I Hate Bottom Up Baby Sweaters

Joining the two tiny sleeves to the body and knitting around sounds easy enough.  However, taking a tiny circular tube (baby sleeve) and flattening all the stitches out onto a needle and stitching across them makes for some seriously tight knitting.  The poor little underarm stitches are all stretched out while I’m trying to make it work.  It’s miserable and not Zen-like AT ALL.

I’ve invested too much time to bail on the project at this point.  But, I will not be doing a bottom-up baby sweater ever again.  Adult sized bottom up sweaters haven’t ever given me this much trouble.  In this baby sweater, there just aren’t enough stitches to make it work.  All the sleeve stitches are stretched flat across the needle and my underarm stitches are stretched to the max when I go to knit across.  I’m going to have to do some serious blocking at the end to reshape the underarm areas.

Lesson learned- no bottom up baby sweaters for me!  However, I still think this will be wearable in the end.  I hope my sister will never even notice the wonky underarm area and proudly don her baby in my creation.  🙂

Side note- I couldn’t help myself and ordered a hefty amount of yarn during the Knit Picks summer sale.  I haven’t tried their Palette yarn yet and I couldn’t figure out how much I might need to just try out the yarn so I added way too much to my cart with needles and books.  I’m going to be stalking my mail carrier until they arrive.