Baby New Year

Remember the Samantha dress I knit for a new cousin back in the fall? Her grandfather recently posted this picture. As you can see, she's absolutely beautiful. I made the six-month-old size for her -- and she's right at six months old now. Her great-grandmother reports that she's a dainty thing, so it may be a few months before it fits better. Since it's made of cotton it should still work for spring.

I love the mid-drool capture. Also, it appears that she may have lost one of the buttons already. I'm still new at the whole button thing. Anyway, I just had to share this wonderful picture of my littlest 1st-cousin-twice-removed sporting handknits made by Cousin Steven.

On the knitting front, I'm beginning the first saddle shoulder on Jeff's seamless hybrid sweater. Elizabeth Zimmerman's instruction in Knitting Without Tears are, in her words, "rather chattily written," and sometimes you have to infer that when she spouts out a number of stitches, she's often referring to a ratio or percentage based on the gauge in her example. It's up to the astute knitter to figure out how that translates to his gauge. Which is why when she says to "work 44 rows for the saddles," I was a bit thrown. Most of the percentages refer to stitches (or stitch gauge) rather than rows (or row gauge). 44 seemed like a rather random number.

But I think I've figured it out. It appears that the number of rows, rather than just being 44, is roughly one third of the stitches remaining between the decrease lines on the front and back. Here's a bird's-eye-view (ala Zimmerman -- only lame) of the neck showing what I mean:


Imagine you're looking down on the top of the sweater. With my gauge (only slightly bigger than Zimmerman's example), there are 68 stitches on the front and back between the decrease lines. She had 66. Now, as you knit up the saddle, you knit the edge stitches from the front and back of the sweater at the end of each row in a sort of short row move. So for her, with 66 stitches on the front and back, she would divide by three to get 22 stitches on each side -- doubled, that makes 44. In my example, I have 68 stitches, which doesn't divide as well by 3, so I'm going to divide my front and back thus: 23-22-23. Doubling the 23 gives me 46 rows.

Is this what she's saying? I have to say, no one challenges a knitter to think more than Elizabeth Zimmerman. In my case, that could be a dangerous thing. Someone please tell me if I'm totally off on this. I'll post pictures soon, I hope.

And because if my life this week could be described in term of an Elvis movie, it would be called "Dogs! Dogs ! Dogs!," here's another video of Pona and Kate.