Marie Grace Designs

Daisy Cardigan Knitting Pattern

Due to popular demand the free Daisy Cardigan is now available in more sizes!

This alpaca raglan is simple to knit from the top down. Finish with a tiny picot edge and some easy embroidered daisies. There won’t be any seams to sew up or button holes, just 2 ties built into the front bands as you cast off your final stitches!

Sizes:
3 (6, 12, 18, 24) months, [2, 4, 6] years.

Finished Measurements: 
Chest 19 (20, 21, 22, 24) [24, 26, 28]inches.
Length 9 (10, 11, 12, 13) [14, 15, 16).

Yarn:
Llamajama Alpaca/Merino blend
(50% alpaca/50% merino)
100 grams/220 yards per hank.
1(1, 2, 2, 3) [3, 4, 4] hanks main color.
1 hank contrast color.

Sample shown in pink and yellow multi-color with Petal Pink contrast.

Skill Level:
Easy +

Skills Needed:
Working with DPNs, working in the round, increasing.

Free

Lately...

Maryland Sheep and Wool loot

You’d think that with me being me and the festival being what it is that I’d have piles and buckets of yarn and goodies to show. Really I’m surprised myself at what little I brought home. See I’m sort of like a kid with a nickel... I’m afraid that the minute I spend it I’ll find something I like even more and then wish I hadn’t already spent my nickel. So I wandered around all day admiring everything and left with very little.

But really that’s not true either. I may not have come home with bags and bags of yarn but we all had a fine day. We met up with some friends, ate lots of yummy junk, and got all squeaky about all the fluffy critters.

The kids waited... ummmm... patiently while I chatted with Ann and Eugene Bourgeois of Philosopher’s Wool...

Once I was done chatting we headed out to the truck for a picnic lunch.

Later in the day I got to congratulate Eunny Jang on her new job in person but it was late in the day and we had already dumped the camera off at the truck so I have no picture. Its just as well, really, because by the end of the day I was a bit disheveled and pretty much felt like a dork the entire time I talked to her. She was, of course, quite pleasant and tidy.

I did purchase some silk hankies and a little make-your-own-silk-hankies-out-of-cacoons-kit (I blame the kids and the lady who was doing the demonstration thinger). This is all quite amusing because I don’t know how to spin, I don’t normally knit with silk and, in fact, I didn’t really know anything about silk hankies until this very day. Go figure. They are really pretty though... and I do have a nice spindle here... somewhere...

Spring cleaning and smocking...

I’m not really sure what happened but somehow Mac Daddy and I managed to turn our entire house upside down this past week.

Tater has officially been moved to a “big kid” room (she’s bunking with her big sister). I’m still a little queasy about her being (what seems like) so far away (she’s across the hall).

Moving Tater out of our room sparked some kind of desire to re-arrange, re-establish, re-consider our room (the only room in the house that’s just ours don’t-ya-know). Simplifying our room sparked a further desire to do the same to the rest of the house.

I really had no idea just how many boxes of books, bags of out-grown clothes and no longer needed baby stuff we still had floating around here.

Seems that between the books, clothes, toys, doo-dads, yarn, and fabric our house is pretty much stuffed to the gills. All these years of kids and all their stuff and the need to save it (just incase there’s another one) and find a place to put it (because our house wasn’t built to house 6 people) have resulted in some rather creative, yet inferior, storage solutions.

I’m not sure if I should blame the kids (don’t I always) or the obsessive knitting but in all the moving and de-cluttering I found my smocking pleater that I haven’t seen in about a year. Of course this find led to a search for fabric (found in the cedar chest at the end of the bed) and thread (in the hoosier in the dining room). I remembered just how much I love the itty-bitty stitches of smocking and the fluffy-soft cotton.

So when there was a lull in the house cleaning action instead of knitting (Meredith, turn your head because you don’t want to hear what I’m about to say) I did some pleating.

Smocking in one of those things that hold about as much mystery as knitting for people who admire it yet never learned to do it. Its really quite simple as smocking stitches are nothing but back stitching and embroidery. The pleating is usually done with a pleater now but was originally done by hand. I get a feel for what that must have been like every now and then when I don’t notice a pleated thread making a run for it before its securely tied...

The actual smocking stitches are all back stitches. Once the smocking stitches are all in place the rest is decorative embroidery and can be simple or extremely fancy... or left out completely.

These pretty lengths of cotton stripes are destined to be night-gowns for the girls.

For me, smocking is the complete embodiment of a clean, tight, neat-as-a-pin kind of existence I wish I could pull off. Its done very simply yet very precisely and the results are nothing short of magical.

Of course this all lead to me digging through the fabric stash (which pales by comparison to the yarn stash but is still rather respectable). I think this fabric will do nicely for a summer dress or two.