Girls Rule

Girls Rule

Welcome back everyone!  I hope the week has been good to you since the last time we spoke.  If you guys have been following me on Instagram (on my @ctalrunwild handle anyway) you probably know what this blog post is about.

I've been fervently working on my Raindrops pullover for a friends baby girl and look what I finished!  I think this is the fastest little knit project that I’ve finished in a long time.  I cast on June 23rd and two and half week later I’m all done.  I feel so accomplished!  I can do anything I set my mind too!  I wanna ride this high forever! Lol, I’m joking around but I do feel accomplished.  If only everything could be accomplished with this kind of speed and ease.

I knit this with a single skein of our comfort sock in our Lavender colourway.  I’ve loved this colour since Ashley first came out with it but I only just got a chance to get my hands on a skein.  I love the soft speckle in this little girl.  This pattern is called Raindrops by Tincanknits and it has been sitting in my library forever!  If you guys remember a while ago I did a blog post about exploring new patterns instead of relying on my old favourites?  This pullover is the result of that experiment.  I particularly love this pattern for a few reasons. First it has a grown up version that I totally love.  It’s knit in the round, so NO PURLING! All of the increases are done by these adorable little eyelets instead of normal increase stitches and I didn’t have to remember to decrease stitches ANYWHERE.  It was fantastic and super straightforward.  I immediately put this sweater in a beginner pattern folder to suggest for my new knit friends who are just starting to build knitting skills. 

For this sweater I knit the 0-6 month version and I jumped needle sizes as I always do.  Instead of the recommended sizes, I used 3mm and 3.5mm needles since I have a naturally tight gauge and I figure at this size she’ll get a little longer use out of it even if it is a bit big. I did not gauge swatch. You would think that I would know better after all of the times this has bit me in the nethers but, as it turns out, I’m also one of those people who likes to make mistakes four or five times just to be sure.

If you guys follow my personal Instagram account, @ctalrunwild, you probably know that while I was knitting this I spent a lot of time meditating on how great girls are.  At first it started with “I love knitting for girls”.  “Girl” knits are so much fun and then it just turned into a full on ode to how great girls are, just in general.  Now, first of all, I’m a pretty hard-core proponent of gender neutrality in all things.  Not in a lame I’m-only-going-to-knit-in-green-yellow-and-grey way but in the I-wanna-knit-the-spectrum-in-all-of-the-patterns-and-I-don’t-wanna-hear-about-how-lace-is-for-girls-and-cables-are-for-boys way.  I rarely get support for my way.  I once added purple in a pacifier clip for my friends son and he looked at me and said it was kind of girly.  I gave him a seizure-level hard eye roll.  The first time I learned about masculinity as a social construct was in a film class when I was 20.  It’s 18 years later and I feel like we’re just starting to have these conversations in more public arenas.  Anyway, that’s a rant for another time and place.

My ode to girls was more of a tribute to all of the girls that I’ve grown up with and all of the little ones coming up after me.  My mom is the second oldest of eight siblings and I’ve always been pretty tight with my aunts. I`m not a whole lot younger than them so I was always treated half as a grown up and half as a kid.  They always wanted me around and I always wanted to be around them. Almost all of them had daughters - at least one but sometimes two or more. Being the eldest kid, their daughters always wanted to be around me. I`ve always had a large group of girlfriends and now I have two nieces.  I come from a clan of girls.  I`ve had the privilege of seeing them grow up and do some pretty amazing things and I’ve seen their strength as they`ve faced off against life`s challenges and come out on top.

On the flipside, my experience with guys is limited to the ones I have to date (insert groan of annoyance here), the ones who only sit still to watch tv or play video games, and a few boy cousins that I`m sorta fond of.  I guess it`s just a circumstance of "you prefer what you can relate to."  Oh wait.  I also have a brother. We’re nothing alike, at all.

Getting back to knit related things, I finished the sweater and I’m super satisfied with it but there’s this teeny tiny little part of my brain is still craving an old favourite.  As soon as I found out my friend had a little girl I immediately decided to knit a baby vertebrae for her before going on my little pattern exploration.  Now I think my brain is processing that baby vertebrae as an unfinished task.  I cast it on this morning.  I pulled a whole bunch of remnants together and I’m going to see what I make of them.  I’m hoping to get it done before Saturday.  Wish me luck.  If I succeed you’ll see the finished one next Wednesday.  If not, I’m sure it’ll happen sometime soon after that.

That’s all for me for this week!  Until we speak again, PEACE to you and yours and happy knitting!

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