My cousin had a baby and I thought that was the perfect excuse to knit the February Baby Sweater by Elizabeth Zimmerman.

By the time I got started, this new little person was heading into her fifth month. After casting on and knitting a few rows I thought, “This is going to be wayyyy too tiny”, and ripped it out. I did some major (for me) math and figured out a whole new stitch gauge and ended up with this:

Very cute. But the more I looked at it, the more it started to look BIG.

Then, and only then, did it dawn on me that my friend google could probably give me some information on what size babies’ chests are. Turns out I’d knit a sweater for a toddler.

I really didn’t want to mail a gift that couldn’t be worn for a year. So I ordered another ball of yarn and set about making the sweater in the original size:

Also very cute. But frighteningly tiny. (I wish I’d photographed it next to my hand for a sense of scale.)

Feeling more and more like Goldilocks looking for the sweater that is “just right” I decided to nip the thing in the bud before it got out of hand and get both them sweaters down to the post office asap.

According to the thank you email, I squeaked in by a hair — wee Stella is still able to fit into the little sweater, and there’s the big one to look forward to.

This experience has taught me that it’s helpful to have a baby in front of you as evidence of how teenincy a brand new person truly is. Cats cannot be substituted.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2012 at 9:56 am and is filed under knitting & crochet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.