My Design Process: Northwest Baby Sweater

I’ve been working on designing a baby sweater for my stepsister Blair. Fortunately, I got a pretty early start because this has definitely been an iterative process. I already shared the first steps of my design process. I have since knit the sweater twice. I’ve used what I liked and what I didn’t like about these two drafts to write a pattern. Now I just have to knit the final sweater!

Since the shape of the sweater is so simple, the design process has been about getting the intarsia sun and clouds perfect. For the first sweater, I knit two clouds, one on the front, one  on the back. I quickly decided that I didn’t need two clouds as juggling the bobbins to knit three separate intarsia patches became unruly. And, although babies do have giant heads, I think I left the neckline a little bit too giant.

The other major problem with the first sweater was the shape of the clouds. They don’t look very cloudlike. Oops. I do like the way the embroidered sun rays look, so that was a success.

For the second sweater (which I haven’t embroidered yet), I made a mistake in reading one of my scribbled annotations (oops) so the body ended up pretty short and fat. That’s an easy fix for next time. The sun ended up a little bit small, but I love the way the brown moss stitch border looks.

On the second sweater, I think I really nailed the cloud shape. I’m quite proud of how knitting it over the shoulder decreases really gives it a fluffy cloud shape! I’m still considering what to do with the finished neckline. I’d like to add something (crochet edge? embroidered edge?) to make it look a bit more polished, but I don’t want it to distract from the designs on the sweater. I welcome any ideas!