knits for kids

A Bit of a Puzzle

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Hello!

While I’m writing this, I’m sipping lemon-and-ginger tea with honey. I’ve just made a jug using the recipe in this post. It’s said to help with all kinds of ailments, and it also tastes good, too.

Today, I’d like to tell you about a cardigan for our grandson I’ve just finished, from a Danish pattern translated into German. The design is called Lykketræf, Danish for ‘A Stroke of Luck’. ‘A Bit of a Puzzle’ would be a more fitting name, if you ask me. My German is reasonably good, but looking at the pattern I felt panic rising.

Very dense print with lots and lots of abbreviations – without a list explaining the abbreviations! To make things more manageable, I highlighted the instructions for the size I was making and used a sticky note to keep track of where I was.

The cardigan is knit from the top down with a decorative pattern along the raglans. Working slowly, step by step, I was able to work things out in the end.

It took a while and quite a bit of ripping back to get there, though. To be honest, at first I had no idea what I was doing. What on earth did zun mean??? Ah, it must be zunehmen (increase). So, 1 M li zun must be ‘make 1 left leaning increase’, and 1 M re zun must be ‘make 1 right leaning increase’, right? But it didn’t look right.

So I got out some undyed DK-weight yarn and tried out the raglan decorations separately.

This showed me what the problem was. German links can mean both ‘left’ and ‘purl’. And rechts can mean both ‘right’ and ‘knit’. What I needed were purl and knit increases, instead of left and right leaning increases.

Okay, time to start anew. Was it plain sailing from there on? Uhm, not exactly. I won’t bore you with all my struggles, but there was quite a bit of ripping out and re-knitting (on 2.5 mm/US 1.5 needles) until I was happy with the buttonholes, the I-cord along the front edges and the bind-off. Fortunately the yarn stood up to it.

Fronts and back are knit in one piece from the armholes down. The sleeves are knit flat. I used mattress stitch for seaming them, joining a few rows at a time loosely before tightening the thread.

There is a great video explaining mattress stitch in garter here. Once you get into the rhythm, joining ‘smiles’ to ‘frowns’ (as the tutorial calls the different garter bumps) is a nice and contemplative thing to do, really.

And here is my finished Lykketræf cardi – the tiny olive wooden buttons are just what it needed.

I’m taking it with me on Monday, my regular day for looking after our grandson. Hope it fits. The wool-and-cotton blend feels like just the right kind of yarn for this in-between season. Although the weather forecast for next week promises us colder weather with wintry showers, there are many signs that spring is around the corner.

  • Pattern: Lykketræf by Bente Geil
  • Yarn: Geilsk ‘Bomuld og Uld’ (55% wool, 45% cotton, 50 g/254 yds/232 m)
  • My Ravelry notes here

Now it’s time to start something new – yay! Enjoy your weekend and see you again next week!

A Forest Green Jacket

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Hello!

Choosing yarn online is a tricky business, as many of you will know. Colours can look very different on a computer screen than in real life. I had forest green in mind for a jacket for our grandson. You know, that deep, fairly dark, leafy green. The yarn did look lighter and, well, different on my screen, but it was called ‘forest green’, so I thought it would be all right and ordered it.

When it arrived, it was not what I had in mind, and very much what it had looked like on the computer screen. Oh, well, it was a nice colour for a little boy anyway.

The last time I wrote about the jacket, I said that I ‘only’ needed to knit the hood. Well, the hood was almost as big as the rest of the cardigan.

I finished the knitting on Saturday afternoon and started weaving in the ends and seaming. It is getting dark early at this time of year and for work like this I need to switch the lights on at around three.

While I was seaming and sipping tea, I meditated on the term ‘forest green’. How could the yarn producer have such a different idea about it from what I had in mind? My Oxford Dictionary defines forest green as ‘any of various shades of green associated with forests’. Not very helpful. Googling it, I found out that on various websites about colour, ‘forest green’ is indeed the shade of the yarn, and that what I have always thought of as forest green is generally called ‘dark olive’.

In a colour story about forest green on the Artists’ Network, I found this painting from the Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum:

The accompanying text said: ‘In a sense, the name “forest green” is a misnomer, because as artists well know, leaves and mosses are never a single color, much less a single value. Nevertheless, forest green does evoke the overall impression of foliage […] When the color finds its way into domestic spaces, it can lend a degree of earthiness and calm. This connection with nature is apparent in Still Life With Teapot, Cup and Fruit by Émile Bernard (1868–1941), in which the colors of the man-made objects seem to take their cue from the color of the fruit.’

Earthiness and calm – that sounds like a good thing for a baby jacket.

On Sunday, my husband was out on an excursion and I was home alone. A good moment to finish the seaming and sew on the buttons. It was a lovely, sunshiny day. Too lovely to spend indoors entirely, so I went for a bicycle ride as well.

