I've been a bad blogger the first couple of months this year. More accurately, I've been very short of energy to blog, despite wanting to knit more and spending too much time on Ravelry. Now with one more week of work and expecting a baby any day now, even though the due date is during the first week of March, I am knitting as much as I can to finish up baby projects already started and near completion. I say this just because both D & R were early babies. Anyhow, here's a finished variation of EZ's Best Baby Sweater without the lace that used up some of my hand-dyed, handspun merino wool and handspun "Denim Dreams" (wool and part mohair fiber bought from Paradise Fibers). I quite enjoyed knitting up this little sweater with the exception of the realizations that I may not have had enough hand-dyed handspun to finish the project after knitting the yoke (so I had to start spinning and plying some of my "Denim Dreams" right away in January) and that I had forgotten to knit the buttonholes in the yoke of the sweater since Elizabeth Zimmermann doesn't even mention buttonholes until further into the pattern instructions. I ended up making bobble buttons with chain loop closures to remedy the lack of buttonholes on the yoke. The bobble buttons were made by casting on a stitch on a DPN, leaving a 3" tail and then with another DPN, I kfb in the stitch until there were 5sts on the needle. I knit the next row and purled the following row. On the fourth row, I knit the row, but then passed the second, third, fourth, and fifth sts over the first st. I cut the yarn, leaving a 6" tail to thread into a yarn needle for gathering up the edges of the bobble to make a ball, stuffing the bobble with the cast-on tail. I made only three bobble buttons for the yoke to make a swing-like cardigan and did not do the decreases at the end of the pattern. The little cardigan was finished on February 6.
