adverbs and études: spring knitting gallery

I've finished a bunch of projects in the last few weeks.

The first is a sweater for Joe-the-office-roomie's daughter, Julia, who had her first birthday yesterday. I made it 3-year-old size so that she'd be able to wear it for a month or two at least before growing out of it (kids today and their growth spurts, sheesh!). You can see pictures of the birthday girl modeling it here and here and here and here (this last with cat possibly being jealous of it).

I'm proud of it for a couple of reasons. First, my seaming skills have improved immensely. I used to do rather wobbly seams, but a slight change in technique has fixed that. I've said before that I don't mind doing seams, and I mind it even less now that I can make them look nice. Second, this is the first knitted piece I've done on which I've added embroidery thanks to Kristin Knits by Kristin Nicholas. It's an easy way to jazz up an otherwise plain piece. I used a technique called lazy daisy for the flower petals and french knots for the centers.

It's a clever pattern too. It starts at the bottom edge and is knit up in a big rectangle. Then the stitches are divided into three sets and put on stitch holders. You work one set for the back panel, and the other two sets for the front panels, which also have a little shaping. Then you seam the tops of the shoulders to join all the panels again and it magically gives you evenly sized sleeve openings. It also knits quicker because instead of knitting five pieces (back panel, two front panels, two sleeves), you're only knitting three pieces (back and front panels knit all at once and only separated for shaping, and two sleeves). Knitwear designers are so smart.

Next, we have some scarves for Survivors Offering Support, which distributes care packages to women undergoing surgery for breast cancer. They receive their care package on the day of their surgery. This pattern is called feather and fan:

It looks a little fancy, but it's an easy pattern to memorize. There are three rows of knit and purl and one row of yarnovers and k2tog to make the wave magically appear and to give it more of a lacey look.

Finally, we have the cabled messenger bag that I mentioned in an earlier post. This is a mash-up of several patterns pulled from all over the interwebs. The original cable I wanted to do in the middle of the front panel wasn't cooperating, so I mercilessly frogged it and started over with the braided cable across all three sections and made the middle one slightly bigger.