Le Petit Artichaut

It's that time of my life when friends and family start having babies. While it makes me feel old (and way behind everyone else), it's a wonderful excuse to knit all the adorable baby clothes I have queued up in my Ravelry favourites! I decided that the first project I would tackle would be the (Petit) Artichaut by Solen Couix-Loarer. 

I'm so happy with the result of this baby bolero. When I started the project, I was quite worried it wouldn't work out. First of all, getting Fingering weight yarn in rural Newfoundland is almost impossible. Luckily I found this Red Heart Stardust yarn in pink or I would have had to return to the drawing board. Also, I've never knit with fingering weight yarn and I didn't have a US 2.5 needle to work with (only a US 3 circular), so I had no idea if this would even resemble the sample pictures. But I stuck with it. 

I looked at a number of  YouTube videos to help me with the provisional cast-on, but it turns out they didn't help too much. I managed to do it, but when it came time to remove the waste yarn, the crocheted chain did not unravel easily. Instead, I had to reclaim the working yarn stitches and cut out the waste yarn through each stitch. A long process, but it worked out in the end.

Having read through almost all of the notes left on this project from other knitters on Ravelry, I have to agree with them on the fact that this pattern is unnecessarily difficult in certain areas. I assume it is a problem in the translation from French to English, but I had a hard time following the two row repeats. It would give you the pattern for the RS and WS rows then tell you to repeat this 5 times in total. Is that 5 times including the two you just knit, or in addition to those two rows? Did anyone else find that confusing? 

I also found myself taking a lot of notes while completing this project; mostly in an attempt to keep up with what row I was currently finishing and how many I had left to do. All the repeats made if difficult to keep track in my head. It also would have been nice to have the explanations of the LLIP and RLIP stitch embedded in the pattern and not at the end so I wouldn't need to keep flipping back to the last page to find it.

Overall, I was happy with the pattern however. There were a few frogged sections that I went back and redid but that's just because I was very intent on getting a great finished project that I could send to my cousin's wife who is having her baby in October. I'm fine with a few mistakes on something I will keep myself, but if I'm sending it somewhere, I like to have something I'm very proud of as a result. And I do!

If you find yourself knitting this project, here are a few notes. Good luck!

Notes: 

*Is the button hole necessary on this? Couldn't you just use the last four stitches on the left side border to start the 15.3 inch strap and pass it through the hole made on the right side seam?

*If you did include the button hole on the right side, couldn't you transfer the hole from the right seam to the left seam and start the second strap from there? It would take a lot less yarn and eliminate the strap needing to go all around the back of the garment. This would also eliminate any worry about the garment being too tight on the child. 

If you'd like to see more photos and details, head over to my Ravelry page