We rescued this hat from the sad fate of abandonment on a sidewalk during a week of solid rain — we let it sit for a few hours after we first saw it in case the owners were backtracking for it, but it was only getting more and more sodden and forlorn. I hope we’ll run into another young family in the neighborhood who will say, “Oh, we had that same hat, but we lost it!” and I’ll be able to give it back. Meanwhile, it’s having a happy second life warming my big girl’s big head.

Want an easy-peasy thumbless mitten recipe for a baby in your life? Here you go!

Tom Thumbless Mittens

Materials:

Remnants of worsted-weight wool (I used Dream in Color Classy), maybe about 75 yards? (I asked for a kitchen scale for Christmas, so if Santa Claus comes through I’ll weigh the mitts and then give you an update on the yardage. )

US #8 dpns

Directions:

CO 28 sts and work 9 rounds in k2, p2 rib. On the 10th round, knit the knits and yo & p2tog over all purl sts but the last two. Knit 20 rounds, then decrease as given below. Rounds begin just left of center on the back of the mitt.

Rnd 1: K3, k2tog, k2, ssk, k8, k2tog, k2, ssk, k5.

Rnd 2: K2, k2tog, k2, ssk, k6, k2tog, k2, ssk, k4.

Rnd 3: K1, k2tog, k2, ssk, k4, k2tog, k1 and then divide the sts on two needles, one for the palm and one for the back of the mitt, to graft them closed. There will be one extra st on the back where you didn’t work that 4th dec; simply work those 2 sts tog as you graft.

Make a matching mate.

Twist up a mitten cord, beginning with a length of yarn about as long as your wingspan, tying a knot in the middle and looping it over a wee doorknob or picture hook or the finger of an obliging friend, then twisting the two ends together until they do not wish to twist any more. Keeping tension on the cord, pinch it at the mid point and at the ends, then relax the tension and let it twizzle up into a lovely cord of a good length for weaving in, out, in, out through the holes above the cuff and tying in a bow. Tie a knot in the end that needs it before you do any weaving, of course.  If your cord has squirrelly bits that twizzled away from the main cord, just give a few tugs on the ends and they should jump back  into place. Make another cord for the second mitt.

I’m going to pick up stitches on the inside of the cuff tops and knit a lining for each mitt for extra warmth, but for now Ada’s wearing them over those sleeves that fold over her hands.

P.S. Someone’s going to ask about Ada’s furry boots. They’re made by Robeez and I love them. I justified the splurge by giving them to Mr. G as a birthday present, but they’ve been well worth it; they are as functional as they are cute. And luckily Ada has very small feet, so they should last all winter.

I’m one sleeve and five buttons short of a new jacket for Ada. It’s got a hybrid round-raglan yoke, some garter stitch, some stockinet, and some slipped stitches for extra style. I’m going to change a few things based on this prototype, but I have to say I’m pretty happy with it. And the yarn, too — I finally stopped chiding myself to knit from the stash and bought some Malabrigo Twist. I’ve got two skeins of Liquid Ambar (and I can see how liquid amber sounds more poetic than pitch). I’m cutting it close on the yardage, though. Good thing I didn’t bother to swatch, right? I knit most of this while we were most pleasantly putting our feet up in Friday Harbor a couple of weeks ago. A cooperative baby who was strangely amenable to being propped among the couch cushions at the yarn store allowed for the knitting of the first sleeve on a rainy day last weekend. We’ll see if such favorable circumstances can be reproduced this weekend to finish it all off.

Speaking of babies, I love the sleepy stretching before they wake up:

Yeah, that’s a commercially knit hat. I have no excuse for not having made her a better one yet. Or a pair of mittens, for that matter. Except that I’m all about the little jackets right now.

Raise your hand if you need to knit a quick baby gift. (Yeah, me too.) May I suggest a Pebble vest? This is the quickest and easiest of projects, and it is So Darn Useful. Just right for a little extra coziness before you bundle the baby into a front pack for a nice long walk when autumn is coming on. If the baby lives in a hundred-year-old house like ours, it’s also perfect for fending off the morning chill indoors. And the evening chill. And the high noon chill, here in soggy Portland. (Not today — today’s lovely. But last weekend? Yes, that was Pebble weather.) Ada’s been wearing hers very regularly indeed.

If you’ve already made a vest like this or if you’re a seasoned baby-dresser, you’ll probably spot the most major thing wrong here immediately. Let it be said that I knit this vest when Ada was four weeks old. It was probably the peak of sleep-deprived loopiness, looking back. I thought I was feeling pretty sharp, all things considered, but it took me three tries to graft the twenty shoulder stitches together. I pride myself on my thorough understanding of grafting and I got it wrong three times. That’s more times than I botched my very first attempt ever. The third time I just laughed at myself and let it be wonky. I wasn’t going to win this one. It wasn’t until I went to put the vest on the baby that I realized I’d grafted the wrong shoulder to boot. Um, yes. The point of having buttons on the shoulder is so you can open up the whole garment flat, place the baby on top, feeding one arm through the armhole as you do so, then button it all closed. It still works just fine the way I did it, but I have to feed the head as well as the arm through the hole. Aren’t these mismatched buttons fun, though?

Close examination here will reveal that I couldn’t even manage to be consistent in the way I sewed the buttons on. Oh well! The baby’s cute anyway!

The yarn’s nice, too. It’s Rowan Purelife British Sheep Breeds, the Bluefaced Leicester DK. I used slightly more than one skein for this vest, so I’ll have to combine the leftovers with something from the stash when I make the next size up. I didn’t actually use the Pebble pattern because I was knitting at a smaller gauge — I cast on 98 stitches and allotted 40 to the front and back stockinet panels and six to each button band and the opposite side garter column, if you’re wanting to do something similar. It came out just right for a three-month size, which was my aim.

Hey! I can smile on purpose now!

More catch-up documentation of summer knits… this has gone across the country to Baby Walter now, so it can have its day on the blog! I had a lot of leftover Indigo Moon Merino Superwash in Mossy Green from the stripey baby sweater I knit at the beginning of the year. (It’s such a cheerful, vibrant green that my camera lost all confidence and didn’t even try to reproduce it here. Way to phone it in, Olympus.  You’ll just have to imagine it about fifty times springier and better than what you see here.) Anyway, it was the excuse I needed to buy a skein of Claudia Hand Painted Fingering in Copper Pennies, over which I’d been drooling ever since Twisted received it. (And now I have leftovers of that… enough for edging on a raffish neckerchief, I should think, if I stripe it with something else russety from the stash…) I’d been intending to make a Baby Surprise out of these two yarns, but when Kristen told me about Surtsey I couldn’t picture them as anything else. (Mom wants to know what a Surtsey is. It’s one of the newest islands on the planet, formed by a volcanic eruption in Iceland’s Westmann Isles in 1963. Now seals and gulls and puffins breed there. Puffins! I badly want to see puffins in the wild — clearly I must go to Iceland. Surtsey takes its name from Surtr, a fire jötunn in Norse mythology. Since I love islands and Norse mythology, it was my choice of the names Kristen was considering for the design.)

I picked up these excellent orange buttons at Close Knit. I had nice russet buttons that matched the contrast color; in my original plan for a BSJ they’d have worked nicely on a green button band. But this little sweater wanted something loud and fun, and while I don’t love the orange buttons quite as much as the red ones on Kristen’s original, I think they’re pretty darn good.

Happy birthday, little Walter! I’m pretty sure I made this big enough to encompass your whopping 9 pounds 5 ounces (and gaining steadily, I’m sure), but I hope the heat wave in the Northeast will be over soon or you might miss your window!