Madelynne is here!

This month I became an aunt, and I am so excited! My niece Madelynne was born on August 5th and is the cutest little baby ever.

I told my brother and sister-in-law that I was going to be the crazy aunt who always sends knit and crochet stuff. They seemed ok with this, so I thought I should get started early.

When I first found out that my SIL was pregnant I asked for requests and if it was going to be a girl she had a crochet flower pattern in mind. (The pattern can be found here: http://www.etsy.com/listing/89500561/crochet-pattern-floral-baby-blanket).

I decided to go with yarn from knitpicks. Comfy (75% cotton, 25% acrylic) seemed to be a good choice as it is soft and machine washable. My SIL chose the colors to match bedding that they already had. She chose "Whisker," "Honeydew" and "Lilac Mist" for the flowers  and "Ivory" for the middle of each flower. I'm not sure if they ended up matching the existing bedding exactly, but it is really hard to match colors off a computer screen when you can't see the yarn in person.

Slowly the blanket grew from one flower into a blanket.

Hopefully little Maddy enjoys many years of snuggling with her flower blanket! (She has more knits on the way but her parents haven't seen them yet so I will wait until later to post them.)

Spring Toddler Sweater

Since it is not quite spring here and is in fact snowing outside right row I thought I'd better post something bright and flowery. I was requested to make a sweater for a 2-year-old. It needed to be lime green with pink and yellow flowers. I found a basic bottom-up pullover pattern called Cheeky. Then I found a flower motif in one of my knitting books to go around the bottom and a large flower to go in the middle of the front. I used Cascade 220 superwash yarn so that washing and drying would be super easy- just throw it in the washing machine and dryer. The sweater is knit entirely in the round without any seeming. Once the bottom of the sweater and the two sleeves are made, all of the stitches are brought together to make a large loop and then the top is decreased until you get to the neck.

I did not want to carry the strands of pink and yellow yarn around the body of the sweater which meant that there were about 50 million yarn ends to weave in when I was done.

 

But I think it was worth it since I really like how the flowers turned out.

 

After a nice wash and dry it came together pretty well, I think. Hopefully the new owner will agree. :)