Hey, Sugar Sugar!

Sugar is the name of the pattern of the very first sweater I have knitted.  I found the pattern on Ravelry, and decided to make it for K3's birthday.  Since she has a ton of pink clothes, I didn't want to make the sweater in pink.  I was thinking a sea green, perhaps, or a blue to go with her eyes.  The yarn shop didn't have a green in the hue and type of yarn I needed, so I went with the blue.  Kind of a cornflower color.

This sweater was super easy for a beginning knitter like me.  (I'm pretty sure I'm still a beginner; it has only been a little over three months since my first knitting lesson).  It knits from the top down, all one piece, so there wasn't much to mess up, LOL.  It does require an i-cord cast on and bind off, which were totally new to me; however those were easy to learn and video tutorials of this technique are simple to find online.

It only took me a week to knit this sweater!  I told you it was easy!  In fairness, I should disclose that during that week I took a 500 mile car trip (the drive to the U.P.), so had many many hours of knitting in the car.  Still, if you sat and knit for an hour a night while watching TV, I bet you could do this sweater in two weeks or so.

I wanted to find daisy buttons to put on the sweater to make it more feminine, and so people wouldn't think my little blondie who is just starting to grow much hair is a boy when they see her in blue.

Finding daisy buttons just 1/2" in size proved to be difficult, so I ended up going with white flowers and using yellow thread to sew them on with.  Viola!  Daisies!

I loved this sweater so much, that when we were in the store looking for daisy buttons, and DH saw some camo patterned yarn and suggested that I make K3 a second sweater in camo, I decided to do just that!  Besides, I still had a couple of days of traveling left, and was out of yarn to knit with.  ;0)

The second sweater came out a hair larger than the first, even though I followed the same pattern and used the same size needles.  I contribute it to the yarn being a different brand and slightly fatter, although the labels of the two yarns said they were the same weight.  Anyway, this one, knit mostly on the return trip from the U.P., also took about a week to make.

Now I just have to get them blocked, and wrapped up for gift-giving at the end of the month.