The nicest baby sweater

I'm loving my current project so much I almost feel like I'm having an affair. Ok. That's maybe a bit of a overstatement. This is the EZ (Elizabeth Zimmermann) baby sweater from the February chapter of Knitter's Almanac. It was also published in Vogue Knitting and I have the pattern in a collection: Vogue Knitting: American Collection.

When I moved I actually tore out EZ's chapter in the Collection and threw the rest away. They were 90's patterns, and not at all something that will work today. Every single one of EZ's patterns in the book do work today, even if the Tomten jacket is a bit 70's.

You should be able to see some of other peoples EZ baby sweaters on flickr. It's knit from top-down, with garter stitch edges. When you are done knitting (I have 1,5 rows left on the bottom) all you have to do is to sew up the arms (which are quite small.

The lace pattern is very nice. It's called a gull stitch. I like it so much I added a repeat both for the arms and the body. My excuse was that baby's grow so fast so you have to make things a little bigger, but the real reason was that I just couldn't stop knitting ;)

This making cloths a little bigger makes me want to tell you a story. In my mother's side of the family we are 11 grandchildren and I'm the only girl. Not only were there 10 boys, but 9 of them where BIG boys. When Kamilla was born (first child to be born in 12 years in my family and first girl since I was born 28 year earlier) everybody gave her cloths big enough so she wouldn't grow out of them in couple of months. The problem was that she was a petite baby (in Icelandic terms, quite average in American terms) and most of the cloths she got at birth didn't fit her until she was a year old. This continued and she always got clothes that she couldn't wear for a year (for her birthday or Christmas). This wouldn't be too bad if Icelandic stores had good customer service, but no. I rarely was able to exchange for a smaller size, so normally I just kept it and often I forgot about the clothes until they were too small for her :( She still wears a rainsuit she got when she was 6 months old (at the time she was to young to play out in the rain anyways) and she's just now big enought to wear a sweater knitted for her when she was a newborn (supposed to be 9 month size but got a little bigger). She's also to skinny to wear cloths that are too big so that doesn't help.

End of story. Sorry about that. Back to knitting.+

The EZ sweater is intended for a friend of mine, what just had a baby last month. The yarn is very coarse (Icelandic wool and all) and I will wash it with a conditioner to make it smooth. I can't wait to see how it will turn out.

I'll keep you posted.