Oriental Lily Sweater: Staying Stylish in the Ice

I'm still sewing, but I've made great progress in the knitting sphere lately too. While Pete's Guston Sweater was awaiting blocking and seaming, I kept up the knitting by casting on an Oriental Lilly Sweater (available on Ravelry as a free download) for Guinevere. This is a quick and easy knit with no seaming and only a few stitches to pick up. The yarn here is baby alpaca by Plymouth Yarns in a DK weight, and the contrast is DK weight Merino, also by Plymouth Yarns. This was such a quick an easy knit, that by the time I got around to the finishing up of Pete's sweater, I was also finishing up Guinevere's.

The variegated yarn probably is a dead giveaway that this is a homemade sweater. I mean, when was the last time you saw a variegated sweater at The Gap or The Childrens' Place? That aside, the multi-colored yarn was fun to work with, and the finished product is nice and warm. It's a good thing the sweater is warm since Guinevere asked if we could take the pictures outside to avoid the flash of my camera. It was mid- or late-morning when we took these pictures, but you can see the ice coating the plants from the freezing rain the night previous. The kids keep hoping for snow, but it hasn't happened yet this winter (at least not enough to stick). 

As you can see above, the yarn only had a few spots where it made wide blocks of single color areas, and no real stripes. 

This is a really easy pattern to customize sizing on, since it is knitted from the top down. The only thing I may not have adequately counted on is the amount of stretch in the yarn I used. As she wore it, it seemed to stretch to where it is a bit lower-cut than I would prefer for a kid's sweater. A cami underneath helps to keep things modest. 

This was a nice, easy pattern that knit up really fast. The weight seems just about right to be warm but not bulky. The amount of yarn needed wasn't a lot, so it didn't cost much more than walking into a chain store and buying a cheap cotton sweater. This could vary, of course, if I used another yarn for the next one, but this being a kid's sweater, it isn't like I'm planning to make a cashmere version. The pattern sizing goes from 6 months to 10 years, so I imagine I'll be trying to knit her several of these each year until she reaches her teens or tells me she's tired of them.