First of all, thank you all so much for your warm embrace of Daisy Daisy! She’s flattered, and so am I. I am mulling over different possibilities to size the back shaping and will try to come up with some sensible instructions soon. Meanwhile, I’ve got other knitting that hasn’t found its way to the blog yet…

One of our reasons to travel east last month was to attend my cousin Caroline’s baby shower, the better to glimpse a bunch of relations on my mother’s side whom we’ve rarely seen since we moved back to the Northwest. Caroline is an interior designer with impeccable taste, and she’s also having a girl. All the most recent babies I’ve knit for have come with man tackle, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to pull out all the stops and design something really girly and adorable. So I hunted up some sock leftovers from the stash (those skeins of Dream in Color Smooshy are generous) and just kicked up my heels. The result is this sugary confection:

Sorry the photos aren’t a little better; they were taken in haste at the shower itself, since I was sewing on buttons in the airport and steam blocking in my brother’s hotel room just a few hours before! But I think you get the sense that if you were to make a big sundae of sugar & spice & everything nice, this would be the cherry on top. Pink! Picot! Scallops! Rose petals! (I actually feel a need to go read some Ernest Hemingway and knit Scratchy Man Wool just looking at it.) I opted for a sort of bubble hem because I was quickly running out of the red (that’s “In Vino Veritas,” and you might recognize it from a certain February Baby Sweater)… only about eighteen inches remained after I bound off. Here’s the back:

The rose motif (though I think of them as snowflakes) is from a chart in Lizbeth Upitis’s Latvian Mitten book. I added the “lice” wherever there was a particularly long carry, thinking of baby toes getting snagged on the way through. Since The Baby Currently Known as Bundle doesn’t have a real name yet, I’m calling the design after her mother: Sweet Caroline. My cousin may have broken a land speed record with her thank-you note, so I can smugly report that this little top has been dubbed an heirloom and a favorite gift. Thanks, Caroline! Can’t wait to meet your little daughter!

This is my third year of crazy knitting during the Tour de France, and it seems I’m getting the hang of it. This is the first year I’ve actually underreached and not had to grit my teeth and knit like George Hincapie riding a time trial with a broken collarbone to finish my project. I’m late on the wrap-up because I took a little vacation to visit my family and other beloved people in the Northeast, but I did manage to press my husband into service for a quick photo shoot while we were waiting for a train in Reading, Massachusetts. So here’s Daisy Daisy!

Note to self: Good idea to take pictures after a transcontinental red-eye, eh, genius? Despite the fact that I look like yesterday’s toast crusts, I love this little jacket. The improvised back shaping and the set-in seamless sleeves worked out perfectly. The yarn is lovely to wear, and I’m just not bothering myself about the really obvious color change at the shoulders. I did decide the bicycle wheel/flower design on the front needed a little more punch, so while I was frittering away a couple of hours in the Long Beach airport yesterday afternoon, I revised it comme ça:

Just doubling the outer rim gave it the extra weight I wanted. All this embellishment is just me drawing loops of yarn through the fabric with a crochet hook and binding them off, by the way. I think that’s probably obvious, but I wouldn’t want you to think I’m capable of anything fancier than that when it comes to surface design. As you can see, just making a straight line stretches me somewhat. Oh, and the sweater closes with an i-cord button loop:

When all’s said and done, I needed more than 5 and a half skeins of the Louet MerLin Worsted, about 860 yards. I have learned respect for the appetite of the daisy stitch and its relatives.

If people are interested in a pattern, I am willing to work on one, but I have to tell you I’m nervous as a cat about trying to size this thing properly for anyone who isn’t built with proportions similar to mine. It would be really straightforward if it weren’t for the back shaping, which, as you can see, turned out very fitted. If your curves are closer together, you’d have to space the decreases and increases more closely from bottom to top. If they’re shallow, you’d want less shaping. If you don’t really have curves or just favor boxier silhouettes, you could scrap the shaping entirely. The beauty of knitting is that, with practice, we can learn to easily tailor designs to our own bodies, and I’d really want to encourage that for anyone knitting Daisy Daisy, but I know many aren’t comfortable working outside a pattern and as a designer who aims to please I cringe at the thought of someone following what I did and then finding it doesn’t fit her at all. I think if I do write this up it will have to be á la Zimmermann, asking knitters to do a bit of calculating to find their own best fit.

But hey! A sweater in three weeks! Let’s stop with the designer’s insecurities and open a bottle of Hendrick’s in celebration! Because it’s hot here in Portland. Apparently I missed the worst of it, but I still bought a cucumber at the farmers’ market this morning with an afternoon G&T in mind. I think it’ll go well with the sewing activity I have planned. (More on that later.)