Baby Jumpsuit

At long last – something to post about and time to post a post – this makes my day! First and foremost – happy birthday textileshed, you were one 2 weeks ago…, so here is  a yummy cake and some candles… both actually for Josephine’s birthday, but … let’s just share, eh?

And now my finished item, my something to post: it started late last month, when I took my parents in law to a hospital appointment. “By the way”, my mother in law said, “I have this old knitting booklet, I wonder if you would enjoy it?”.    I took one look, rushed out to the local yarn shop to get some 3ply… and this is what happened over the last few weeks. Fortunately there are two babies coming, one here in Australia, one in Germany, so I made this jump suit not just for fun, but also with some real people (soon to be people!) in mind.

   It was not easy to choose what to knit from this treasure trove of knitting patterns, initially I had my heart set on a jacket.  But then I fell for the jump suit – it has got so much detail – have a look at the scye for the sleeve, the buttonholes, the immaculate little sleeve head! And look at the bands for the legs with buttonholes! To be honest, I didn’t get it first time ’round, the instructions are rather ‘dense’ and I lost count of how many times I started to knit this suit. But it is really nice to know it is as perfect as it will ever be, I did not cut any corners, and I started over and over again (with a gauge of 36st to 10cm!!!) until it was just right!

What are these safety pins? They are my crutches. It was very easy to lose track of what I was doing, and why I was doing it.

The instructions were rather dense – for something this intricate, there was 1 1/2 A5 page of instructions!

So, I converted the pattern – as I knitted it – into a table. And now back to the pins: each time I finished a section (see below) I put a pin in my work, so I knew exactly where I was, where I was going, and what I was supposed to do next.

The table lists the section number (easy to repeat for the next, ie back piece), amount of rows, stitches in the section (at beginning and at end) – and some overview/ summary of the section, so it is easy to understand what is happening and why. The last column contains instructions for people who need their hand held, which can be me at times… The overall aim is to develop a set of knitting instructions that make it easy to continue the knitting process after taking a substantial break from a project. So many of us ‘loose the thread’ with our projects and then start another one, because that is easier than continuing a project that has been on hold for a bit.
This still needs editing! Sue keeps pointing out to me that I currently am not using standard terms and abbreviations! It is difficult for me to know the conventions, since I never use patterns… I am hoping to add a schematic drawing to this pattern with the correct size of all the pieces, somewhere on my computer I have saved a ‘how to’ tutorial for Word Doc.

I am now working on a stripy version of this, it gives me the opportunity to fine tune the pattern. And I have two jumpers on hold… I am desperate to finish those, because I’d like to start (and finish!) something for myself.