem practical to me, I think I'll stick to cotton ones that you can wash decently in the machine. So for now it's cardigans and hats/bonnets and I'm planning on knitting some socks, too.

My basic go-to pattern is the "Raglan Baby Cardigan" that I found on ravelry, it's the one I used for the green cardigan pictured above. It only comes in two sizes but with a variation of different yarns you can basically knit any size. And it's super easy and looks really neat with the regular raglan increase. You can customize it very easily and I've already made different versions with and without sleeves (see my projects here for example).

The red squirrel jumper is "Nøtteliten jumper with circular yoke", also a free pattern on ravelry. I already made it once in the past but this time I steeked it and turned it into a cardigan. I'm very proud of myself that I even had the patience to sew on the ribbon to cover the steek border inside. But I admit it's also partly because I ran out of the red yarn (you can see the button band is also a bit on the narrow side) so I didn't have enough to secure the steek with a matching colour.

Finally, the bonnet is the Purl Soho "Baby Bonnet" pattern. I love Purl Soho yarns, especially their beautiful colour schemes, but I'm always too stingy to pay for the postage and taxes to order from the US. In this case it wasn't a problem because I still had enough yarn in my stash though. And the pattern was quite straight forward, too. Although I still couldn't figure out how to knit the attached iCord! In the end I just crocheted the border and the strings.

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Patterns:

• "Raglan Baby Cardigan"
• "Nøtteliten jumper with circular yoke"
• "Baby Bonnet" by Purl Soho

Yarns:
Various leftover bits from my stash, mainly the Michell's alpaca for the bonnet, some Lithuanian wool yarn for the red cardigan and some handspun merino for the green cardigan, contrasted with the same alpaca yarn mentioned above.

Mini Brexit cardigan

I had knitted the "Prince George vest" once before but a lot has happened since so I when I got the request from a UK-based friend to knit another one for her baby I thought it was more fitting to call it "Brexit cardigan" this time!

I also free-styled a bit on the pattern, using only the chart for the intarsia work from the original vest. The cardigan is based on the classic "Raglan Baby Cardigan" that I have used several times before. I still can't say that I'm a big fan of intarsia knitting, especially with more than two colours in the same round. But since the result is so cute it makes up for the difficulties.

I also like the contrasting buttons, which were not part of the original pattern.

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Patterns: "Raglan Baby Cardigan (top-down)" and "Changing the guards at Buckingham Palace" by Susan Crawford

Yarn: Limbazu Tine Sia (intarsia) and Teksrena (main colour)

2017 knitting review

• The favourites:

Looking back over my past blogposts, I think the Praline cardigan and the Birki cardigan really stick out - Praline because it was fun to knit a garment which was constructed differently from my usual go-to patterns and Birki because it's just so comfy and pretty and I've worn it a lot (amongst others on my Estonia/Finland trip). And of course I loved the Palmetto cardigan, I've been wearing it all the time this winter because it still fits me quite well during pregnancy - we'll have to see if I have to make some adjustments later on.

• The small stuff

I also knitted a lot of smaller items, especially baby stuff, that went to various friends who had babies this year. Many of them I forgot to document properly before giving them away and a couple of them are not posted yet but the pink alpaca vest was one of those projects. Good practice for knitting our own baby clothes!

• The one-off

Another project which I enjoyed a lot was knitting the Tailwind shawl with my hand-dyed "confetti explosion" yarn. In hindsight, the speckled yarn fad was exactly that: a fad. I'm still using the shawl if I need a bit of colour in the grey winter weather but honestly I'd rather stick to the boring old plain colours in the future, or at least a combination thereof.

• The loser

Clearly, this was the "Yellow sweater". Even though I knitted it in my favourite Létt Lopi, the yellow never really matched the one in the pattern and, who am I kidding, I just don't do sweaters! The idea was to convert it into a cardigan eventually but I never got round to doing it. I'm also not convinced of the yoke shaping, it's a bit too wide for my taste. 

• The unfinished

My "Delft" cardigan. Even though we visited Delft in the summer this did not boost my knitting mojo enough to really get down with this project. Actually, it was WAS finished at some point but the neckline was messed up and far too wide so I still have to unravel parts of the yoke. Urgh, I don't even want to think of those tiny stitches....

• The one that didn't survive

Oh, and last but not least one item that did sadly not survive 2017: my "Green Tweed" cardigan got accidentally shrunk in the washing machine. At least I got a lot of wear out of it before we parted, and I have to admit that it was my own fault it got destroyed. I usually washed it in the wool cycle but in moment of confusion I told Thomas to put it in the 40 degree wash with all the other stuff - oops.

