This year, I’m profoundly thankful for my son, James Cormac, who was born at home on Monday, November 24, 2008. He weighed 7 pounds, 14 ounces at birth and is 19.5 inches long.

He already makes an excellent knitwear model. We couldn’t be more delighted with him.

Next thing I knew, the bag of leftover yarn was empty, and I had four baby hats. Turns out the suckers are kind of addictive.

Oh, and I also made a pair of socks to match the blue and green striped hat before deciding that the DK-weight socks were bigger than I wanted.

These are all the handknit hats and socks I have made for the baby to date.

Oh, and I also knit those three baby sweaters . . .

And my mom knit this Baby Surprise Jacket and two matching hats (which I think of as the Sherpa Outfit) . . .

Bringing the grand total of Baby Surprise Jackets to three, as I received this beautiful multicolored and red one from my knitting friend / textile artist Alison . . .

I think the Knitting Trousseau is complete, don’t you?

Pattern: February Lady Sweater (an adaptation by Pamela Wynne of Elizabeth Zimmerman’s February Baby Sweater)

Size: 37″ bust, 16″ length and 13″ sleeves to armhole, about 9″ raglan seam

Yarn: Brown Sheep Nature Spun Worsted (100 percent wool; 245 yds per 100 g skein), color 133 (blue fog)

Yardage: About 800 yards (3.25 skeins)

Source: Yarnzilla

Needles: US 8 (5.0 mm) circular needles

Gauge: 16.5 stitches and 32 rows = 4″ in garter stitch, blocked; lace repeats are about 1.75″ wide and .75″ tall

Notes: This sweater took me six weeks to complete. Given that I spent much of my free time in those six weeks lying on the couch reading detective novels and vampire books, I think I can safely say that in normal circumstances it would have been a quick knit.

I ended up modifying the pattern a bit to suit the yarn I chose, which knit to a slightly larger gauge for me than the 18 stitches over 4″ called for in the pattern. I cast on 83 stitches for the 35″ size and then just kept going with the garter stitch raglan increases until I had 168 stitches at the armholes, omitting the eyelet row altogether. The sweater looked awfully small while I was knitting it, but it blocked to more or less the size I wanted (whew).

I used some vintage mother-of-pearl buttons on the yoke, and I’m quite pleased with them. I may need to reinforce the buttonholes, which gap a bit, particularly at the bottom. But that’s easily done if it turns out to be necessary.

I enjoyed working with Nature Spun Worsted, which is a dirt-cheap workhorse yarn that comes in a huge number of colors. I think I spent about $15.00 on this sweater. Can’t beat that! The only drawback was that the yarn was rather smelly before I washed it. I suspect that’s not the fault of the online seller but rather a consequence of the fact that Brown Sheep mothproofs this yarn. I would rather not have my yarn dipped in mothproofing chemicals before I knit with it, but at least the smell went away with one washing.

I picked this pattern because I thought it would make an attractive maternity sweater that I will still be able to wear after the baby is born. And indeed, it is a nice maternity style, but it turns out that after 37 weeks of pregnancy I am somewhat weary of wearing things that button only over the chest and then drape fetchingly over the gigantic baby bump. Not that there are a lot of other style options to choose from — one may as well highlight the bump, since concealing it is a lost cause.

Still, as much as I enjoy the baby’s exploratory nudging from the inside, I look forward with pleasure to having a non-globular stomach again, even if it’s a bit worse for the wear. Last week I thought of a favorite pair of pre-pregnancy pants and was swept with a wave of nostalgia. Likewise, it is with pleasant anticipation that I look forward to wearing this sweater in the more standard, non-pregnant fashion. Meanwhile, it’s doing a nice job of pinch-hitting as maternity wear.

These stockings are made following the vintage Bernat pattern that I have on my website. Throughout most of the year, I get an inquiry every few weeks regarding whether I’d be willing to knit one of these stockings for pay. Now that Christmas is approaching, I’m getting a couple requests a week.

Knitting for money is not really my cup of tea, but I’m sure it’s somebody’s. If you’re interested in knitting stockings for hire, leave a comment to that effect and I will add you to the list of names that I give out to people who e-mail me. Then, if you’re contacted by a stranger about knitting a stocking, you can decide if you’d like to do it and can set your own schedule and prices. I encourage you to charge prices that value your time and skill appropriately!

