Sweater Dress

My small yarn order arrived yesterday and I immediately began working on what I thought was going to become a baby raglan.

Being foolish, I decided to use an 18" doll as my model. Measures taken, quick calculations, I was set to knit something double the size of the doll, thinking that a baby would fit in it easily, with room to spare.

But oh no! What I ended up with was a sweater bigger than the doll, but too small for a baby! So it became a sweater dress and another failed experiment. At least the doll looks reasonably cute in it.

Oh and if you'd like to reproduce this for whatever reason, here's how:

You'll need a size 6, 16" circular (or size to obtain gauge -- aprox. 5 stitches/inch) and same size dpns. Worsted weight yarn was my choice for this.

There's not much to this sweater at all. For starters, I cast on 80 stitches on the 16" circular and knit 2 ridges ( 4 rows total) in garter stitch -- alternate purling and knitting rounds -- and worked in stockinette for 36 more rounds. Then 8 stitches were placed on scrap yarn for each armhole.

The body was set aside and the sleeves were worked on the dpns- which I hate, but they are a necessary evil here -- and knit 20 stitches for 20 rounds, placed 8 stitches onto scrap yarn and joined with the body at last. Once the sleeves are placed diametrically opposed each other, it was a matter of knitting for as long as I wanted the armholes, in this case I wanted an inch or so, so I worked 8 rounds and placed markers where each sleeve begins and ends. From here on it's down to decreasing stitches before and after each marker until sleeve stitches are eliminated and it's time for complete removal.

I removed the piece as soon as I finished decreasing all sleeves stitches and there were more or less 50'ish stitches left on the needle. You may keep decreasing or work the collar, but I wanted a lose and elastic neck opening to make it easier to pull the sweater over the doll's head.

You can certainly make this in one solid color, but I thought of adding red to spark some interest. The sleeves were knit in the contrasting color and once I joined them with the body I chose to knit 8 rounds in grey before I switched to red, but you don't have to wait to start knitting with your contrasting color of choice once everything is united in the same needle. In fact, had I pondered this a bit more, I would probably make the same decision.

The hat and scarf were knit on board and loom of course and are identical to the previous accessories I made last week, with exception of the hat having a knitted on I-cord border.

So there you have it... the dumb baby sweater turned doll dress.