Tulips for Eloise

Adam's tutor just had a baby: her second girl. I thought it was an ideal opportunity to knit the baby sweater that is popular on the internet right now. This is the Dream in Colour Baby Tulips Sweater which I bought as a kit from Yarndogs.



The pattern is pretty simple, but effective: the seed stitch transition between the colours is really pretty. However, the main appeal of the sweater is the lovely colours. DIC yarn is also machine washable which is good for babies.



I did wait to see if she had a girl or boy, as I would probably have substituted something for the lightest pink if the baby had been male - but the sweater is so pretty as designed.

While I was at it, I also knitted a 'soaker': a wool knitted cover for nappies. Crissy does cloth diapering and wool covers are supposedly very effective.



The soaker looks a bit odd as the waist is very heavily ribbed - but I think it will fit well over the bulk of cloth nappies.

A camel through the eye of a needle

I did a little more spinning - this time some camel/silk fiber I bought at Stitches from A Verb for Keeping Warm. I recommend you look at the photo of the fiber here as it is lovely in it's natural colour.

The fiber was lovely and soft - but actually really hard for me to spin! The silk fibers are long, but the camel clearly has a short staple and I felt I was often spinning lumps of camel fiber onto the silk. I hoped that some of my inadequate spinning would be disguised when I plied - and maybe it is, but the resulting yarn has a very obvious thick-and-thin character.



However it was really fun trying to spin this evenly and a good learning experience for me. The yarn is pretty soft and I still love the colour. I have plans for this yarn for Gill!

Off the needles: Mystery Shawl

I finished the Mystery Shawl pretty quickly. That's the nice thing about starting on the long edge and decreasing. However I realized that I had made an error in the set-up repeat of the shawl which is obvious now - but I'm clearly not going to go back and fix. I am going to work on the principle that if I move fast enough while wearing it, no one will notice.


The miracle of blocking...

It was really fun to knit a shawl in parts without knowing what the final item would look like, the pattern is pretty but not terribly exciting - but it was easy and quick. The best thing though is the marriage of yarn to pattern - the cashmere fingering weight Nimu yarn that Christina gave me is just lovely in this shawl - the simple pattern and the slight colour variegation work well together and this is a shawl I will certainly wear (but maybe not for a little while!).