In other news, I’m (gasp) almost finished with the February Lady Sweater. I’m hoping to wrap up the second sleeve soon and block the sweater tomorrow night. I’m looking forward to having my first finished object in a long time!

In my leisure time this month, in addition to reading eight or nine books about a certain Detective Inspector Rebus, I’ve knit this much of a February Lady Sweater, which is the grown-up version of the February Baby Sweater by Elizabeth Zimmerman. At thirty-four weeks along, I continue to have an easy-peasy pregnancy, yet the lure of the couch is strong, and I’ve been helpless to resist it. Perhaps I’ll finish this sweater before the baby is born — I had intended to get some use out of it as a maternity garment. If not, I suppose it will still be there when I get back to it . . .

In other news, the falling leaves, windy weather, and gobs of candy on display at the grocery store all conspired to give me a wicked craving for some caramels, so today I made them.

I sprinkled salt on top, because salt always makes caramel even tastier. Here is the recipe, should you care to make your own:

Milk Caramels

2 c. sugar
1 c. light corn syrup
3 c. milk
1/4 c. butter
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla

Preparation
Heat sugar with syrup in 1 c. milk. Stir until dissolved. Cook to 246–248º, or firm ball stage. Stir occasionally, slowly adding the second cup of milk. Repeat cooking process. Add remaining milk, butter, and salt. Cook to 246–248º (until a ball in cold water is firm as desired for firmness in caramels). Remove from heat; add vanilla.

Immediately pour into a buttered pan and grind salt on top if desired. Let cool before cutting into squares. Wrap squares in waxed paper if desired.

Notes
Be careful when adding milk to the hot caramel mixture, as it will boil up like crazy. Add just a little at a time and keep stirring to keep the temperature up.

If so, he’s going to miss out on a lot of cute knitwear. When my mom came to visit, I asked her to bring some of the knitted things my grandmother made for me. These are the ones that ought to fit a little baby.

(By the way, my camera is back from Nikon. It had a mysterious, intermittent problem that may be fixed or may just be waiting to recur when I least expect it. Meanwhile, I am ever so happy to have it back.)

This green sweater and bonnet set has a beautiful stockinette petal motif on a garter-stitch yoke. I’m not sure what stitch the body uses. Any guesses?

This one was knit in a heavier yarn, perhaps a worsted. Lovely details.

This one is my favorite, I think, for its whimsical pompom placement and the very smart combination of stitch patterns with yarn choice and overall shape. Mom says Leona used to wear it a lot. It has a little hole that I will have to try to darn.

And if I do have a boy, perhaps he can wear this one — though I think that Grandma actually made it for one of my dolls, so we’ll see. (Sorry, the red is so bright that it’s sort of washed out. I suppose I should have corrected for that.)

There is also an absolutely gorgeous newborn-sized cardigan and bonnet that has several tiny holes in it. I think it’s too fragile to use for this baby, but if I were feeling ambitious I would recreate the pattern from scratch. It uses fingering-weight yarn and has beautiful trinity-stitch edgings (or daisy stitch?) against a stockinette background. Since my ambition is somewhat lacking of late, I have packed it away for now, to be reconsidered in a few years.

Anyone know how to get the smell of mothballs out of clothes? My mom already washed everything with Kookaburra wool wash, so that alone won’t do it, and I don’t want to cover up one smell with another by using a stronger-scented product. I suspect that at least a few of these sweaters are acrylic and may tolerate machine washing, so that’s a possibility. I could also try hanging them up outside in the crisp October air. Other ideas?

I can finally tell you what I was going on about. Way back in the spring, I was commissioned by Knit Picks to develop a set of special “shells” for Sheldon that they could sell on their website. They also asked me to rework the pattern so that it could be knit in Shine Worsted as well as Shine Sport (which is the yarn I used for the original pattern). And so I did that, and Super Sheldon was born. He looks just like Sheldon, only bigger.

Okay, this is where the pig comes in. In my middle school art class, we were required to make these clay pigs. Everyone’s pig followed essentially the same template, but we were supposed to customize our pigs so that every pig had a different outfit reflecting its unique character. There were basketball-playing pigs, ballerina pigs, and so forth. My pig, for reasons that I don’t remember, was dressed up as the Easter Bunny. No, really — see its little bonnet with bunny ears? And the eggs? And the Easter basket?

