Greenery

So here's what I've been working on this week.  It's a new baby/little girl's sweater design tentatively called "Guacamole".  It's a zippy little layering sweater perfect for spring, fall or cool summer nights.

This pattern is a milestone for me.  Up until now, I have pretty much written my patterns as I knit them.  I needed to check myself as I wrote just to make sure that the ideas I had would actually work out that way in real life.  After I made the first sample, I'd knit it again in a different size just to make sure I didn't write something down incorrectly during round 1.

For this pattern, I wrote the first group of yoke instructions as I knit the pattern.  But, not all the sizes work with that set of instructions.  So last night I did a little pattern analysis and figured out how the pattern would work for the second group of sizes.  As I wrote it out, I thought I was basing my guesses on things that made sense, but this was new territory for me.  I figured there was a very good chance that I'd start knitting the second sweater and find out that every line I had written was wrong.

Much to my glee, I'm now 28 lines in and everything is looking good!  It'll be a big time-saver if I can write patterns before I knit samples, so I'm glad to have turned this corner.

I wasn't planning to release anything this summer, but I think that I'll have this pattern ready for testers in about 2 weeks, then it'll take about a month for the test.  Since this is a nice light summer sweater, I will plan to release it sometime in late June/early July.

One thing I learned during this knit: I absolutely love the Three Irish Girl's Adorn sock yarn.  The colorways are gorgeous and the wool is quite soft enough to make baby garments out of.  My only confusion is that the label says it's 100 grams and 430 yards.  But my actual skein weighted 131 grams.  So I'm not sure if the yarn is just much heavier than the label says (I don't think it is, because the gauge is very much a fingering-weight gauge) or if they give you 30% more yarn in each skein than the label states.  I'll have to unravel this mystery before I can accurately estimate how much yarn each size will take.  This size 4T only used a little over 1 skein and I had estimated that it would use about 1 2/3 skeins.  So something isn't quite adding up!