Doggie Sweater!

I know people have strong feelings about dressing up pets. You either think it's animal torture, or have 128763598723 tiny Yoda costumes and Santa suits for your teacup Yorkie. Well, I grew up with the two greatest dogs ever (Don't even try to fight me on whether they were the best. You'll lose.) Rudy and Fritz, two adorably chubby Boston Terriers. Of course, they were boys and you don't dress boy dogs in cute clothes, so we never did. By the time mom and I realized we should knit them some very masculine sweaters, they were too old and curmudgeon-y to put up with that crap. 

My opinion is that dressed up dogs are ADORABLE. But if your dog doesn't like it, be kind and don't do it. It's better if you start dressing them up while they're young. Or they'll be like my Rudy and Fritz and just eat through anything you put on them. 

But I now have another adorable small dog in my life! Baylee is a 12 pound Beagle-Chihuahua mix. As much as I would love to knit a sweater for her older brother Hunter, he is a 90 pound black lab. I also don't think he would stand for that. Regardless of if you think dressing up your dogs is torture, she's tiny and she gets really cold, especially in this freak winter weather we are having! So, naturally, my next project is a sweater for her. 

I want to get into knitting sweaters for people, but I decided that knitting a sweater for Baylee would be a nice stepping stone to doing bigger sweaters.

The cutest pup in the land.

Here is the pattern that I will be using. I chose to use Cascade 220 Superwash in Lake Chelan Heather. It was one of the recommended yarns for the project on its Ravelry page, but I failed to do my research, and apparently Cascade just changed the gauge on the yarn, and it's quite a thin worsted weight.

Before I started the project, I knit my first ever gauge swatch! And I'm glad I did! Because the yarn is thinner than called for in the pattern, the sweater would have been too small had I blindly followed the pattern. I ripped out the first gauge and made a second one with a larger needle, but the swatch wasn't as dense as a sweater should be. Therefore, I decided to keep the needle size called for in the pattern and just knit a size Large instead of a Medium (can you believe that she can be considered a large!?). I am hoping this works out. 

Lesson: Knitting a gauge swatch is extremely important when embarking on a project that is supposed to fit someone's body for two reasons.

1. Even yarns that are called "worsted" can be lighter than what you normally think of as worsted. 
2. Every knitter knits differently. Not better, not worse, just different. There are probably knitter out there who don't pull their stitches as tightly as I do. If a tight knitter and a loose knitter knit the same thing with the same yarn and the same needles, the size of the end project will be larger for the loose knitter than it will be for the tight knitter.

Here is my project so far: 

10 rows in!

Cable Close-Up

I'm not sure I like that the cables aren't very defined. They actually look better in the pictures than in real life! I'm going to keep going with the pattern for now, but if I still don't like it I think I am going to substitute a different cable pattern onto the sweater, keeping the same general size and construction.

Happy Knitting!

Ruth(ie)