I saw my bunny pig while visiting my mom’s house at Christmas, and it gave me the idea to dress Sheldon up as other animals. Voila!

Knit Picks is selling the patterns and yarn together as a kit here. They also have some interviews with me and a very adorable photo gallery of the various animals in their natural habitats.

Which one is your favorite? I am very fond of the bat.

Pattern: Basic top-down V-neck raglan sweater, à la Barbara Walker’s Knitting from the Top

Size: Maybe 9-12 mo.? 21″ chest, 6″ length to underarm, 4.5″ sleeves to underarm, 3.5″ V-neck depth

Yarn: Harrisville Designs New England Shetland (100 percent wool; 197 yds per skein), poppy and white

Yardage: 1 skein poppy; two-thirds skein white

Source: Yarns by Design, Neenah, WI

Needles: US size 3 (3.25 mm) metal circular and bamboo double-pointed needles

Gauge: 26 sts and 40 rows = 4″ in Stockinette stitch

Notes: I think this may be the first time I’ve made a V-neck cardigan, and I am struck by how thoroughly the V-neck transforms a simple cardigan into a prepster’s dream garment. The whole time I was knitting it, I kept feeling as though it needed a varsity letter or some pockets, just to complete the look. So cute!

This Harrisville Designs yarn makes a nice rustic fabric that I think will work well for an outer layer. Their colors are really saturated and fabulous. The poppy I used here looks like a red with orange in it in the pictures, but in real life it looks much more like an orange with red in it. At some point, I’d like to make an adult sweater with the worsted-weight Harrisville yarn. Something simple, like Elizabeth Zimmerman’s modified saddle-shoulder design, would really show off the color and wear well forever.

I think this is the last of the baby sweaters for a while — I’ve got adult sweaters on the brain again! Before too long, I’ll post an update about my progress on Neiman, which I’m making for a friend of mine. I finally finished the body up to the armpits and am feeling fresh interest as I begin the sleeves.

Okay, on to the good stuff. I have finished a baby kimono, and lo, it is cute. (Apologies for the rather sub-par pictures: I had to send my good camera in for repairs, and I didn’t have the skills to take non-blurry pictures with my brother’s camera, which I borrowed for these photos.)

Pattern: One-Piece Baby Kimono by Cristina Shiffman for Mason-Dixon Knitting

Size: Newborn-ish (16″ chest, 4″ to underarm, 5″ sleeve to underarm)

Yarn: Blackberry Ridge Wool/Silk Laceweight (25 percent silk, 75 percent wool; 350 yds per 2 oz. skein) in Deep Red for body, held double; leftover Kona Superwash sock yarn for I-cord

Yardage: 1 skein, slightly over 2 oz.

Source: Yarns by Design, Neenah, WI

Needles: US 5 (3.75 mm) bamboo straights for body, US 3 (3.25 mm) bamboo double-points for I-cord

Gauge: About 21 sts and 26 rows = 4″ in St st

Notes: When I had about two inches left of knitting to do on the teensy sleeve of the orange-and-white-striped baby cardigan, I was struck by a strong urge to knit something — anything — else. So I whipped up this little baby kimono as a gift for my friend Martha’s baby, who was born preterm and therefore can be expected to be small enough to wear it for much of the winter.

I modified the pattern slightly because I thought the garter-stitch version would be too thick for my taste. Instead, I used garter stitch only for an edging and kept the rest of the sweater in stockinette. I followed the directions for yarnover increases because I like the little line of holes this makes along the front, and I omitted sewing on two ribbons, choosing instead to do a single I-cord tie in a contrasting color.

It wasn’t until I had knit about two-thirds of the sweater that it occurred to me that one skein of laceweight yarn might not actually be enough to get the job done. As it happens, I had enough yarn to finish the body — just — but not enough to seam the sweater or to make the I-cord ties. Thankfully, I had some nice deep red leftover Kona yarn in my stash that I used for the ties, which I think gives the sweater a little something extra special.

(Interestingly, when I made a Baby Norgi sweater for Martha’s firstborn, I came so close to running out of yarn that I had to use the little leftover bits from weaving in the ends to finish the second sleeve. Something about knitting for Martha makes me improvident, it seems.)

All in all, this was a fun and simple pattern, and I can see why so many hundreds of these kimonos have been made.