A couple of Sweater Girls

During the long drive from Utah to Tennessee, I kept myself occupied by knitting teeny sweaters.

They're pretty quick and fun to knit, and I think they turned out really cute.

The pattern is from the website Sticka Till Barbie, which is a Swedish website that offers a huge (like over 1000 patterns) library of free knitting patterns for clothing and accessories to knit for Barbie, Bratz and a few other dolls. This pattern is a basic cap sleeve shell that is knit in the round, so there is no sewing and only two ends to work in.

The patterns are fairly simple, but they are translated from Swedish, and they assume a basic understanding of knitting, so I wouldn't say these would be an ideal beginner project unless you have an experienced knitter around to fill in the gaps.

The green sweater that Diva Midge is wearing was the first I knit. There isn't any gauge information provided, and since this is so small, I wouldn't have swatched anyway. The author provides a suggested needle size (2mm) which I used and a yarn suggestion, which I didn't. This sweater is knit from thrifted crochet cotton that looks to be size 20, but isn't labelled. This weight was absolutely perfect for this project. It fits Midge beautifully and the scale looks great.

So, my next attempt wasn't so great. I used a smaller yarn (size 10 crochet cotton) and unsurprisingly ended up with a smaller sweater. Oops. I guess Skipper gets this one...

Having learned my lesson with the white one I made a few alterations for the blue version. This is knit from self-striping sock yarn, so it is fingering weight. Since it's very close to the weight of the white crochet cotton, I decided to use that as a sort of gauge swatch, and added stitches based roughly on that. I ended up casting on 36 sts, instead of 32, and then casting off 4 sts for the armhole instead of two, and casting on 10 instead of 8 for the sleeve. It's amazing the difference 4 extra stitches makes. I also did a rib knit hem band on this sweater, instead of the garter stitch ridge called for in the pattern.

I'm pretty thrilled with how these turned out. I started another in a light worsted yarn, but managed to break one of my needles. Ooops. That's on hold until I can get a metal needle. I'm a tight knitter.