Fair Isle Romper

Recipient: baby Marte
Designer: Moi
Pattern: As yet unnamed
Completed: October 22, 2005
Colours: Canary yellow for main colour, with pink/red, lavender/purple and baby blue/blue for the fair isle section and gradiated cuff ribbing
Yarn: Combination of Zellers fingering weight and Bernat sox yarns - more specific details to come
Completed status: Given at baby shower October 22, 2005
Notes: Pattern to be for book

2005-Oct-22

This was the source of much panic. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I abandoned my intelligent and relaxing nap/long shower/knit day structure for all-out knitting in order to finish this on time. At 2:30am today, it was finally done. It looks great. It's a design I'm hoping to publish, so I'm not going to post any pictures, but I really wish I could because I'm very happy with it.

This afternoon of course was the baby shower, so the romper was giftwrapped and given to the mummy-to-be. It seemed to be appreciated, and I received compliments from my fellow shower-goers, which was lovely. But I was not the only person to give a knitted gift! One of the other women had made an extremely cute 'teddy bear' romper. It was cream, and it had a hood with bear ears. The mitts and feet had dark brown 'pads', and dark brown was also used to depict the insides of the ears. It was super-sweet and I can't believe I didn't ask her where she got the pattern. However, I know how to get in touch with her online so I'm not really kicking myself all that much.

Tonight I sleep.

2005-Oct-19

Ah, and now we come to the panic project du jour. (De la semaine, actually, but whatever.) Yesterday it hit me with blinding and horrifying clarity that the baby shower was THIS WEEKEND. With the romper almost barely started. AIEEEEEE!!!

So today I took action. I have decided to try and salvage the fair isle section of the first (screwed-up) version of the back. I placed the stitches right below it on a holder, and then cut and frogged the rest of the back down to the leg join. I am currently working on redoing the back - I think I have about twelve rows to go. Then I'll graft the back to the fair isle portion and save myself a lot of work (and, more importantly, time).

I am hoping fervently to have the back done by this evening. If I reallyreally hustle, I can have both fronts done by the end of tomorrow and then Friday I can focus on the sleeves, neck, and finishing. Yeesh. I'm freaking out just thinking about it.

2005-Sep-14

DH fortunately was able to return the un-needed four balls of white yarn. The piss-off was that the store had no yellow.

Anyway, I picked this up last night, hoping to get in a few rows before bedtime. As I worked, I was looking at the emerging left front and thinking about how it would all come together. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks - I had made a SERIOUS error in the shaping of the back. The stupidity of this error is so bad that I cannot bring myself to confess it in a public forum. Suffice it to say that it is far more serious than merely having to add another 1.75" inches to the back. Oh no, no, no...I am going to have to frog almost the entire back, right down to the leg join. All that beautiful fair isle...gone.

Faced with the sick certainty of this new knowledge, I lost the heart to continue. I put the knitting down and went to bed.

2005-Sep-12

Fantasy: The Schedule says that by last night, I was to have finished the back of the romper and one of the fronts.

Reality: The first front is less than half done - I've only just finished the leg. However, at least I had the back finished...or so I thought. As I was working through the math for the first front, I realised that, thanks to a moment of true boneheadedness, I had stopped the back 1.75" short of where it was supposed to be. Well done.

There's nothing like a crappy moment of knitting error horror to ruin a good mood. I'd even been thinking that I'd be able to do the whole romper with just two balls of the main colour (yellow), since I'd "finished the back" and the leg of the first front and still hadn't run out of the first ball. But no.

DH's task list for today involves a lot of shopping, so he planned to return the four balls of white that I bought when I thought I would be making a white romper, and at the same time, buy me a third ball of the yellow (very nice man). However, I received a call from him at the store to tell me that since I originally bought the yarn with my credit card, and since he did not have my credit card, the store would not be able to credit my credit card with the return, and therefore the return could not be achieved. Crap. I gave him my credit card number. I didn't hear back. Hopefully this means the yarn was returned successfully, but I assume nothing.

Fantasy for this week: The Schedule says that I must finish both fronts by Sunday night. Hahahaha.

The only bright point in all of this is that (I'm sorry, I just can't be humble here) the design looks so freaking good knitted up, I can hardly stand it.

2005-Sep-7

I got far enough up the back of the romper that I was able to start the fair isle motif. It's coming along well. I'm hoping to be able to finish the whole back by the end of Friday.

2005-Sep-5

Friday evening DH went to get the mail before picking me up, and what happened to be in our mailbox right before the long weekend but the royal blue sock yarn! Hooray! I promptly did a test swatch of the motif design and it looked fantastic, if I do say so myself.

I then sat down and plotted out all the dimensions I needed for the romper, and cast on. It went swimmingly. I did find myself without some of my notes at my parents' place last night - the notes that I needed to calculate some decreasing. However, I thought I was able to do an educated guess and forged ahead. A mistake. My educated guess was based on the premise that the motif swatch I did was 70 stitches across. Sadly, it was actually 74. (Yes, I should have actually counted instead of relying on my brain to come up with the right number.) This error means I'm going to have to do some ripping, but only about 4 rows, so not a huge deal.

So far I've finished about half the back. Since I'm going to try and sell this design, I'm not going to post exactly what it looks like here, but I don't think displaying a few miles of stocking stitch would be giving away the farm:


Work continues. It's going beautifully quickly. (So far.)

2005-Sep-1

If the royal blue yarn comes in today's mail, I am so not getting anything else done tonight.

