Baby Surprise Jacket and notes

Last night my spouse saw me looking at the camera screen and asked, "Are you admiring your knitting or your photos of your knitting?" Good question. I must admit, I enjoy both: the finished knits and attempts to capture what I like about them in photographs.

This captures what I like about the Baby Surprise Jacket I finished last week:



Pattern: Elizabeth Zimmerman's Baby Surprise Jacket (from Knitter's Workshop and Dawn Adcock's cheat sheet)

Yarn: Regia Bamboo Color 1066 (approx. 1.1 skeins) and some cream wool that my MIL says she used to make my younger son's baby sweater

Needles: Brittany circular size 5

Cost: $18 in yarn, but most of skein 2 remains; with better use of the cream, I'd have gotten away with one $9 skein.

Notes: I spent a lot of time on-line trying to figure out how the thing went together. EZ has a diagram of the finished flat piece in her book. Most people show their "before and after" photos. But I had a hard time finding in-progress pictures to help me imagine how the thing comes together and where I was in relation to the finished object. If that describes you (and also for my own future reference), here are photos and descriptions of the where/when:

1. This is in the first section. All you're doing is knitting mitered corners by double decreases. Note that you're knitting the jacket from the top down.

If you're on circular needles, you can lay it down, flip up the end edges and see that you're constructing the sleeves and top back of the jacket at the same time.

3. Eventually you stop double decreasing and start double increasing. It will fill in that semicircle from above and start expanding the fabric.
4. At the point where the instructions have you put stitches on holders, you can again fold in to see that the stitch holders are at the edges of the right and left cardigan fronts and your needles are knitting the length of the sweater downward.

5. This is the classic "before" photo, the finished piece minus the sleeve seams.

6. If I straighten out the lower right edge, you can better see where the front cardigan edge is:

7. By folding that edge in and the sleeve up, the form begins to take a more recognizable shape.

8. Doing the same to the other side, you see a sweater at last.

Two seams and four buttons (I didn't make the last button hole) later, you have a sweater. Front:

And back.