The Baby Shower Insurance Jacket

This year I've been looking at my four remaining boxes of stash yarn and trying to come up with a plan to use it up more quickly than I've been doing. It's mostly just odds and ends of yarn, not matched lots that would be suitable for making whole items. I was looking especially at my box of worsted yarns and wondering what I could do with it, since I don't work with worsted much anymore. The colours I have in that box play together quite well, and for quite some time I toyed with the idea of using it to make an afghan. But I'd have to buy quite a lot of yarn to use as a base colour to tie the other colours together, and I didn't even particularly want an afghan, at least not of that style, or know anyone I could gift it to. Then I hit upon a plan: I would use my stash yarn to make baby clothes and toys, which all those half skeins would be perfect for, and put them away to give as shower gifts. If there's one thing I can count on, it's that there are always bound to be more babies appearing on the scene, and it would be so nice not to have to scramble to get something made in time to give it to the new parents.

This year I shall have time to make just one stash yarn baby gift, but going forward I'll wait until the end of the year when all the rest of the items on my list are finished, and then whip up as many baby things as I have time for.

For the one baby item I made this year, I took from my box of worsted weight yarns 150 grams of Phentex Merit acrylic worsted in "Aqua" (left over from this turquoise cardigan, which I made for me back in 2013). Then I searched Ravelry for a suitable baby clothing pattern and found the Leaf Love Baby Sweater, by Taiga Hilliard Designs. I had enough turquoise yarn to make it in the 6-12 months size.

Here's the finished item. It was quite an easy, quick knit, and finishing was a snap since there were no seams to sew. I was also fortunate enough to find buttons that went really well with the yarn -- turquoise can be a difficult colour to coordinate.

This project used 120 grams of stash yarn.