Every year I knit a sweater for my kids' school picture day. I started this with my son when he was three. He is now 8.



Last year was the first year that I let him pick out the yarn for his picture day sweater. I made his sweater out of Noro Shinano with a stripe of Schaefer Miss Priss in the middle. It was a great sweater.



This year he requested a vest and picked out some Noro Silk Garden. I have to have his vest done by November 1. Not a problem. I'm doing it in the round using the color he picked out for two rows and a contrasting Noro Silk Garden for two rows. I'm about 4 inches from where I need to separate the front and backs. Easy peasy.



Now 4 year old Suzannah has been expressing her wishes for her picture day sweater. Maybe it is because she is my youngest child and I treat her more like a baby that it didn't occur to me to ask her opinion. Last year she requested a yellow sweater and I made her a purple sweater. This year she requested a yellow sweater again. She even drew a picture of what she wants her sweater to look like and told me that she wants a yellow sweater, with buttons on the front, that comes down to just before her fingers, a round neck, no lumpy parts and no cats!

Now I'm trying to figure out what she means by no lumpy parts. Does she mean that she doesn't like yarn that is thick and thin like Colinette Point 5? Or does she mean that she doesn't like textured stitch patterns? Or is it cables she dislikes? Or maybe entrelac? Hmm.

I know why she specified "no cats". I showed her a picture of the child's Kitty Cat Pullover by Vermont Fiber Designs. http://www.vermontfiberdesigns.com/patterns/children/506.php
I think it is a really great design. I love the graphic simplicity of it. I was thinking it would look great with a grey background and then for the cat using a handpainted primary colors yarn (specifically Schaefer Yarns Miss Priss in the Sprinkles colorway) . Then there was another sweater in the 2001 Vogue Knitting Special Kids issue with a cat on it. Again a really cute design; the cat was done in an angora yarn to give the illusion of fur. Suzannah didn't like either sweater. Sure surprised me.

I asked my friend RaeAnn if I should knit Suzannah her yellow sweater, or the sweater I want to knit. RaeAnn has college age children. She said that her kids will remember incidents that she thought was trivial at the time and they will bring it up as something that really shaped their attitudes and personality. She warned that years from now Suzannah might point to the fact that I didn't knit her the yellow sweater that she wanted at age 4 will some how be a pivotal point in our mother daughter relationship.

So now next week I'll be at Stitches East and my mission there will be to find the perfect yellow yarn for Suzannah's picture day sweater. Luckily her picture day isn't until March. So I have time still to ferret out exactly what she is expecting from this sweater. Already she has told me that two of the skeins of Cascade 220 in my stash were the wrong shade of yellow.

All this is coming from a little girl who's first word as a baby was "shoes" and when given the choice between new shoes or a new toy will pick new shoes. Is this what fashion designers are like as children?