Teeny tiny

I found the Newborn Vertebrae pattern on Ravelry a few weeks ago and thought it would be a nice gift to send along with the baby quilt I'm making for my friend all the way across the Atlantic in Switzerland. I have to spoil her somehow! It is a cute little sweater that is designed to cover baby's back and be open in the front. A baby bolero, sort of, only it's full length.

I had some pretty fingering weight yarn leftover from Pacific and Karenina (I decided not to finish those mittens, after all) that I thought would make a nice combination of colors that either a girl or a boy could wear. The colors look rather neon in places -- they're not.

The body of the sweater works up in a breeze with raglan construction and a simple saving of stitches at either end to go back and make sleeves with. The issue I'm having right now is continuing with the sleeves. My cables on the interchangeable needles I have aren't quite flexible enough to make the magic loop technique (which is the suggested work up) work. Or I'm just all thumbs and can't do it. I either need to go out and get a set of double pointed needles in a size 2 or try to use the DPNs I have and just knit pretty tightly.

I taught myself how to knit from left to right on this one. I haven't ever really been fond of the purl stitch and it actually hurts my hands more for whatever reason. So when the twinges started I decided to sacrifice speed for agility and learn left to right knitting. It will come in handy when I try out entrelac, too. It was the perfect project to do this on since it was just one big stockinette party and eventually my speed picked up to be not so much slower than my regular knit stitch.

My least favorite part was picking up all the stitches for the ribbing around the front, but it was really just time consuming more than anything. I think the red ribbing against the deep turquoise is super cute, so it was worth squinting at those tiny stitches for a while.