Land o’ Sunshine

When my parents came to visit  me the family Sunshine Daughter the grandkids, my father started telling Sunshine Daugther that she was a “Hot Ticket”.   Her response was “Noooo…I not a Hot Ticket.  I just Sunshine Daughter.”    Since their visit, I occasionally call her Hot Ticket, just to hear her response (it really cracks me up). 

Here is the Hot Ticket Sweater (formally known as Hugs & Kisses Sweater):

Pattern: Personal version of EZ yoke sweater (Knitting Without Tears).  Knit for a 22″ chest size.  Fits aproximately a 2T. 

Yarn: Diamond’s Galway Heather in purply-pink (2 balls) and ecru (1/2 ball), aprox 500 yards.  Also about 25 yds of Swish Superwash in Ballerina Pink. 

Needles: US 8 circs–16″ & 29″,  US 8 dpns, US 6 circs 16″. 

Thoughts: 

• I loved the hem on the bottom and on the cuff.   SO cool.  (DH wanted to know why his didn’t have that hem).  
• I alternately love and despise the cable.   I like it best on the middle section of the yoke.  I am pretty sure it looks best there because of the placing of the purl stitches.  Of course it is not blocked yet, so maybe the irregularities will even themselves out a little bit…then again, maybe not. 
• There is no neck shaping that EZ calls for after yoke decreases.   Well, I did them, but there were two problems (1) the neck came too high, and (2) I did not place the short rows correctly, so the center of the sweater was off-center. 
• Binding off.   I bound off loosely (or so I thought), only to find it didn’t fit over her head.   Everything go ripped back to the last decrease and I bound off with a double knit bind-off (supposedly a more elastic version of the normal bind off).   Still too tight.   Third time.   I used a K1P1 bind off after the last yoke decrease.   It doesn’t look too bad and best yet it fits over her head–the whole point of a sweater, right?

Without further ado, here is my Hot Ticket!  

Sunday morning I cast on for my self designed sweater.   I worked the bottom, hem, cable and body.   I finished the body around 10pm Monday night.   Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?  Well, it is only 22″ around and 9.5″ in length, so let’s not get too carried away, right? 

Here is a close up of the cable at the bottom.   ]

This cable is also going to be on the hem of the sleeves and the bottom of the yoke.    So, here’s the thing.   The cable is supposed to be the XO pattern, however, if I squint, sure it looks like XOXO on the bottom, but it is really not very neat.   How do I fix the cables and make them behave?  

Since finishing the Wallaby, I have been thinking about knitting another sweater.   I’d love to knit one for myself, but man that is a lot of yarn.   So, I moved on and decided to knit a sweater for Sunshine daughter.   I looked at alot of sweaters, all of them very nice, but nothing that really called to me, so I set about designing my own sweater.  

I read some great books and came up with some of the things I wanted: knit in the round with a  cable pattern on bottom and cuffs. 

I searched through another helpful resource (Vogue Knitting) and found the cable pattern I wanted.   I then swatched on US 6 (looks great!), but then decided to swatch on US 8 (looks even better).  Then I swatched the cable pattern(looks good).   Then, I decided to flip the pattern from vertical to horizontal (looks ok).   Swatch again.  

The temporary name of the pattern is Hug & Kiss Sweater (so origninal, I know).