It's a long time since I've shared any finished knitting...amazingly enough, I kind of have a backlog now!
Back in the fall when we went to Ugly Duckling Yarn, almost as soon as we walked into the store Ian beelined over to the display of Ella Rae Seasons and grabbed a ball in a blue-and-gray colorway. "Mommy, I want a sweater of THIS yarn."
There are a few rules in life, and one of them is this: When the preschooler asks you to knit him a sweater, you knit that kid a sweater.
Pattern: Set-in-sleeve sweater - Child, from Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns
Yarn: Ella Rae Seasons, colorway 17
Needles: US9/5.5mm
Time: October 30 - November 23, 2013
Ravelry project page
I don't really like seaming (and did a terrible job attaching the sleeves here), but I opted to knit this sweater in pieces because I knew that the striping pattern would annoy me otherwise -- somehow, stripes not lining up doesn't bother me, visually, like stripes of unequal width would -- and I chose a "figure out your gauge and plug the numbers into a template" sort of pattern. I had a really hard time figuring out what size to make -- I wanted the sweater to not be ridiculously huge on Ian now, but I didn't want him to outgrow it immediately either -- so I went for something that seemed a size or so too big, and lengthened it somewhat since he usually outgrows things in height well before he outgrows them in width. In the end, the sweater is NOT as big as I was expecting, so it looks very tunic-like on him. Then again, I've not yet wet-blocked it, so chances are I will be able to ease it into a wider shape.
The best part of knitting this sweater was just how excited Ian was by the process. I was afraid that, despite having watched me knit for his entire life, he'd think it was a lot more instant-gratification than it really is, but that wasn't a problem at all. He'd watch me knit -- encourage me to do so, really -- and the best was one day when my mother-in-law came over and Ian excitedly showed her the back and one sleeve I'd finished. "I LOVE how this is coming out, House!" he gushed. And when I did finish it, after about a month (which must have seemed an eternity to him), he was so excited he could not stop giggling. Just couldn't contain his glee.
Seriously, how could you NOT knit for this kid?
In other news, my son may have a future as a model. He posed himself for these shots. What a ham.