Finished Object : Owlet Sweater

After getting my yarn in the mail yesterday, I picked back up the owlet sweater I started for my niece pretty much right away. I'm not a big fan of having lots of unfinished projects laying around because they generally make me feel sulky and unhappy about them not being finished, even if it's something that doesn't have a deadline or any real reason to be finished already or very soon. I only had one sleeve and the yoke left to do, so it only took a few hours to get it all finished up.

Originally I had intended this to fit my niece this coming winter and was planning on giving it to her for Christmas or her 2nd birthday this January. I'm not a big fan of the way the sizes are numbered in the pattern, because it confused me. This is mostly my fault, but I also accidentally started following the directions for the baby size 2 before I realized the child sizes were on the next page, and I think at that point I had finished the body and had the correct number of stitches for a child size 2, which is for 5-6 years old. I added quite a bit of length onto the body because my niece is pretty tall but thin, so as she grows I figured she could wear this as a dress or tunic, then later as a sweater. I'm not sure when I'll end up giving this to my niece, but it's much better that it ended up too big rather than too small! I've read in a few project notes that the sizing for this tends to run small, so maybe she'll be wearing it sooner rather than later after all.

Overall this was enjoyable to knit, I don't usually do bottom up or yoke sweaters so it was something different, although I would have preferred it to be top down (and I'm sure it wouldn't have been too hard to modify). If I made this again, I would just bind off the underarm stitches and then mattress stitch the hole closed, because my grafting wasn't looking great and I just ended up doing a three needle bind inside out anyways. I also wish the pattern could have provided more specific directions in some places, especially for the yoke decreases where it just said to decrease the stitches evenly within the round instead of giving actual stitch counts.

I just did the button eyes on one owl, and did them in gray because I think white would have been too stark and jumped out a bit too much. I tried to weave in the ends really securely, but I am always paranoid that they'll un-weave themselves... hopefully that doesn't happen with this sweater!

I think the finished product is very cute, I like the color and I think it will be a good color for my niece and hopefully something she can get a lot of wear out of! For more specifics on this project, please check out my project page on Ravelry!