In October, my niece celebrated her first birthday.  That same month, I found out that my CEO and his wife were also expecting a baby girl.  So I decided sweaters were in order.

The pattern I settled on was Summer Chills Cardigan by Danielle Reiner.  It’s adorable, the pattern was adaptable to varying ages and it seemed like the perfect little baby sweater for cool San Francisco summers for these two little girls.

I started with the sweater for my CEO’s soon-to-be baby girl, Evie.  I used a worsted acrylic blend in white – soft enough for a baby and machine washable enough to actually let it be worn.  I did slightly modify the pattern, but only in so far as…I do not know how to crochet.  So I didn’t crochet the edges.  I just left them bound off.  Because I didn’t add the crochet edging, I also didn’t make a button hole.  In the case of Evie’s sweater, I simply added two pieces of pink ribbon to tie the sweater together across her chest.  I realize now that I think I shorted Baby Evie’s sweater by one lace repeat but oh well.  Hopefully she’ll be a short baby!

Before I had finished completed the second sleeve on the sweater, I took it over to size on my niece.  I was making the 6-month pattern for Evie but it seemed awfully large for a 6-month old.  I tried it on my niece at age 13-months and it was just about the right size.  She isn’t a tiny girl either, so I’m not entirely sure why my sizing was so different from the pattern but it didn’t really matter as long as it would fit little niece-y pants.

For my niece, I opted to use some FibraNatura Sensational worsted weight in red superwash merino.  I had a few extra skeins left over from another project and I thought she’d look smashing in the color.

For this sweater, I added a lace repeat so it would be slightly longer on my niece.  I also left out the crocheted edging but instead of ribbon, I made two i-cords which I attached as the ties for the sweater.

And as an aside, thank you Google+ for having Auto Awesome make an animated gif out of my photos.  It’s posted above just to give you a sense of the sweater in motion.  🙂

I didn’t have enough yarn left to make the matching hat for the sweater, but I did have enough to make a headband.  I simply knit a few repeats of the lace row to make a rectangular piece about 15 inches long, used mattress stitch to sew the ends together and then made another small band to loop around the seam and tacked that into place to create a slightly gathered look and hide the seam.  Sadly, at Christmas, the headband didn’t stay on my niece’s head long enough to take a photo but one of these days, I’ll get one.