As a baby's bottom...

Item: One strand booties and lettstrikka babylue from Nøstebarn
Yarn: Drops silkealpakka
Grams: 44 g

The one strand baby booties are simply brilliant. Easy to knit, excellent for small scraps, easy to make larger or smaller by using different yarns and needles. The trickiest part is to sew together the bottom of the bootie with kitchener stitch, but you'll get the hang of it in the end. I always use the Purl Bee Kitchener Stitch tutorial, it's great!

The hat is also a good pattern, nice and easy. Next time I'll probably knit the last half of it in the round, I prefer to minimize the required sewing in the end.

The yarn is a silk alpaca blend, 70% alpaca and 30% mulberry silk, soft and silky as a baby's bottom.

Pram goes retro

Item: Pram afghan

Yarn: Loads of different ones, all from the 70s, corduroy backing

When I was a baby, my mother made this small afghan for me, intended as a cover for my pram, on top of the baby duvet. Isn't it gorgeous? Truly inspired, I think. It is primarily knitted, from loads of different yarns, some of them coloured with plant dyes by my mother herself. And the colours just pop, mostly reds and browns and oranges. And the backing is a brick red corduroy, matching perfectly! 


And now it is passed on to my baby boy, when he decides to join us in January some time. His pram will be the hottest pram in town! 

Stars in mummy's eyes

Item: Baby jacket with accessories
Yarn: Baby merino from DROPS in buttery yellow and creamy white
Grams: 87 g

 A new baby means a new mum, and new mum usually has stars in her eyes whenever she is gazing at her new offspring.


This baby jacket will make sure that those stars are always there, using daisy stitches to create lovely borders for the bottom of the jacket, the sleeves and the hat.

The creamy white and the buttery yellow is a perfect gender-neutral combination, and the yellow buttons match the yellow yarn perfectly, as though they were made for each other (lucky purchase, as I did not have a yarn sample with me to the button store).

The pattern is from Pickles, the Lazy Daisy baby jacket, with a few minor alterations to the amount of daisy stitches. I made the border at the bottom of the jacket thinner, and added borders at the bottom of the sleeves. The jacket, hat and booties are all knitted with circular needles (40cm), size 4.5 mm.

The hat was made without a pattern, just casting on a suitable amount of stitches. With daisy stitches, it is important that the amount of stitches can be divided by 3 + 2. For instance, you can cast on 77 stitches = (3 * 25) + 2.

Knit in the round until you have a suitable amount of rounds, enough to cover the baby's head from the baby's forehead to where flat top of the head starts. Then you are ready to start decreasing. For a baby's hat, I decrease quite rapidly compared to an adult's hat.


Now, yet another baby is soon ready to put stars in the new mother's eyes!

Cherry baby

Item: Cherry pink baby jacket and baby hat for infant
Yarn: Baby Merino from Gjestal Spinneri, superwash
Grams: 64 g (jacket) + 18 g (hat) = 82 g

A childhood friend of mine is soon having her first child, and it is announced to be a baby girl!

Picking colours for knitting projects for a baby girl often means choosing pastel pink and lilacs, understandable, as they are very delicate and yummy colours, I think. But in this case, the mother of the baby girl is not particularly keen on pink! In fact, she can't stand it!

But as the brave (and very possibly foolishly so) knitter I am, I'm still venturing for a pink project. For once, I can be quite sure that the end result will look nothing like the rest of the baby girl's wardrobe, as pink probably will be shunned. But how on earth am I to lure this jacket and hat past the keeper of the wardrobe, i.e. the mother?

By using a vibrant mix of cherry, fuchsia, and coral, mixed together in a single lovely yarn! No baby pastels here, no pale pink and no luscious lilac!

The project consists of a jacket and a matching hat. The pattern for the jacket is a very simple raglan sweater, knitted from the bottom up. The end result is a size 0 to 3 months, but probably only for the smaller range of babies. Raglans can be knitted both bottom-up and top-down. The top-down method is perhaps a little bit easier to use when knitting without a pattern, as you start with a suitable neck size, and continue increasing with the raglan technique, until the shoulder width suits its intended wearer. However, this particular jacket is knitted bottom-up.

All the edgings of the jacket have a simple garter stitch edging, to match the hat. Two tiny buttons are sewn on, as a simple fastening, leaving most of the jacket open at the front.

The neck of the jacket is knitted in a different direction than the rest of the jacket. When finished with the required amount of decreases, I've continued the garter stitch edging from the front opening of the jacket up and around the neckline. In some patterns, similar edging is knitted separately and sewn on afterwards. I usually prefer to avoid as much sewing as possible, so I've fastened the edging by knitting one mask of the edging together with one mask of the neckline, one at the time, until the edging has worked its way all around the neckline, from one side of the front opening to the other, "eating up" every single mask of the neckline on its way.