Still shocked by the realisation that I’ve had a different mental image of this shade of green from the rest of the world all my life, I saw what I now know is ‘forest green’ everywhere. On a church door…

… on the lid of a wheelie bin…

… and on every bicycle route sign I passed.

For me, it’s still more like garden-and-kitchen-waste-wheelie-bin-lid-green or bicycle-route-sign-green than the colour of a forest, grumble, grumble. (I’m very much attached to my own mental image of forest green.)

It won’t make any difference to our grandson, though. His favourite colours are still those of his Mum and Dad’s eyes. As long as the jacket is soft and warm, he’ll be happy with it. And it certainly is that.

For any of you with babies and toddlers to knit for, here are a few useful details:

  • Pattern: Little Pixie Jacket (here on Ravelry)
  • Size made: 74-80/12-18 months (our grandson is only 7 months old, but he’s a big boy)
  • Yarn: Garnstudio Drops ‘Merino Extra Fine’, 7 skeins, colour 31 Forest Green
  • Needles: 4.0 mm/US 6

Knitter’s notes:

  • The sleeves are knit on to the body by casting on stitches at the sides. They have both underarm seams and seams on the top.
  • I put the sleeve and hood stitches on holders (old circular knitting needles) and used the 3-needle bind-off instead of seaming them.
  • Having knit this jacket before, I knew that the sleeves were waaay to long and made them a size smaller this time.
  • The hood is very warm and cosy for babies still lying down in their prams or strollers. For toddlers sitting up or walking, I think the hood will be too heavy and cumbersome hanging down the back.
  • The hood has a garter edging that is folded to the outside. The pattern says to only attach it at the bottom on both sides, but that won’t keep it in place. I attached it with invisible stitches all around.

Thank you for your patience with my forest green grumblings. Have a lovely weekend and see you next week!

Two Klømpelømpe Hats

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Hello!

Our grandson is 6 months old now. He cries from time to time to indicate that he needs something, of course, but on the whole he is a cheerful little chap. He is growing fast and it will not be long before he has outgrown his pram.

He lives in a quiet neighbourhood with lots of green space. The bicycle tracks meandering through it are perfect for pram walks.

Often he falls asleep as soon as we set off, but when he lies awake, I can see him looking at the sky, and listening to the singing of birds and the rustling of leaves.

I wonder if he is also aware of that special scent of autumn in the air.

How fortunate we are to be able to enjoy our strolls in this peaceful part of the world.

He has suddenly outgrown all of the hats I knit for him, too. So I quickly knit up two new ones, both from patterns in the first Klømpelømpe book.

The first baby cardigan I knit from this book was not a success – the instructions were unclear, the stitch pattern didn’t match up around the raglan armholes, and it turned out far too small. So, I ripped it out and put the book aside disappointed and frustrated.

A visit to a dear cousin of mine made me pick it up again, though. She is mother to 7 and grandmother to the same number, and the proud owner of a stack of Klømpelømpe books. She has knit many items from them for her grandchildren and is very enthusiastic about them.

Her enthusiasm was infectious, so I got the book out again, dug up the yarn left over from a jacket I knit for our grandson, and made the Henry hat.

I was still a bit puzzled by the instructions, but was able to work things out. Based on my earlier experience I made the size for 1-2 years and it fits perfectly.

I also had lots of yarn left over from the Pyrus Blanket I designed myself.

Some of that became the dots in the Henry hat and I had more than enough left for the Knot hat. The Knot hat has two weird antennae knit on to the top that are transformed into an adorable set of knots.

For anyone who hasn’t heard of the Klømpelømpe books yet, they are a series of knitting books from Norway that have been translated into many languages. According to the website Booksfromnorway ‘Klømpelømpe is a Norwegian dialect word from the Western region where the authors come from, and simply is an expression for describing a sweet, little child – a sweetheart.’

The book I’ve knit the hats from has ‘knitting for babies and children’ as its subtitle, and most of the patterns in it are for this age group. But it also contains a few simple accessories for adults as well.

I’m glad these hats turned out well, because everything in the Klømpelømpe books looks incredibly attractive and I’d like to make more from them.

Useful info:

  • The authors’ website can be found here in Norwegian. And a complete list of all the books in Norwegian here. (There is an English website, too, but it’s very limited.)
  • If you’re looking for translations of the books in your own language – the English translations all have ‘Knitting for Little Sweethearts’ in their titles, while most other translations retain the word Klømpelømpe or Klompelompe somewhere in the title.
  • The yarn I used is Drops Merino Extra Fine in colours 01 and 07.
  • The Pyrus Blanket can be found here on Ravelry.