• What's next? 

For 2018 I foresee a lot of baby knitting - if I manage to do any knitting at all! I still have some dream projects that I want to tackle but to be honest I prefer to wait until my body is back to its post-pregnancy shape (keeping my fingers crossed that my old stuff will still fit eventually!). But hey, you can always dream, for example of:

- Siri - still top of my list, second year in a row!
- Another Miette - such a nice and easy pattern and fits really well
- Minetta - I already got the yarn waiting and it's soooo tempting
- Tabular - even though I don't like sweaters this pattern got my fingers itching

Happy knitting 2018!

Palmetto

For my birthday I got a subscription to Pom Pom magazine, something I had been thinking about for a long time but since it was a gift the decision was taken easily. In the first issue I received, the Autumn 2017 one, I immediatley spotted Emilia Jensen's "Palmetto" cardigan. I loved the colours as they were used in the magazine but since I still have a massive stash I decided to recycle some DK yarn from a frogged cardigan and some odds bits of leftover yarn in the contrasting colours.

I'm very pleased with the colour combination and also the overall outcome. It was really a pleasure following this pattern, very clear and easy to use. As I mentioned in a previous post, recently I've been using more and more professionally written patterns and it makes such a difference! I didn't realize how much rubbish patterns were on Ravelry until I got the  direct comparison. Saying that, I still managed to mess up the German short rows on the shoulder stripes - I got it right in the back, but not the front. You can see in the photos that the transition from the yellow of the bodice to the shoulder strips is very bumpy and uneven. But then I figured it out as I went and didn't want to unravel it all.

The other small issue is that I blocked the cardigan so thoroughly after finishing that I over-blocked the sleeves and now they're a bit too long. I can still wear it but might make a small adjustment when I have enough motivation to pick up the project again. Also, I'm crossing my fingers that the cardi will still fit post baby-belly... I can't button it all the way down but around my chest it fits perfectly now which means it might be a bit too big once my boobs go back to normal size.

I can really recommend checking out Emilia's ravelry page, there't lots of great inspiration for future projects! I especially love the "Electric Pea" and the "Landskap" cardigans, can't wait for patterns of those to be published.

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Pattern: Emilia Jensen - "Palmetto" cardigan published in Pom Pom Quarterly, issue 22, Autumn 2017
Yarn: Main colour recycled "Cygnet DK" from a frogged project; contrasting colours were leftover bits from my stash

Bulgaria

What do you do if you have a week of holidays but not booked any trip and you really feel like doing something? Thanks to low-cost airlines, the answer is easy nowadays: check to where they have the cheapest flights and book! This is kind of what we did for the autumn holidays, except that we chose Bulgaria for one more reason, which is that neither us had been there before.

Originally, we wanted to go somewhere warm and sunny because the weather in Belgium had be so awful during the summer. But then we got a really nice September and October so we could be more flexible. I'm so happy we made it to Bulgaria, one more EU Member State to cross of my list - now only Portugal, Cyprus, and Slovenia are unvisited!

Since we booked quite late we didn't work out much of an itinerary but rather decided "on the go". We also got some great advice from some Bulgarian friends so we ended up a small road trip from Sofia, to Plovdiv, Veliko Târnovo, and back to Sofia. Our priorities were mainly: good food, relaxation, some nature, some culture. I think we got pretty much all of this and especially the food was no disappointment!

One thing I enjoyed especially and that I was quite surprised about were the amazing independent coffee shops that we found and where we spent quite some time. Some examples are Fabrika  Daga ("Rainbow Factory") and Barista Coffee and More in Sofia, and places like Monkey Bar in the the Kapana district in Plovdiv. Once we went to get coffee at Costa's and it was a huge disappointment - luke warm coffee, smelly seating area, dirty toilets. And it was about twice the price of a cup of coffee in the other, much nicer places! So if you are a coffee lover I definitely recommend going to Bulgaria.

We didn't even make it as far as the Black Sea coast but I spent a couple of days on the Romanian side of the border a few years ago and remember it was quite pleasant (except the Soviet era style resorts that were extremely crowded and didn't have any "natural" beaches). Maybe if we go back in the summer this will be an option, too.

And one quick knitting update: I made quite a bit of progress on my Palmetto cardigan and I'm enjoying it a lot. Hopefully I'll be able to post the finished project soon.