one of my favourite knitting orders

I was commissioned to make a jumper and hat for a 6-9 month old baby in Auckland. I decided to use a mix of 6 and 8 ply baby cotton and hemp, as I preferred the colour choices on offer and the parents preferred natural fibres, as opposed to acrylic or lanolin in some wool. The lady who commissed this outfit had been selling my designs in her childrens wear boutique ..so felt comfortable giving me total creative license( as long as I put in a couple of flowers from a pattern she had seen in a book for much older children.) I always smile at this. It must be similar to what hairdressers get..people that say'' I want my hair to look like THAT'', pointing at a photo that is really not going to look good on them, or is almost impossible to create with the style they already have, or the kind of hair the hair dresser has to work with. I feel like that with knitting at times.

- When people hand you a pattern and say'' knit this please'', and you later find that the wool they insisted is simply PERFECT to knit it with ..is far from perfect.. because it's NOT the right ply... in fact its not even remotely close and the stuff is not much softer than a pot scrubber! How do I break it to these mums that I wouldn't knit that up for my dogs coat? Often i replace those wools with something softer and hope they won't be too disappointed:)

when you get asked to down size a pattern suitable for a 10 year old size to a 3 month old month size, you are going to be loosing more than 3/4 of the width and lenght..hence any picture knitting is going to have to be really modified or completely left out and made over!! Then the person is going to be sad because it is NOT the same as the picture they handed you!

As you can imagine, I will give anything a go with a pair of knitting needles(as my wearable arts costume shows ..look at my profile for that blog)..but my favourite knitwear to produce are garments where I can do as i please!!

For this piece I was inspired by a 1970s pattern I found for an ice skating dress.... SUPER short..so thought I'd attempt to knit up something similar..but for a little babe who is not yet worried about whether their underwear is showing ;) I am pleased to say it is also a little less tacky! I felt based on the childs age, they were moving out of all in one baby suits and into jeans and trousers by 9 months-1 year..so why not have something funky and colourful enough to go with anything.