Italian Dish Knits

I hope you all had a wonderful holiday and New Year.  I’m still picking up and cleaning after all the out of town guests we had at the house and recovering from too much food and fun.  But I’ve been knitting right along and having a great time with baby patterns.

This is a cute little sweater knit from a Bergere de France pattern book that caught my eye.  The pattern is written in English but there were all kinds of amusing  and maddening techniques that we American knitters don’t really do.  I love the end result, though, and will be knitting this again with some modifications.

First of all, this sweater is knitted flat and requires seaming, which I don’t really like to do.  But I liked the sweater so much I did it anyway.  One of the odd things about the pattern is that they have you knit the neckband separately, leave the stitches on a separate needle and then graft it on.  That seemed ridiculous, so I just picked up the stitches around the neck and knitted the neckband.

The other odd thing was the creation of the buttonholes.  I’ve never encountered this – they had you knit the sweater with no yo’s for buttonholes.  After the sweater is done, you create buttonholes by lifting a stitch above and below where you want the hole to be and sewing those stitches aside.  What?  But I gave it a go and hated it. Never doing that again.  The buttonholes it created weren’t very good and it was an enormous hassle, with having to weave in yarn ends all around the buttonholes.  Yikes.  I guess this is a typical French technique, but I’m sure glad we don’t do that here.

Another odd thing – the pattern has four sizes – newborn, 1 month, 3 months and 6 months.  Isn’t that weird?  Usually patterns are, for instance, 0-3 months, 3-6 months, 9-12 months, etc.  Something like that.  So I wanted to knit a 12 month size, but there was no 12 months size.  My solution was to pick a heavier weight yarn (Cascade 220 Superwash Aran) and knit on bigger needles (#9).  I figured I would end up with about a 12 months size.  Nope.  I ended up with about a 2 or 3 year size!  Especially after I blocked the sweater, and the yarn relaxed like crazy.  It became huge.  So it’s really not a baby sweater anymore.  So I will be knitting this again, using DK and smaller needles.

I loved the sweater, though.  The cables were just a sweet touch and I’m a sucker for garter stitch hem and cuffs. Looking forward to knitting it again.

Thanks for dropping by,
Elaine

Pattern:  Bergere de France #06 Boy’s cardigan in Book #182
Needles: US #8 & #9
Yarn:  Cascade 220 Superwash Aran
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