Dress for baby Janet

Not a huge amount of crafting happened while the kids were off school over Easter, most of the time we stayed around Bern, but we did have the middle weekend away camping.  We bought a tent that's bigger than our apartment and headed off to the Sancerre area of France.  We like Sancerre wine, which seemed like as good a reason as any to pick there as our first camping expedition with les enfants. 

It took us about 6 hours to drive to Sancerre, and of course driving time means knitting time :-)  I knit a dress for baby Janet using yarn that I got from my Mum as leftovers of a cardigan that she knit for Frances recently.

It's Patons 100% cotton, in pink (quelle surprise) and I got 4 partial balls of it, which came to about 140g in total.

The dress I knit is from a 1976 pattern, which I remember my Nanna knitting my dolls some clothes from, which by coincidence is a patons pattern.  I knit the yellow dress in the 12" doll size.  The pattern called for 3 ply and the pink is double kntting, although from poking around on the Internet I learnt that it's quite a fine DK, so I split the difference on the needle size and went for it.

The one thing that I don't like about these old patterns is that everything is knit in pieces and then seamed together - what I waste of time.  I'm all for not seaming knitting if I can help it.  I cast on with 4 fewer stitches the front and the back together and went from there (4 fewer stitches as that's the equivalent of the seam allowances).  With some looking ahead at the pattern and a little bit of thought I managed to knit the whole dress with the only bit of seaming being sewing down the bottom of the underflap at the back opening and sewing on the press studs.  I'm really quite proud that I managed - especially as most of the figuring out was done in the car.

And now for some pictures of the finished dress:

It has a knitted hem at the bottom - I've never knitted a hem before, and really like how neat it looks.  The neck is also a knitted hem - it was meant to be cast off, turned over and then sewn down, but I ran a smaller sized circular needle around the inside of the neck where I would have sewn (if I was so inclined, which I think you've probably gathered I'm not) and then did a three needle bind off. 

Construction aside I pretty much stuck to the pattern apart from knitting the sleeves longer to cover up baby Janet's "vest". 

And here she is also wearing a coffee filter sunhat made for her by Frances.  I think I need to knit her a matching pair of knickers (there's a pair as part of the same knitting pattern), as she does have a tendency to flash her knickers around.

Link to my ravelry project.