Baby Cardigan done!

baby-cardigan8
Originally uploaded by herdis2002

Finally finally!

This has been on my needles for half a year now, and I finally cast off the last stitch last night. Tonight was spent seaming and fastening buttons. Let me share the joy with you.

First, what the jacket looked like this evening when I got back from work. No buttons, no sleeve seams.

Then I set about seaming up the sleeves and fastening the buttons, all the while watching a show on PBS on a beauty pageant on the Navajo reservation. Apparently Miss Navajo has to not only look good in tiara (they didn't say anything about a bikini...), she also has to be able to converse in Navajo, make traditional Navajo bread and, most important of all, she has to be good at slaughtering sheep. I wonder if they plan to introduce any of those in the Miss Iceland pageant. Could be interesting. "So, how are your Icelandic conversation skills, young lady? And while you're telling us, geturðu nokkuð reddað mér smá heimaslátruðu??"

baby-cardigan13
Originally uploaded by herdis2002

But, I digress. After all the sewing and fastening I was left with this stunner (pardon me for being pleased with myself, it is such a rare feeling for a grad student...):

This is by far the most involved knitting project that I've ever done. Not that I realized that when I started, it actually seemed pretty simple at the time. Now however I know where all those four difficulty bars on the pattern come from: Front placets and collar. OMG. It took me four tries for EACH of the front placets before I got anything resembling the correct combination of # of stitches and gauge, and the buttonholes (EZ's one-row buttonholes from Knitter's Almanac) were a real puzzle and took me forever to figure out. The collar suffered from problems of in- and decreasing - not that hard unless you get all the arithmetic screwed up in your head and at the same time forget how to count. Which I did.

baby-cardigan9
Originally uploaded by herdis2002

But, in the end it all came together just beautifully. I'm very happy with the finished product (although I kinda wish I hadn't chosen the red apples... green ones would have been better...) and I can't wait to see the little man wearing it. Yes, the recipient's born and he's almost a week old by now :)

For the detail-oriented among you: This is pattern nr. 1, called Hermine if I recall right, from Dale pattern book nr. 124. I used the yarn the pattern calls for, which is Dalegarn Babyull. It's a superwash wool which I knit using 2.0 and 2.5 mm needles.