First of all, thank you all so much for your warm embrace of Daisy Daisy! She’s flattered, and so am I. I am mulling over different possibilities to size the back shaping and will try to come up with some sensible instructions soon. Meanwhile, I’ve got other knitting that hasn’t found its way to the blog yet…

One of our reasons to travel east last month was to attend my cousin Caroline’s baby shower, the better to glimpse a bunch of relations on my mother’s side whom we’ve rarely seen since we moved back to the Northwest. Caroline is an interior designer with impeccable taste, and she’s also having a girl. All the most recent babies I’ve knit for have come with man tackle, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to pull out all the stops and design something really girly and adorable. So I hunted up some sock leftovers from the stash (those skeins of Dream in Color Smooshy are generous) and just kicked up my heels. The result is this sugary confection:

Sorry the photos aren’t a little better; they were taken in haste at the shower itself, since I was sewing on buttons in the airport and steam blocking in my brother’s hotel room just a few hours before! But I think you get the sense that if you were to make a big sundae of sugar & spice & everything nice, this would be the cherry on top. Pink! Picot! Scallops! Rose petals! (I actually feel a need to go read some Ernest Hemingway and knit Scratchy Man Wool just looking at it.) I opted for a sort of bubble hem because I was quickly running out of the red (that’s “In Vino Veritas,” and you might recognize it from a certain February Baby Sweater)… only about eighteen inches remained after I bound off. Here’s the back:

The rose motif (though I think of them as snowflakes) is from a chart in Lizbeth Upitis’s Latvian Mitten book. I added the “lice” wherever there was a particularly long carry, thinking of baby toes getting snagged on the way through. Since The Baby Currently Known as Bundle doesn’t have a real name yet, I’m calling the design after her mother: Sweet Caroline. My cousin may have broken a land speed record with her thank-you note, so I can smugly report that this little top has been dubbed an heirloom and a favorite gift. Thanks, Caroline! Can’t wait to meet your little daughter!