Deck the Holly with Dress and Bunny

I do like knitting baby clothes. The projects are so cute, and they are so small that they can be both quickly finished and often made from a few skeins from one's stash. I got a brand new grandniece named Holly in February 2023, which meant I got to make both a birth gift and a Christmas present. Yay for baby-sized knitting projects!

For Holly's Christmas present, I turned to Ravelry to find a dress pattern. I found the Nandi pattern, designed by Triona Murphy. It's quite cute and also very sensible. I have a whole box of worsted odds and ends, and after looking them over, I selected a skein of Bernat Super Value Solids in Forest Green (this was one of two skeins left over after I made my sister a Christmas afghan and matching throw pillow) and a skein of Loops & Threads Meandering in Dark Salmon. The salmon was a DK, but I liked the combination of the green and salmon so much that I made it work by knitting with two strands of the salmon. 

The completed dress, made in size 6 to12 months. I try to learn something new with each knitting project. This project involved a few new knitting experiences for me. I am not sure if I've ever used the mosaic technique before. I enjoyed trying that out. I don't believe I'd ever used a yarn double to increase its weight before either except with a felted pair of slippers, and that's a good option to have. But the most valuable lesson I learned from this piece was that I finally figured out how to pick up wrapped stitches without having them show. The key thing is that when you're knitting the wrap and a live stitch together, you must make sure that the wrap stitch is on the wrong side of your work. You might have to rearrange the stitches on your needle to get them in the correct orientation, but that's easy enough to do.

For the single button on the back of the neckline, I found a button in my button tin, keeping the material cost of this dress at $0. (I did have to buy the pattern.)

I also sewed Holly's a velvet bunny for her Christmas present. I used stretch velvet and a pattern I had on hand and just had to buy a pair of safety eyes for $2.53 and a metre of satin ribbon for $1. 

Last year Holly's older brother Sawyer got a brown velvet teddy bear for Christmas, and I made sure to make his sister a bunny and use a different-coloured neck ribbon in order to prevent any upsetting mix-ups and/or tug of war episodes in their household. I chose a colour of ribbon that would go with Holly's dress. It, er, coordinates better with the contrast colour in the bodice of the dress than it appears to do in this photo.

And when completed, my work added up to not a bad little Christmas present for the money.

An Olive Sweater for Olivia

Christamas 2023 approacheth as Christmas has a relentless habit of doing every year, and that means I need to put together a gift for my seven-year-old honorary niece, Olivia. 

When I searched Ravelry for a nice pattern for Olivia's Christmas sweater, I ended up selecting the very same pattern  I had used in 2017 for my grandniece Cauliflower's eighth birthday present: Color Me Pretty, by Elena Nodel. It is a very pretty design, and I already had it in my library, so why not? 

I did go with a different colour palette. Olivia's colouring is very different from Cauliflower's. I gathered together odds and ends of eight different colours of yarn (teal, rust, dark blue, tangerine, aqua, peach, dark green, and orange) from my DK stash box that I thought worked together, made a yarn sampler from them, and took it to Romni Wools during their Boxing Week sale in 2022 with the idea that a blue or a green yarn would go well with the contrast colours I'd picked out. I purchased 400 grams of a nice muted sea blue yarn for it. Then in August, when I took the bag of yarn out to begin work on it, I realized I'd bought worsted instead of DK. I've never made that mistake before and I certainly hope I never do again. Not only did it mean an extra trip downtown, it proved to be a very expensive mistake for a couple of other reasons. 

I returned the 20% off blue yarn to Romni Wools and bought 350 grams of Drops Karisma in Light Olive for the main colour at full price. In October, when I finished the sweater and had a skein of those seven skeins to return and looked at the email receipt for that purchase for the first time (I don't have a cell phone and can't check the electronic receipt before leaving the store as I always do with paper receipts), I realized I'd been charged for nine skeins of the Drops Karisma instead of the seven I'd actually bought. And I can't expect Romni to correct the error given that I can't prove it at this point. Sigh. Well, I've been shopping at Romni for many years now, and that was the first mistake they ever made on a bill. From now on when I shop there, I'm going to figure out what my purchases should total on my calculator before I go to the cash register, and if the total the store employee comes up with have doesn't square with mine, ask them to double check the bill.  

The completed sweater, in a size 8. I think the colour scheme works pretty well and will be flattering on Olivia, who has brown hair, hazel eyes, and a slight olive cast to her skin. This design is a good way to use up some odds and ends of various colours, because if you're using eight different colours, you will only need to do two or three rounds in each colour. 

The matching hat. Which I predict Olivia will be more excited about and wear more than the sweater. She doesn't care about clothes at this point -- when she's opening her gifts from me, she just takes the sweater or dress out of the gift bag and turns around to hand it to her mother without so much as a second glance or even unfolding it -- but she does really enjoy accessories. 

I used 5 grams each of the rust, dark blue, aqua, dark green, and orange, and three grams each of tangerine and peach, and 20 grams of teal, or 51 grams of stash yarn. Or so I'm estimating. (I do wish I had a more reliable and precise scale to use for weighing yarn than the decades old thrift shop plastic Weight Watchers number I'm using!) I had 30 grams of the newly purchased olive yarn left (plus one skein to return to the store), so that's a net stash decrease of 21 grams. 

 

Some books and a sort of outfit designer kit that I picked up at the thrift store and Dollarama to go with the sweater and cap.  

 

The gift so far. There is another component to Olivia's Christmas present that I'm not quite finished making yet, but will be writing up in its own post once I am. Still, even incomplete, it doesn't make such a bad showing.