Dresses for the little girls in your life

It's always fun to knit little dresses. I know I've made many in my knitting career, and by looking at our sales reports for dress patterns, it's clear to me that you all have made many as well! Some of the best selling dress patterns for babies/little girls are by Minnowknits. The Brittany Jumper # 130 has always been one of my favorites. I made two of these - one for Helen and one for Sophie - when they were about a year old.

The Sunflower Dress #186 is adorable too. It has a little more coverage above from the waist up, and the fun buttons on the front, as well as the stitch patterning, give it that little something special.

The Cotton Candy Dress #218 is precious. It has sweet little sleeves and a lovely diamond pattern on the skirt and bodice.

The Pinafore Dress #230 was the hit of the year last spring. It was featured in several ad campaigns in knitting magazines, and is probably one of our top selling patterns, ever. It's actually one of Minnowknits' most simple dresses, and works well in both solid and variegated yarns.

And the most recent Minnowknits Dress, the Daisy Dress #238 is what I took to Florida last week for my vacation knitting. It is a simple hemmed dress with gorgeous I-cord flowers attached at the bottom of the skirt. I used Berroco Weekend and made several modifications to this pattern (see my changes in tomorrow's post). I'm thrilled, as it came out beautifully!
All of these patterns can be made in Jil Eaton Minnow Merino and Jil Eaton CottonTail yarns. Of course Berroco Comfort and Berroco Weekend are also wonderful options!

Here, kitty kitty!

I just finished a baby sweater for a friend's baby. It’s their first baby so I really wanted to knit something for them. They decided not to find out the gender of the baby, so I had to choose colors that would work well for either a boy or girl.

I have always loved the Roo Designs Cat Pullover pattern that we sell. It's so cute! It calls for a worsted weight yarn so I picked out several great colors of Jil Eaton Minnow Merino. What a super color selection - it was difficult to pick.

I also thought it would be fun to make a matching hat and socks. I used my Ann Norling Kid's Fruit Cap pattern for the hat, and just followed the stitch count and shaping - but striped the hat. Then for the socks I used my Yankee Knitter Classic Socks for the Family pattern.

And here is the result - I love it!

A new favorite yarn

What a great weekend we had for the 4th - hope everybody else had a nice time, too. We had four gorgeous, sun-filled days at our camp in Maine. The lake was over a foot higher than normal from all the rain they'd had, and we arrived to find our dock pieces (and everybody else's) had floated away. After finding the pieces and raising the dock about 8" so it wasn't submerged, the sun came out and things started to dry out. There was lots of relaxing, lots of tubing (for the kids) and even a little knitting!

I started on my Marble baby sweater and almost finished the back by the end of our first day there. But then I had an urge to try the Minnow Merino so I started the little sweater out of that. And look what I have now:

It was easy and quick, and I loved the yarn! Tip for all who knit this - I used one size down for all hems and front ribbings. The pattern does not call for this, but I strongly recommend going down one size needle - otherwise your hems will flare. I made the smallest size, and it is really precious.

Suzie was in the other day and picked up some of the Minnow Merino. She emailed me and said:

"Minnow Merino is the MOST WONDERFULLY AWESOME YARN TO knit with -- dare I type nicer than cotton??? Ah and the color!!! So deep! Good grief Jill, I just cast on for a mitten and think I've gone to heaven. I can't believe how soft it is. I'll be in tomorrow for some more colors (yeah, I KNOW it's wool and I know it is 100+ degrees out, BUT.....that yarn is incredible!)"

Camp knitting

I'm headed to our camp in Maine tonight for the 4th of July weekend. It's Marc's 40th birthday, so he will be having his favorite "lobstah" dinner tomorrow night. I like lobster, but not the getting messy part, so Marc's nice enough to pry & pick the meat out of my lobster so I don't have to deal with the ick... I mean, he's getting messy anyway, so it's really no trouble in my opinion!

There won't be knitting on the drive over - only in little spurts here and there. Four hours of driving on Route 2 while trying to knit is enough to make you seriously carsick. Believe me, I've tried. Marc's great - he gives me warnings "In about 2 minutes you should put your knitting down" or "Up around this curve you can start knitting again." What a perfect partner!

I do have a few small projects to take with me and hopefully there will be some down time so I can knit. I am going to make (well, start?) a Minnowknits Coco Loco out of the new Minnow Merino. It's a sweater I've knit before, but I just love it, and the colors of the Minnow Merino are calling out to me. It was hard to decide which ones to use, but after about 10 minutes of complete indecision, I ended up choosing these three:

I think it will be so cute!

Then yesterday we got a new yarn in - it's from Kertzer and it's called Marble. It's 100% acrylic and is perfect for baby blankets, afghans, sweaters and more. It's surprisingly soft - in my opinion it is AS soft as Encore (if not more so...) It's a dk weight, but also crosses over well into the 5 stitches to the inch/worsted category. I started a little baby sweater last night and I like it a lot! I know, I know... I've always been sort of a 100% acrylic snob. But this one really changed my mind when I saw it a few weeks ago, and I know that people will really like it. That's why I brought in 14 great colors of it to start. Aren't they pretty?

Make way for Minnow Merino

The Be Sweet yarns are finally online, but our ravenous shop customers have pretty much decimated our stock in just one short week! I apologize - some of the images online are not showing up. I'm working on fixing that.

We have very low quantities in some colors, but there is a lot more on order and we'll just have to be patient. I can tell that it's going to be hard to keep this in stock, so if you want some, order it and if we don't have it, we'll put you in line for it. We should be getting another shipment of Magic Balls (and some new colors) in about 2 weeks.

Yesterday we got our shipment of Jil Eaton's Minnow Merino - WOW! This is washable superfine merino wool for kids - but don't just think kids - these colors may be bright and kid-like, but that's not going to stop me from using it for myself. We had several customers madly digging into the box as we unloaded it. (This has been a trend with our shipments recently...)

New Jil Eaton patterns are due in next week. Can't wait to start working on this yarn!

I'm finishing up a cute little bag made with one Knobby Ball and a Be Sweet pattern. I'll have a photo tomorrow.