Faaaancy!

A few weeks ago, I realized that I of course wanted to make a first-day-of-school sweater for my youngest, who will soon be starting Kindergarten. Of course, I did realize I'm not leaving myself a lot of time to knit it, but it can be done, so, I grabbed the yarn she picked out over a year ago (Lachiwa, a lovely 60/40 Linen/Cotton blend from Mirasol), and found a few patterns for it.

The white sweater still looks the same, so here's my garden!

The one I eventually went with was nice. It had a complicated edging bit to start with, and then it would get easier from there right? Right. Only it was also becoming more and more apparent that the sweater would be a better fit for me than my not-quite-five-year-old, so I started decreasing, thinking I could just lengthen it into a sweater-dress.

 I eventually realized this was going nowhere fast (since I would run out of yarn before finishing at that rate), and that I should just rip the whole thing back and start over. Only, I didn't want to face that cast-on with the fancy edging again. Sure, it wouldn't be that bad with the reduced stitch count, but then again...

I decided it was time to ask the girl what her ideal sweater would be like. "Smooth!" She said. "Faaaancy!" She said, with the idea conveyed more by the hip shake and waving arms than the word itself could manage on its own. I asked her what would make it "Faaaancy!" in that particular way, and she said wanted various figures on it, or so I gathered (it became a long list). Because she will likely change her mind on just what figures and how they should look at least eight times between now and when it's done, I've settled on embroidery as the means for adding the figures.

I've also decided hey, why not share the whole process on the Blog as I go!

Hmm, perhaps pink flowers as embroidery subject?

Rather than figuring the whole sweater out beforehand as I usually would, I just worked from the swatch I had made and washed to figure out why the sweater was coming out so big, and actually measured my daughter this time, and started the sweater with the correct number of stitches. I've done a row of eyelets so that I can turn the hem and present a picot row at the border. I've continued to where the armholes should start, which means I've some work to do now: What sort of sleeves, what sort of neckline, and a fair bit of number-crunching to make sure it works!