FO: Little Spare Time.

One of the best things about participating in the Ravelry Gift-Along is finding lots of new-to-me designers and hence lots of new patterns to queue and favourite! On the hunt for a suitable sweater pattern to knit our 2yr old nephew for Xmas, I found Little Spare Time by Terri Kruse. Terri has some amazing designs - from adult sweaters (including a grown up version of this pattern), to shawls and hats and other accessories. I really felt drawn to her design aesthetic and Little Spare Time was a pattern that fit my need for something relatively easy and quick to knit, but still being stylish and that 'little bit different'. I think it looked like an easy to wear sweater for an active toddler, and I really liked the buttoned up shawl type collar.


 I used some Bendigo Classic 8ply in "Tasman". This is my first time using this particular yarn and it has an almost crepe like appearance. It was a little bit splitty and not my favourite yarn I've ever knit, however it blocked really well and this smoothed out any uneven stitches (I found the crepe made these areas really obvious so I am glad the blocking fixed it). I also think it would make a good hardwearing yarn for kids.

To make my sweater a bit more interesting I grabbed a ball of black crepe yarn from Spotlight and did a contrast collar. Unfortunately 50g wasn't enough for my initial plan of doing a contrast colour for the collar, pocket linings and all the garter hems - in fact I had to modify the collar a little bit so I didn't run out of yarn! It's been awhile since I knit something this size so obviously my yarn estimating abilities are a little bit off! I am still happy with how the collar looks though but it's just a bit smaller than the designer intended. I also found some cute pirate buttons at Spotlight which finished it off perfectly.

I made short sleeves as I am gifting this for Christmas which falls mid summer for us - in the hope this will be a good transitional/autumn sweater. I just hope Mr A likes it!!

 More details on my Ravelry project page: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/sweetp/little-spare-time-kal