I'm ready for Picture Day 2008

They are done! Suzannah gets the yellow sweater with buttons that she wanted. Augy gets the dark deep blue vest that he wanted. I didn't try to impose my taste on my children. I let them choose the yarn, pattern and buttons.

Suzannah choose some very cute hedgehog buttons for her sweater.




What I learned from knitting these two sweaters:

1. Cabling without a cable needle is easy as long as you don't pull your right needle too far away from your left needle as you are slipping the stitches off the right needle.
2. Cabling without a cable needle goes way faster than with a cable needle.
3. Loosely spun yarn, such as Steadfast Fibers Wonderful Wool, are easier to knit continental than English. Knitting it English undoes some of the twist and makes snagging frequent and annoying. Continental adds some twist and keeps the yarn together. At least that was my experience.

swatching for Suzannah's sweater

Suzannah picked out the Wonderful wool by Steadfast Fibers for her picture day 2008 sweater. Label suggests 4 sts per inch. I swatched on a 4.5 mm and got 3.75 sts per inch. Then I swatched on a 3.75 mm and got 4.5 stitches per inch.

Why did I jump from 4.5mm needles to 3.75mm needles and skip the size 4.00mm needles? Becuase the swatch on the 4.5mm needles biassed like crazy. It leaned like all the stitches were italicized. I read in Clara Parkes' wonderful book The KNitters Guide to Yarn a suggestion to knit single ply yarns at a tighter gauge to try to conteract the bias. That is why I skipped the size 4.00mm needles.

However, even at the tighter gauge once the swatch was washed a blocked it had a definite bias. Not as bad as the looser swatch, but there is definitely some leaning going on. Darn it!

What do I do now. Suzannah has said she doesn't want any lumpie bumpies on her sweater. Yet she has choosen this single ply that will bias in stockinette. Do I substitute another yarn or do I add some purl and knit patterns, or do I just knit a sweater that leans?

If you notice in the middle of the swatch above I slipped in some seed stitch. First to test Suzannah to see if she likes the seed stitch and to test myself to see how long I could stand knitting seed stitch. I detest seed stitch. Even though seed stitch cancelled the bias, I can't bring myself to designing an entire sweater out of seed stitch.

Gotta sleep on it.

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?