This UFO comes from Simple Knits for Cherished Babies by Erika Knight. The book certainly lives up to its name; the trickiest pattern in the book is a pair of basic booties. I’ve already used the monogrammed baby blanket as inspiration for a blanket for my new niece. (I double stranded DK weight yarn to make it, so I had to do a little math.) The only issue I have with the book is the “It costs HOW MUCH?!” factor of the yarns used. I’m sorry, but I will not be knitting baby pants out of cashmere. There are many reasons for this, but the biggest one is that I don’t particularly want to spend $50 to knit a baby garment that will likely have poo leaked on it. I know I can't guarantee that anything I make won't, in time, come in contact with poo, but pants for an infant is pretty much a sure thing. I would like to think that my cashmere scarf project is never going to come in contact with poo, but who knows what the future brings? I could be wrong. Finding suitable replacement yarns has sometimes been an issue, but for my current project from the book—the garter stitch cardigan—Patons Grace was a perfect substitution. (And I’ll be using less than 2 balls, so if I remember correctly, it’s $10 worth of yarn instead of $40. Much more realistic a price tag for an item that will be worn for 3 months and will most likely be doused in regurgitated lunch at some point or another.)
To be honest, I wasn't all that in love with this particular sweater when I first saw it, but I cast on out of necessity. When my youngest turned 18 months old, she started climbing out of her crib. And, my then 3.5 year old started climbing into the crib. So, fearing a crib collapse or a serious smooshing incident, we moved Abby into a big girl bed. We had been putting the girls to bed 30 minutes apart so Abby would be asleep by the time it was Kai’s turn to pass out, but in a big girl bed, it’s much harder for Abby to wind down, and in no time we had given up on spacing bedtimes and went to putting them to sleep together.
That’s when chaos sprung forth in our home.
Bedtimes turned into 90-minute affairs on good nights. In an attempt to curb the more outrageous bedtime behavior, one of us would stay in the room with the kids and enforce the “stay in your own bed” rule. When it looked like things weren’t going to improve anytime soon, I hauled the kids to a second-hand store and got myself a small, rocking recliner to sit in on my nights as Enforcer. Sitting in semi-dark repeating, "Lie down and close your eyes," for 90 minutes got old fast, so in no time at all, I followed the example of the old lady whispering “hush” and had some knitting on my lap. The garter-stitch cardigan was the perfect project. Not only is it all garter, but there was no increasing or decreasing for the first half of the project. I made it halfway through and realized that I’d made a counting error way back when I cast on, so it all got frogged one night. After another few nights of knitting, we decided to change tack with bedtimes and went to just telling 1 story and singing 2 songs and leaving them after that, and the project was set aside at that point in favor of projects that were more demanding now that I wasn’t working on them in the dark.
I picked up the project again last night. You can see how quickly it knits up; three-quarters of what is done in that photo was done last night while getting caught up on The Black Donnellys and fast-forwarding to the performances in American Idol. My only complaint thus far about the pattern is that it's very unspecific. Fine for an intermediate knitter, but you would think that a book called Simple Knits Anything would be geared toward beginners. Not so. It tells you to cast on for sleeves after getting to a certain point of the body, but doesn't tell what method. I imagine that a newbie would assume long-tail cast on, but a cable cast on would be more flexible and leaves no more ends to weave in. Likewise, the pattern calls for increasing to form a v-neck, but doesn't say if you should k1fb or work a m1 or what. Plus, for some reason, instead of including the sizing info with the pattern, all the sizing info for all the projects are at the back of the book. It probably made the patterns fit in their allocated space better, but it's a bit annoying to have to flip back and forth. Anyway, for an intermediate or adventurous-beginner knitter, it is a very good book. Simple, relatively mindless projects in classic looks that will be just as stylish for the recipient's own grandbabies 50 years from now. You need to be willing to make some construction choices on your own, but worth looking into.
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