New! Baby sweater and matching hat!

Dearest friends,

How are you all? I am glad that you are still looking at my blog, it makes me so happy! I have been knitting a lot these days, it is such a relief to stress. As I told you, I was planning to knit a baby sweater for the son of a friend. He was born barely a month ago, and the sweater is intended to work for this winter, so I tried to figure out how big the baby would be in those months. Now, I have been looking for a pattern and discarded one that looked a bit too difficult. The one I chose, though, although it looked easy, contained many mistakes. Wonderful Allison from the Knitting Novices helped me SO MUCH with this sweater. I am totally indebted to her for all her personalized advices and instructions. This was soooo important to me. I would like to publicly express my gratitude to such a wonderful teacher, even at thousands of kilometres away (she is in the USA, as most of you, while I am in Europe!).

Allison helped a lot, so I could make something decent out of this wrong, imprecise pattern. This is a one-piece sweater, with lots of "put stitches on holder" and similar thingies involved. It was OK, although the mistakes in the pattern made the whole thing slower because I felt so puzzled when the results didn't show up like the photograph given with the pattern...

I chose a baby yarn, very soft acrylic, but since I love SO much to mix yarns and colours, I bought two skeins: one white, and the other blue. These look so cute together. The result is very very soft, really. The yarn was also very cheap. I added yellow and pink ribbons (yes, yellow and pink...) -- and, of course, I did a little matching hat. I am not sure about the size... this is still something that makes me nervous about knitting: being able to calculate the size of the person you are knitting for... basically, my thought was: If I get the size wrong, the present will be useless and they will never make the baby wear it. I know this sounds a bit too pessimistic, but... I hate the idea of knitting something that will never be worn. Now... maybe they'll save it as a "symbolic" present, something their friend had knitted with his heart on the needles (sorry, this might not sound very idiomatic, but I thought it was poetical!) - who knows?

Anyway, here it is. The whole thing, I mean. Also, this has been my very first time trying mattress stitch. Oh yes. The "almost invisible" seaming. It was challenging. It looks fabulous. BUT. BUT. BUT! Sleeves are awful. Really. The mattress stitch went wonderfully until I reached the arms of the sweater. One of the sides was BOUND OFF, not stockinette stitch. And the direction had changed: not vertical, but horizontal. I had no idea where to pass my tapestry needle through. So, I simply seamed as it came... a bit "chunky" and "ugly". I know. But that's what I did. Now I know what's the next thing I have to learn. Seaming sleeves, when one of the sides has been bound off. Argh. Any comment on this?

By the way: this is my second sweater (this was the very first experiment: but then, the pattern was perfect and it worked wonderfully!) - I have learned mattress stitch (more or less) and I have learnt a huge lesson from Allison: I have to focus more on my knitting, without hurries. It must be a meticulous process, really. I am so glad I am progressing at this. I feel proud to be able to knit - it is one of my childhood dreams and now I can do it! Wow. I wish my sweet great-aunt could see me, but I am sure she's looking at me while I knit. She was always knitting, always. And she was soooo great at it. Knitting makes me feel nice because it is like going back to the 80s, when I was a child, looking at my great aunt knitting and talking about the weather and how hard BOTH World Wars had been. She had lived both...

Well, sorry for the ranting. I hope you like the pictures... I know, it's not perfect. But I hope they will appreciate it.

Lots of love from your Flavio!