A February Sweater for a February Baby

Wow! I had no intention of taking such a long blog holiday! First and foremost - thank you so much for all of your kind comments and well wishes for this little growing baby that is slowly but surely taking up more and more space in my mid-section. I'm currently at 18 weeks and we are set for our 20 week ultrasound in about a week and a half. Initially we were going to wait and see how we felt at the time of the ultrasound to decide whether or not we'd find out the sex. But seriously, picking out names is hard and stressful! So, at this point, we are planning to find out!

Anyway, over the last few weeks I've been busy, busy, busy. Given that a certain someone is getting married this month, my biggest project has been unbloggable. But, I was able to give Nonnahs her gift last night, so expect another finished object post in the near future!

I've also been knitting again. I've discovered the secret to Dis's Happy Hands is continental knitting...exclusively. I had tried to go back to knitting with my right hand after my last break and it was just too much. I now use my left hand for everything, except binding off (I still can't get the yarn out of the way - how do you people do it!?!). I also used the excuse of baby knitting to pick out some fabulously squishy worsted wool yarn - Dream in Color Classy, which has also been very hand friendly.

The product of my latest knitting efforts has been a February Baby Sweater for a certain February baby of mine:

This was my first experience knitting an Elizabeth Zimmermann pattern. While I appreciate that she doesn't spoon feed you line-by-line instructions, I am glad I didn't try to tackle this one as a new knitter. There were several things you just have to know how to do. She provides the ingredients, but you need to put the recipe together. It was a great pattern and otherwise pretty straight forward. I did get a little bogged down with the lace for a while, but I got my mojo back once I realized how close I was to finishing!

I used just about exactly one hank of Classy in the color Cocoa Kiss on size 6 needles (for the main body knitting). I did have to shorten the body by about a 1/2 inch to do this though. The yarn is wonderful! The colors are so great and the mottled nature of the variegation is very subtle and not distracting, but still just as enchanting to knit. I picked out this color first because I've loved it for a long time (and needed a good excuse to buy it!), but secondly because I thought it would be nice for either a boy or a girl. The color would look very elegant on a little girl, but also tone down the lace for a boy.

I've already decided that all the baby knitting I will be doing will be gender neutral because even though we will be finding out ahead of time what we are having, we certainly don't know who will be coming next. And I would like to use these hand knits for more than one baby! So along that line, I wanted to show you the other wee little sweater currently on my needles:

You probably recognize this as the Get Ziggy (Rav link) sweater that Nonnahs did such a lovely job on here. It is such a great little sweater and in this fun green (also Classy in the color Spring Tickle), I think it will be great for a boy or a girl. But I think my favorite part of this project is that when Nonnahs and I were talking about potential baby projects one day, we IMed each other the link for this pattern at the exact same time! Great minds must think alike ;-)