Presto Chango!

I finished Vinnie's Presto Chango {Ravlink} four days after I started it, on Monday night. I love it! It's not exactly like I intended it to be, but that's okay, because it was an unplanned, spur-of-the-moment project anyway.

My one complaint with the sweater is that the wool isn't soft; it's pretty scratchy, actually. I'm aware that Steph knows how to work some magic with wool and will hopefully be able to overcome that so it's comfortable for Vinnie to wear. I don't even mind the colorblocked-ness of it, or the fact that I ran out of the blue on the front panel and had to finish it in the red. I kind of like it like that. I was going to make her a blue panel and a red panel, so she could swap them out on a whim, but I haven't enough yarn to do that. So I didn't.

I went to Michael's for the buttons, which was a mistake, but I don't know yet where a fabric or button store might be around these parts. Dude. I have a ton of buttons in my stash, but not sixteen of the same, so I wanted something wooden in the right size for the buttonholes for this sweater. Not only was it impossible to find wooden buttons at Michaels, it was darn near impossible to find any buttons there. I was sorely disappointed at the selection. {I am pretty impressed with myself for picking up and putting down about 90 things, either literally or mentally, and only getting the three crafty things on my list. That, there, was calendar-worthy for me.} Anyway, I found a tin of wooden beads that were the right size and shade, so I subbed beads for buttons and there you go.

The only mod I made to the pattern was in doubling the frequency of the buttonholes, so I needed the 16 you see instead of 8. I don't know that Steph will want to undo 16 buttons, but I think the construction of the sweater is such that she'll probably never need to, and she can just whip it on and off over Vinnie's head. As a former mother of toddlers myself, I can't remember a time when I'd have wanted to remove only the tummy portion of their shirt - kinda weird, isn't it? But I still think it looks cool, so off it goes in tomorrow's mail to Steph and Vinnie.

Link up here if you have some crafty goodness to show Cindy at Skip to My Lou this week!

Fin.