Little Blue Girl

I'm not going to lie, it's taken me ages to finish this project. Now that it's done it looks so cute I wish I had just cracked on and finished it earlier. The colour combination was part inspired by the beautiful and colourful Swedish knitwear designers Millamia, and part stash busting some of my 'didn't quite get round to it' smaller projects. You know the ones: a few balls to make a cardigan for a four year old, but opps they've grown so big now!   

The two shades of blue are Naturally Alpaca DK - 90% alpaca and 10% merino wool - a New Zealand made yarn. The mottled pink is a Twilleys of Stanford yarn called Freedom Spirit that's made in England. I usually always buys New Zealand made yarn, but couldn't resist it sitting in the sale bin at Knit World.  

I used the cardigan pattern from this Patons book. I've made this pattern very successfully a number of times. Because our Little Miss is a long bean, I always increase the length of the body by 5cm and the length of the sleeve by about 3cm. 

The strip sequence I used is: 
5 rows sky blue, 
1 row pink, 
2 rows navy, 
1 row pink, 
5 rows sky blue, 
1 row navy, 
4 rows pink, 
1 row navy, 
and repeat!

The overall pattern really works well because the mottled pink yarn breaks up the stripe so it doesn't look so arbitrary or obvious. 

I let our Little Miss choose the cardigan colours from my stash. She has got so opinionated about her clothes these day that it's not worth the risk of having her tell me that she's 'not that keen on that one' once I've spend all that time knitting. I really hate to think what teenage years are going to be like! 

Happy knitting xx