The hat is knitted in the well-fitting and I guess quite well-known "devil hat" design. When I say well-fitting, I mean two things: (1) The design creates an easily recognisable dip down to cover the baby's forehead, making it look a little bit as a the baby has horns (but only in a funny way, not a creepy way!). (2) The design fits the baby's head wonderfully, sticking on no matter what, and keeping every important part warm, both the head, the ears and the forehead.


So now you are very welcome to the world, baby girl!

Giant granny square: still not from Granny, and still not for Granny!

Item: Pinkish giant granny square
Yarn: Leftover yarns, ranging from the cheaper Vestlandsgarn from Gjestal, through Kitten mohair from SandnesGarn, to the more expensive 2-ply merino lambswool from Nøstebarn. Even some yarn leftovers from the seventies made it into the pile, donated by a family acquaintance who was actually knitting back then (in the seventies I had not even made it into diapers yet :)
Grams: 707 g

 Somehow, I seem to accumulate a lot of pink yarn. I do love pink in all its shades, from the richest cherry pink to the most delicate frosty-white pink. I don't discriminate on pink, I'll even through in the lilacs, aubergine, peachy and plum colours. However, I usually don't wear pink! The only exception I'm willing to make, is for shades like dusty peach, sandy pink and similar. So what to do with all this lovely pink yarn? I'll make a giant granny square!

 

There's nothing that eats up leftover yarn like a giant granny square. Since the amounts of each colour of leftover yarn usually is limited, I decided to go for a "two-rounds-per-colour" scheme this time. My previous giant granny square had fewer colours, and required more rows per colour. For this pink granny square, I had several matching colours to choose between. This made it easy to achieve the desired gradient effect.

My previous granny square was designed as a baby blanket, and so is this. There is no better blanket for a little princess just born! The holes in the granny square isolates well, believe it or not, so that the blanket feels really warm. The whites in the blanket are made from thicker wool than the pinks and purples, which makes the whole blanket alternated in thickness.

For newborn babies, I would recommend making this blanket in thin wool and a bit larger crochet needle than recommended for the wool in question, as this will increase the isolating abilities, whilst the blanket remains lightweight. For a bit sturdier blanket, use thicker wool, but with the same crochet needle.

I find the giant granny square looks a bit unfinished if it is without an edging of some sort. A scalloped edging is easy, it only requires some consideration for the amount of scallops that will distribute evenly along one side of your square. It does require a lot of yarn, at least when your giant granny square starts to become giant, so make sure you start in a colour of which you have plenty :)


 I also like to make a flower of some sort to sew onto the centre of the blanket, to make it a little more interesting.

So now I have much less pink yarn in my yarn stash, and a lovely pink granny square for the next baby girl to arrive. Although, I don't know of any such baby girls yet...

Leftovers make great baby booties

Item: Baby booties
Yarn: Leftover yarn from the baby blanket project
Grams: 15 g

The baby blanket project did of course bring with it some leftover yarn, more than enough for a pair of tiny baby booties. These are actually a pair of tiny socks rather than booties. The same striped effect used in the blanket is repeated in the legs of the socks. These socks are so tiny, they'll probably only fit a baby the first few weeks after being born. But warm, snug feet are just as important the first few weeks of life as any other week in life!

A giant granny square, but not for my granny

Item: A giant granny square becoming a baby blanket

Yarn: Wool yarn in matching colors, mostly 3-ply merino wool yarn from Nøstebarn.

Grams: 522 g

This is a giant granny square, which is a simple granny square continued forever and forever, until you have a blanket of a desirable size. In my experience, crocheting usually requires (a lot!) more yarn than knitting, especially crocheting something like this blanket. The granny square is crocheted, with a crochet needle of a suitable size, depending on the yarn you choose. My yarn required a crochet needle of size 4.5 mm.

 I've used colors that match, but still have a bit of a punch in them. With large and time-consuming baby projects, I prefer to use gender-friendly colors, so that the finished project can be handed down from sibling to sibling without objections. When spending many, many, m-a-n-y hours on a project, why risk it only being used for a single child? :)

The corners of a granny square are the most attractive parts of the blanket to me, they create nice angles in the blanket. The corner is created by crocheting two groups of double crochets in the same loop, with two chains in between, rather than just the one chain between two groups of double crochet along the long side. 

A traditional granny square alternates the yarn colour every round. This makes each colour form tiny squares, like a chess board, rather than a striped effect. In order to create the striped effect, you'll need at least two rounds of each colour. 

As a final flourish, when the blanket is finished, a 

crochet flower is added to the centre, and scallops creates a nice trim along the edge of the blanket. The flower is crocheted separately, and is sewn onto the blanket afterwards. Now it needs to be gift-wrapped and find a baby to wrap itself around.