Friday, July 30, 2010

Baby Kimono Jacket

Hey Gang, here is the other baby jacket that I finished this last week:
baby kimono jacket

Pattern: Harvey Kimono Jacket
Needles: size 5 and 6US
Yarn: 2 skeins of dark green "di.Ve Zenith" yarn
Mod's: seed stitch instead of garter stitch
For: my twin munchins

baby kimono jacket

The jacket is cute, but since I ran out of the dark green yarn, I was forced to use another shade of green, which inevitably shows the seed stitch on the edging more messily than the invisible same color edging. Oh well. :)

If you're just coming in this week, check out the BSJ 3 from the last post for more baby knits.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

BSJ 3

Welcome to my remodeled blog. I finally got the motivation to "repaint" because I have a bunch of knits to show off since my last appearance on this blog. Joe and I are currently house-bidding at the moment, which is taking up all of my free time (and boy does it resemble a bad ping-pong match), but I have two baby jackets to show you, as well as some other cutsie knits that I'll show off one by one in the posts this week. Yeah, I know...a heart attack for the FO part, and a double hospital visit for the multiple posts in the same week part. I've got two little munchkins to knit for; plan on seeing me more regularly.
bsj 3

Pattern: EZ's Baby Surprise Jacket
Needles: size 7US
Yarn: FrogTree yarn in brown, orange, gray and teal. 1 skein each.

bsj 3
Quite surprisingly, I've had many tribulations with this knit. Who would have thought, since I've made it two times before this. I first had trouble getting my hands on the pattern. I finally found a blog friend who graciously offered to show me the information that I was missing. However, I also used the note-sheet that I found a long time ago online for this pattern (that is mathematically erroneous in some spots), and I couldn't remember which parts I changed. So, I had the easy part done: just knitting the increase rows. By row 50, I realized the truth in the saying "assuming makes an ass out of 'u' and me." Dorkus here forgot that very early on, you must increase after the cuff area, or by row 50, you'll come to realize the stitch count is WAY off. Now, I did end up painfullyfrogging all the work way back to, what, like row 10 to fix it...thus having to redo all of the alternate color striping that I did. After working a couple of days on it at the family reunion, it felt like a huge set-back.

Now, fast forward to way later in the game. I had to cut the yarn due to the bind-offs for the collar, and when I reattached them and started knitting I must have started knitting from the wrong side...because several rows later...the colorway was not quite right.
Now ok, I have been working on and off, knitting during family games, during boring nothingness hours, and at late hours...so I wasn't quite knitting clear-minded, but frogging it twice seemed annoying, especially when most of your time knitting it was spent on untwisting four skeins of yarn every other row.

Colorway fixed. Fast forward to the end of the game. The brown running out. That's basically when the project hibernated for two weeks because I was bummed that I didn't have enough some how.

Fast forward to two days ago. Did I remember to mark down which row I left off with two weeks ago? No, that would have been such a easy ending to what seemed like a hard knit. I thought for a second that I was going to have to frog back to a landmark, but luckily...by that point my brain clicked on and I found out where I was.

Do a slow fast forward to today, since I had to go out to JoAnn's Fabric because that's the only place where I can find buttons. Out of all the buttons I have in my craft box, orange did not make an appearance in the quantity of 5. Bummer.

bsj 3
But this happy little bugger is finished. I'm quite happy that we finally made it to the end, this little jacket and I. It seems like a sophisticated number of one of my boys.

The next BSJ I plan on doing consists of the idiot's guide-pattern that I wrote out on the laptop that goes in full length of directions of every row, no cheats or shortcuts...and the yarn will consists of two variated and complimenting yarns. No muss, no fuss next time.
bsj 3

Stay tuned this week for a baby kimono jacket.