2005-Aug-30

No sign of the royal blue yarn in the mail yet, obviously, but in anticipation of its arrival, I have restarted the swatch of the fair isle motif. I've gone as far as I can without the blue, and now I'm waiting - very impatiently! - for it to show up.

2005-Aug-29

Well, the vendor of the second royal blue Bernat Sox eBay auction got back to me, and quoted me a very reasonable $1.10US for shipping. The Canadian vendor had quoted me $5.50US, which was ridiculous - it's never a good sign when the shipping for an item is over twice the cost of the item itself. Plus, the cheaper-shipping auction was a Buy It Now, so I was able to snap it up right away. Before I even went downstairs for breakfast this morning, the yarn was won and paid for.

(We will not discuss how much money the yarn ultimately cost me, what with all the dollar-a-litre gas I wasted visiting five different shops only to conclude that I could not buy it in person. Yes, I have environment-destroying guilt. However, my household is pretty frugal in the energy conservation department, so I am not completely evil.)

To top it off, the vendor emailed me before the morning was up to say that the yarn would be in the mail within the hour. What. A. Sweetheart. How delicious to deal with someone who understands the need to have yarn rightnowthisveryminutenowaiting. Naturally I will wait until the yarn arrives to leave feedback, but so far I'm desperately impressed.

I am so excited about finally being able to start swatching in my red/purple/blue colourway!

2005-Aug-28

For the following story to make sense, you need to know that the romper design calls for seven colours - one main colour, and six colours for the fair isle motif. My original plan for the fair isle motif was to have three separate colour strips: red/pale pink, royal purple/lavender, and royal blue/baby blue, with canary yellow as the main colour. I had already managed to pick up the red, pale pink, royal purple, lavender, and some yellow. But I was missing the two blues. So this weekend I went yarn shopping so I could start the darn romper.

Hahahaha.

On Saturday I spent two hours hitting three different Zellers (Zellerses?). The first one (closest to my house) was a complete bust. The second one did yield some baby blue fingering weight yarn, as well as a pounder of cream-coloured sport weight yarn (I hardly ever see that, so I nabbed it), and some other yarn that I could not resist (read further down in today's entry for more details).

However, I was still SOL on the royal blue sock yarn. I know that Bernat Sox comes in this colour, and I know that Zellers carries Bernat Sox yarn. However, hoping that there was a Zellers anywhere which carried royal blue Bernat Sox yarn was obviously asking too much of the universe.

Fortunately, at the third Zellers, there was some very pale yellow fingering weight yarn. I figured, okay, maybe I replace the royal blue/baby blue combination with canary yellow/pale yellow instead, and use white as the main colour for the romper. (I vowed long ago never to knit anything white for a baby because they have no control over the explusion of various bodily fluids and I have no desire to inflict laundry nightmares on already stressed new parents - but I was desperate at this point because the alternative was a mostly green project, so I figured what the heck.) I bought the pale yellow fingering weight yarn and several balls of white. They looked like this:


So today I sat down with all these colours and swatched my fair isle design.

DISASTER.

The canary yellow/pale yellow turned out to be a terrible idea - the motif pattern was completely lost wherever I used them. I had no choice but to find my royal blue Bernat Sox yarn (and exchange my several balls of white fingering weight yarn for canary yellow).

DH and DD were sleeping. I left a note and took off for Zellers #4.

No luck. In absolute desperation I threw our family's boycott to the wind and visited a Walmart. I got very excited when I saw they carried more colours of Bernat Sox than I had seen at all four Zellers combined, but was intensely disappointed to discover that none of the new colours was my royal blue.

Completely discouraged, and having wasted much precious gas, I went home to search on eBay. There are currently two auctions for royal blue Bernat Sox yarn. The shipping on the Canadian auction is fairly exorbitant. I'm waiting to hear back on the shipping for the other one. Hopefully it is less outrageous.

If anyone snaps up either of these auctions I will have no choice but to hunt them down. You have been warned.

2005-Aug-22

At last, at last, I can 'come out of the closet' about this project! Here's the story: about five years ago, I started participating in an online bulletin board community, mostly for women, where we discuss life, the universe, and everything. There is one woman in this online community who has been there since I started, who has been a real bedrock of the group. Super-nice, very with-it, intelligent, reasoned, helpful, terrific, the whole package. Unfortunately, she's also had years of fertility challenges. I mean, obstacle after obstacle was thrown in front of this poor lady to the point of ridiculousness. And then finally this spring, she announced that she was expecting a baby. Well. The entire board (myself included) went kooky-nutso-wild in celebration. :)

Naturally, I am designing and knitting her something. But I was so paranoid about not jinxing the pregnancy that I didn't really want to start the project or even blog about it until she was about 24 weeks along.

So today, I am delighted to say that my self-imposed 'jinx ban' is lifting and I am discussing the project. :) This pattern will be for my book, so I won't be taking pictures of progress or going into tremendous detail about what it looks like. However, I can say that I will be making a romper with some fair isle-esque pattern banding around the chest, and fair isle ribbing at pant and sleeve cuffs (maybe the neckline, too).

I'm almost all set to go. I have a romper of DD's that fit her very well when she was smaller, which I will be using for sizing reference. I have already designed the fair isle motif. The only thing I still need to do in order to start swatching is complete my purchase of all the yarn I want. Two trips to Zellers have failed to yield all the colours I need, so I will be doing another shopping expedition there (hopefully sometime this week) to see whether my luck gets any better.

The Schedule gives me five weeks to do everything. Stay tuned.