Chez Aristote

I made Elizabeth Zimmerman’s famous baby sweater, the February Baby Sweater that is, while I was waiting for Frank to show up.

I had started it at some point, appropriately, in February. Frank was due in mid-March, and although I’d been planning a sweater, some sweater for a while, I only got finished with the knitting around the due date. There’s a real problem with making stuff for a baby you haven’t seen: babies, as EZ points out, vary, yet I was obsessed with trying to somehow make a lot of things that could fit him right away, and to tell the truth, I was pretty successful. But there was a lot of fingernail-biting, and this sweater was probably the most difficult blind planning I did.

The first thing was to try to guess how many stitches to cast on in DK instead of the worsted of the original pattern, and then how to size the whole thing down to fit a newborn rather than an ambiguously large infant. Of course, Frank turned out to be unambiguously large, but I had no way of knowing this at the time.

I ended up looking at many, many different baby sweater patterns to get an idea about average newborn waist, neck, and arm circumferences, not to mention top-to-armhole and armhole-to-waist. I ended up picking an 18″ chest, a shot in the dark. A further profound difficulty I had in changing the pattern was whether to use the percentages from EZ’s Seamless Yoke Sweater, or try to keep the proportions of the FebruaryBabySweater itself, even though they might have been just a compromise to the lace pattern. I decided in the end that since babies have different proportions from people, I would use the proportions from the baby sweater even if it was more of a headache. Needless to say, all this required some math, the results of which you may find here in my notes.

A few days after my due date, after I’d sewn some baby pants, made a few pillow covers, put together a labor skirt which really did come in handy, I finally sewed on the buttons. I had the time: babies don’t look at the calendar as we do. The buttons, particularly nice, are from an old J.Crew sweater that was dead (the rest of the sweater actually became some of those baby pants); moreover, the placket from that sweater became a placket on this one, so that there would be less curling and none of those annoying gaps you get when you try to button two weak edges together. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to sew the armholes without making it look weird, even though I must have done this when I made my Owl sweater, which is essentially another EZ percentage yoke. But of course Frank does not mind, and apparently even tried to eat the appealing buttons minutes after the sweater was first put on.

The yarn is Queensland Collection Rustic Tweed, an especially beautiful DK (though it claims to be worsted, it isn’t really); not only is the light green beautifully varied with little yellowy brown highlights, it also has tan and black tweedy bits. The Rustic Tweed is one of the most successful several-color-tweeds I’ve seen; the other shades have similarly brilliant combinations. I got it at Fibre Space, my current favorite yarn store in Alexandria, VA; favorite largely as they seem to feel the same way about tweed that I do. I went there a few times in the waiting days to get special Frank-outfitting yarn, including the Fibre Company’s Terra that you see on his birth socks and birth hat.

Here he is, moments old, fresh from being weighed, two weeks and two days over the 19th-century-science-inspired due date. You can see that the sweater does indeed roughly fit him, which I considered a real triumph, as much as I was registering triumph at that time. As he was 9 lbs 7 oz of weight and 21 inches of length, however, I ultimately got lucky that he had the size to fill out the sweater enough. Plenty of other newborns would have been rather lost in the folds. (Here I would otherwise talk about his hat shown in the picture, which truly fit him exactly, but since it got lost by HB at an outdoor croquet match a few weeks after the birth, I’m too sad to really go into it.) But it fit, and he became the midwives’ hero not only for his impressive size but his manifold woolens.

Now, it fit him even better about 3 weeks into his life, as you see above and here below, when he was around 11 lb 3 oz. If you really wanted a newborn sweater, I’d go a little smaller, but then if you wanted it to fit later, 18″ might well be ideal. Much depends on the weather the baby will turn out to experience at a certain time.

Frank is pretty skeptical of ex-womb life in general, as one might expect from his tardy behavior, although a chiller baby you’d be hard pressed to find. But at least in the shifting cold/hot/cold/damp weather of the District of Columbia, his nice sweater has gotten used several times in several important cold-baby moments. And thus a combination of calculation and luck in both instances produced a baby-sized sweater and a sweater-sized baby.

Tags: Knitting //