It’s no surprise looking at my projects that I’m a fan of TFA yarn. When Tanis announced she was going to have a little girl, my head was swimming with ideas of what I would knit, if I had a girl. As the proud mama to three boys, I don’t have much of an opportunity to knit little tunics and dresses. I thought I would take this opportunity to make something a little bit girly. I love the Camaro pattern and have even tried knitting my own, which ended up in me frogging it, because I misread a critical detail. I will make my own soon, but right now it’s all about a teeny tiny one for Tanis’ sweet girl. This pattern was inspired by the Camaro pattern and based on a DK weight children’s sweater, except I knit it in fingering weight and used dimensions from various baby sweaters to make sure I was in the right track. It’s done and I’m so pleased with it. I hope it will fit Willow and she can match her mama when she wears hers.

Here are the mods I made to make the mini camaro

My intention was to use the pickles pattern for the arrow sweater and just have the stripes mimic Tanis’ camaro. Once I got looking at it, I noticed the smallest size was 1 year and it was made in DK weight, so I decided to attempt using fingering weight to get something that was close to 6 month size.

Cast-on - This was a bit tricky since I was using fingering weight, so I looked at the number of stitches cast on for the flax light to get an idea of how many I would need to cast on for 6-12 months size and then looked at the Pickles pattern to see if there was anything that kind of matched up. Since none of the stitches actually matched up, I cast on the maximum number of stitches from the pickles pattern, which was 72. Then I remembered babies have big heads(at least my kids do) so I knit the garter ridge and first stripe flat and decided to crochet a little loop and add a button so its easy to get over babies head. (I hope that works, since I didn’t have a baby to try it on). The flax light cast on is 88.

Split for sleeves - I followed the Pickles instructions on increases until I hit the same number of stitches as the flax light at the point where you split for the sleeves. I separated for the sleeves and cast on the required amount from the flax light pattern.

Body - For the body I finished my last stripe and kept following the Pickles pattern for the body while keeping the sweater to the dimensions of the flax light. I knit the body until the side seam was 6 inches(the front and back were slightly longer) and then I worked the garter border and cast off. I picked up the sleeves and continued to follow the pickles instructions. I didn’t do any decreases on the sleeves, so the result is a bit of a bell sleeve and I was happy with that.

Its a bit of a mash-up of patterns and had no idea if it would work out. I measured it up against some sweaters I knit my kids and its pretty close in size, so I hope it works.