Revisions

I had a fantastic idea for a kids sweater bouncing around in my head recently. It would be a simple stockinette raglan, worked bottom up, with the bee lace from Cookie A's Kai-Mei sock pattern along the raglan seams. 

This design started to get a bit squirrelly from the get go. I couldn't figure out what edging to use for the bottom hem that wouldn't detract from the bee lace. A turned hem would have been great, except that I only have 400 yards of the yarn I'm using and I didn't want to lose yardage on the hem. So that was out (now that I think of it, a picot hem might have worked). Then I thought: seed stitch! At this point, I didn't want to transition from seed stitch at the hem to a stockinette body so I decided to make the whole body in seed stitch. 

I happily motored along to the underarm and used a provisional cast on for the sleeve stitches at the yoke. This is my favorite sweater construction for babies and kids - work bottom up to the neck and then back down the sleeves with whatever yarn is left. 

I think I made it through two repeats of the bee lace. It was just a mess. 

I had forgotten one of the key elements of Kai-Mei's success: negative ease on the sock so the foot stretches out the lace. That was not going to work on a kid's sweater. 

So I ripped back to the start of the yoke and decided to borrow from another of my favorite patterns. This time around, I tried a braid cable at the raglan and hid the decreases in the cable. 

That works much better. I threw in some short rows to shape the neck. The sleeves are stockinette and should knit up quickly at this gauge. I'll probably use a turned hem to finish them since it looks like I'll have enough yarn. 

Miss Tadpole even agreed to help me check to make sure the neck was loose enough. 

EZ's sewn bind off worked like a charm. But then the sweater was off a moment later. 

Once I'm done with the sleeves, I think I'll write this pattern up. At the very least, I'd like to make a coordinating sweater for sprout. And this will be a nice pattern recipe to have handy for gift knitting. Plus, if I'm really good, I can set up a spreadsheet to crunch the numbers for me. 

(I haven't forgotten about the purple sweater pattern - it's on the list. I just need to get my pattern writing feet wet again before I dive into that one.)