Yesterday morning was spent getting a knitting pattern together, so that Talyssa can have her very own fuzzy mohair sweater.  I wanted to use a larger needle size since Talyssa is a bigger doll, and I didn’t want to be knitting her sweater for days and days and days on end.  My mohair/silk yarn is lace weight and it is already quite “airy” for the smaller dolls, so I thought that holding two strands of yarn together to make a heavier yarn would work great on larger needles.

I started figuring things out by knitting a swatch with the same needle size that I use for Talyssa’s basic wool sweater and then evaluated it.  The fabric was a bit dense and stiff, I thought.  I knit another swatch on a size larger needles and thought it looked just right, nice and “airy”.

The next step was to start with Talyssa’s basic wool sweater pattern and adjust the stitch counts and rows using the new gauge.  After some division, multiplication and number rounding, I had a pattern to start with.

I love doing this kind of math work!  Who knows why!  I would think that it would make me want to pull my hair out, but for some reason I find it mentally invigorating.

Now to knit.  And, I did, all afternoon and evening on Tuesday, and hoping and hoping that it would come out perfect.  At “bedtime” on Tuesday I only had 12 more rows to go, and it is all body knitting, easy!  The sleeves got finished on Tuesday night, they seemed to take forever, turning my work constantly, it seemed.  Talyssa has long arms.

I finished up Talyssa’s sweater before Wednesday afternoon started.  I did a quick try on before blocking and it will fit her!  Yay!  Now I will get started on her dress.  I took a photo of Talyssa’s sweater next to one for the Little Darlings to see the size difference. Yes, they are quite different in size, but what I thought was even more interesting was the difference in lot colors of the yarn.  Talyssa’s was knit with a couple of skeins that I just received and the Little Darling’s was knit with yarn that I received earlier in the year.

2015 is going fast!  My daily Mary Engelbreit calendar pages are almost gone!

Oh, I just heard it’s National Chocolate Day.  Have you had some today?  It’s my sweet of choice–I have some dark chocolate daily.

Bye for now and thanks for reading!