Just before the fourth of July week, I got some yarn to make baby gifts. One of the items was this cleverly packaged kit from Plymouth:

It contains a ball of Cotton Kisses yarn, three little ducky buttons, and two patterns - one for a three button cardigan (below), and one for a three button placket pullover (shown on the yarn ball). Both patterns are given for three sizes, from newborn through 1 year. The entire thing was $14. at my favorite local yarn store in Lexington, MA. This weekend past I went on a small kid-free vacation, and while away, knit it up while sitting on the beach.

I did the cardigan in the 6 month size. It's finished except for sewing on the buttons. I made buttonholes on both sides of the button band. When I find out the sex of the target baby, I'll sew the buttons onto the appropriate spot, covering up the unneeded set of buttonholes. I had ample yarn left over - probably enough to do matching socklets, so there should be plenty of yarn to make the largest size.

This was a very inexpensive and quick project. The directions are clear and simple. There is minimal shaping, and interest is provided by a double welt garter ridge detail at the bottom of the body and ends of the sleeves. The only vague bit was the direction to make three evenly spaced buttonholes. I substituted two stitch one-row buttonholes for the K2tog/yo ones written up. All in all a new knitter could handle the creation and assembly of this project with ease.

My only caution is a very mild one on the yarn itself. Cotton Kisses is a loosely plied multi-strand cotton blend. One of the strands is fuzzy cotton, slubby and puffy, the other three are thin binder strands of the blend fibers. All are very inelastic, as one would expect from a yarn of this composition. While the resulting texture is extremely soft and pleasingly random, hiding any imperfections in stockinette stitch formation, working with it does take a tiny bit of concentration to avoid splitting the strands. (The variegated color I was using also camouflages any stitch irregularities.) People who don't like the inelasticity of cotton would also probably not like working with this one. Still - for a very economical quick knit baby project that's cute and easy to do, with a yarn that with a tiny bit of patience gives an excellent result even for new knitters struggling for stitch evenness - this one is a go.

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The yellow baby blanket is mostly done. All that's left is to graft the beginning of the edging to its end, and darn in the dangling ends. Here it is patted out and pinned to the back of the sofa, which accounts for the strange dimensional distortion.

I'm 80% satisfied with it. It's small, more like basket or car seat size than crib size. I only had four skeins and used all but about ten yards of it. I'm only halfway pleased with the corners. The math worked out to be a multiple of a half repeat. That means that two corners were mitered starting at the narrowest point of the repeat, and two were mitered starting at the widest point. I will say that mitering at the narrowest point for this symmetrical edging worked better. That corner is in the upper left of the photo. Its opposite at the upper right looks clunky by comparison. If I had the thing to do over again (with more yarn) I'd work another three inches of the center panel so that all four corners could begin at the narrowest spot on the edging repeat.

The stitch patterns for this one also came from the the first Duchrow book. The center is pretty much verbatim, and can be found on page 35. The edging is inspired by the companion edging presented on the same page. My version is truncated by about a third of the original width. I arbitrarily cut off about eleven right hand side stitches, turning what were diamonds framed by a zig zag on the dagged side and triangles on the join side into plain old triangles, and eliminating a column of fagoting. Along the way I noticed that a smaller "junior" version of the same thing could be worked by using only a portion of my rows. I present both in the pattern graph below (click on it for full size version).

How to miter the corners? It's easier than you think on a symmetrical pattern like this. I do them on the wrong-side rows, working one stitch fewer each wrong side row and wrapping the last stitch I work in each wrong side row until I reach the reflection point of the repeat (the shortest or tallest point depending on where I start), then I reverse the process, re-incorporating one previously wrapped stitch (along with the wrap at its base) on each wrong side row until I've reclaimed my full width and returned to the same point in the repeat where I started. Sounds confusing, but give it at try.

Now on to Baby Gift #3 - the little sweater kit. It turns out that there's yet another in queue, after the sweater it looks like I'll be knitting at least one more small blanket, plus some other thing to be determined when inspiration strikes.

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