A few baby gifts, finally finished

I finally got some baby gifts finished and packaged for shipping. For some reason, these projects having taken me ages to get finished. First, there are two pinwheel blankets:













































These are knit from the pinwheel blanket pattern in the book knitalong. The yarn is superwash merino from Tess' Designer Yarns.


And this little Baby Surprise Jacket has been 98% finished for months -- all I needed to do was to sew up the seams at the tops of the arms, and add buttons. The baby it was originally intended for has probably long since outgrown it, but luckily there's a new baby in the family that I'm going to give it to. Maybe I should stick with blankets, since they can't be outgrown?!

EZ Baby Surprise Jacket

I've spent the past week working on an Elizabeth Zimmermann Baby Surprise Jacket, for a cousin's baby shower. I knit like a maniac for days because I couldn't wait to see how this ingenious design was going to work. The sweater is knit entirely in garter stitch, in one flat piece. The finished knitting looks like this:


A little bit of folding, and it starts to look like a garment:



Fold a bit more, sew up the shoulder seams, and you get this adorable sweater:



I'll definitely be making more of these.

Pattern: Babies Garter-Stitch Surprise Jacket, from Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitting Workshop.
Yarn: Socks that Rock heavyweight superwash merino in the Barney Rubble colorway, 7 oz/350 yds. The sweater used all but a few yards of the skein. This yarn was a great choice for a baby garment -- beautiful colors, very soft, and machine washable.
Gauge: 5 sts per inch on size 6 needles.
Modifications: My only variation was using a slightly heavier yarn than the pattern called for, 5 sts per inch instead of 6. This first time around, I couldn't envision the finished product enough to even think about changing it. Next time, though, I think I'll put the buttonholes one ridge closer to the edge of the jacket.