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The Story:
One of my favorite friends and her husband just had a baby girl named Katherine Mabel. I waited until the little one was born before deciding what to knit for her. Once I saw the beautiful Katie Bell, I got started on a pink girly-shaped cardigan in CEY’s Classic Silk. The shape I used is easy to knit and I adore the result.
I worked the bodice cuff to cuff by casting on for the right sleeve, shaping the sleeve, casting on stitches for the bodice, working a split for the neck and cardigan opening, then binding off stitches at the left edge of the bodice before working the left sleeve. When the bodice was complete, I picked up stitches along the lower edge for the skirt and worked down to the right length. I finished the neck edge and front bands with garter-stitch trim.
Classic Silk (my favorite yarn for baby gifts) is a soft, yet strong, yarn with a beautiful texture that washes well. Because I couldn’t resist adding something a little silly, I used duplicate stitch and a little embroidery in a second color to depict my imperfect interpretation of those spring-time sugar-coated marshmallow candies.
Visit Cecily's blog to see what else she's up to.
The Yarns:
Classic Silk
50% cotton, 30% silk, 20% nylon
The silk used in Classic Silk is not the slippery, shiny kind. Instead, it’s Bourette silk—rustic, soft, and tweedy-looking. Bourette silk is well known for its healing and skin-calming properties. It’s used in the UK for diaper liners to calm diaper rash. Bourette blended with cotton and nylon makes a beautiful yarn that is soft and strong and takes dye well. Its slightly nubbly, tweedy texture is perfectly suited to simple stockinette stitch.
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more photos
The Pattern:
Here is the free downloadable Katie Bell's Baby Cardi pattern.
If you have difficulty downloading or printing the PDF pattern above, try these:
page 1, page 2
The Stitches:
A duplicate stitch is an embroidery technique that covers a knit stitch with a different color yarn. Because it duplicates a knitted stitch by following the path of the yarn in the stitch, you need to be able to recognize the V-shape of a knitted stitch.
This technique is helpful to avoid intarsia, as Cecily did in Katie Bell's Cardi. Another great use of duplicate stitch is when more than two colors are used in a fair isle pattern. Rather than stranding 3 or more colors along each row, only strand the two colors that are used the most, then when the garment is finished, go back with the other colors and cover the stitches for the third color with duplicate stitch.
Learn how to do duplicate stitch.
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