Nordic Knits

Baby Girl in her beautiful knitted dress

This is the first of I'm sure many many posts about my love for the Dale of Norway patterns. I have actually completed one. Yep. That's it. There are 4 more in various stages of completeness, usually I get bogged down in finishing. Perhaps sharing my adventures in 2 color stranded knitting will propel me to finish.

The following baby patterns all are from Dale of Norway - Traditional designs for Baby - you know you have the right book if you see the 18 mo old wearing a jaunty newsboy's cap on the front.

The first is Voss, I made the dress for the baby girl. It's for our Christmas cards. Which even though it's October I need to take pictures of her in, and get going because it's not going to fit forever!  I used 3 balls of red and 1 ball of off-white Dale baby ull.  I was positive I was going to run out of yarn, nope... I even have a bit leftover for potential matching booties!

Don't be fooled by my beautiful even stitches here (go ahead and click it, they look pretty darn good), things aren't always what they seem.  Blocking plays and enormous roll in making these garments look good.  Before they are blocked, this section was a crumpled mess.  But a couple quick hits from the mighty steam iron (very funny bit about the mighty Rowenta in Mason Dixon knitting, a good steam iron is a must have for every knitter) and everything lies flat, and drapes beautifully.  In future postings I can illustrate this much better.  Everyone should give this a try, it's not difficult and makes things that look REALLY difficult, even though I spent 90% of this project using red going round and round and round!

MMM wool

Cool and Educational Baby Knits!!

The Celestine, i think was intended to be a topper for a Christmas tree. This is a very cute idea, and someday I will perhaps make one out of white or yellow and do that. For now, it seems way more fun as a toy for babies to learn colors, counting, and an introduction to polyhedrons.

This Celestine, which is a dodecahedron, (a 12 sided polyhedron) was created using my leftover sock club yarn. I have been a member of the Blue Moon Rockin' Sock Club since 2007. Until this year I faithfully got all my socks knitted, but alas that is another blog post. ANYWAY, there are remnants of those 18 balls of yarn which I was able to use to make this. It required 6 grams of yarn per point. So if you have sock yarn lying about, just get out your scale.

I used mainly the medium-weight yarn, but there are a few lightweights mixed in. When (more like if) I get done this years socks I should be able to make another that features the lightweight yarn primarily. The other thing is this looks really cool with striping sock yarn. Specifically mini-mochi from Crystal Palace, or Feliciti from Knit picks. Eventually I'd like to make one out of that as well. I suppose Noro Kuryeon would look cool as well.



My baby girl isn't quite old enough to hold this yet or play with it, but expect pictures the moment she is!

This was the first thing I knitted after i came home from the hospital, and I found that I had enough time, and inclination while getting 3 hours of sleep at a time to knit a point here and there. It made me feel like myself again. I knew having a baby would change my life, but during the change it's still very nice to experience some things that are just like they were before, to kind of ground your mind. Knitting was, and still continues to be that thing. When I sit at night knitting away for even just 10 min before having to go to bed, it is incredibly soothing. And on that note, I'm off to do a few rows before bed.

Cool baby knits

It's been a long time since I posted. During that time I got pregnant and had a beautiful baby girl! She is so beautiful and sweet, and being only 3 months old, she wears what I put on her, which includes lots of cute baby knits.












The Debbie Bliss ribbed sweater she is wearing was knit by my mother. I made a matching beret.

I had never knit baby things before, call me superstitious or whatever, but I figured if i had a big Rubbermaid container full of cute baby knits I would never have children. I know plenty of knitters who learned on baby stuff, makes sense, it's small and you can practice a technique and the baby will only wear it twice anyway, and doesn't care if there are a bunch of mistakes




I was excited to knit cool edgy baby stuff, like the OpArt blanket
It's cool because:
A. it's baby blanket and the perfect size
B. It can be for a girl or boy so you can start knitting early
C. the baby can actually see this pattern, and she spends time staring, it helps visual development,
D. it looks cool lying around my family room and draped on my super cool stroller.

AND have you seen the cool versions on Ravelry?!? There is this beautiful rainbow hand dyed one... it's awesome. I did the standard black and white, which is boring, but as mentioned above looks good on the stroller an in the house while being functional.

I used Berroco Comfort yarn, (Chalk and Licorice) it's very soft and squishy, it washes very well, the black did not bleed. I made a size that is halfway between the posted sizes, basically I weighed the yarn and went as big as I possibly could with the amount I bought.

The baby girl calls... more cool knits later.