Baby Sweater in the Making

Making a sweater for my little god daughter for Christmas. I’ve been dying to make her something wearable but since babies grow like weeds, everything is small within weeks. She’s not growing as fast anymore so I thought if I just make it oversized now, she’ll get at least six months of wear out of it.

This pattern was served to me via Pinterest, where I’ve been looking at lots of knitwear related stuff, and immediately caught my eye. It’s by Skogstrikk Design.

The problem with the pattern is that it’s in Norwegian, which I do not speak. They have an adult version of this too and that pattern is in English. I bought both of them and with the help of Google Translate, which is surprisingly good, I could get on with the pattern. Following the diagram is easy but the increases and decreases took some serious effort to understand and make sure I got them right. Now that I’m more than halfway done, I think it will turn out pretty good.

I chose a really nice 100% merino wool that is superwashed, so it’s not itchy even if warn straight on bare babysoft skin, and the superwash magic is more machine wash friendly than untreated yarn. Babies are messy so I want the sweater to be durable and not too fussy.

One would think making a baby sweater is automatically going to be faster than an adult sized, but that is not the case. It’s about how many stitches you have to knit and often it can be tricky to work on such small pieces. It actually looks like the size small adult sweater has about the same amount of stitches, but the yarn and needles are bigger than on the baby sweater. This is six days of knitting right here, and I expect it to take one long day of knitting before I’m finished.