Book Review: Minnow Knits

Title: Minnow Knits

Author: Jil Eaton

Date: 1996

Publisher: Lark

ISBN: 0-937274-96-8

Length: 128 pages

Illustrations: color photos by Nina Fuller Carter

Quote: “I still love fresh, unusual colorways and...I still include pantaloons in my collections.”

Need I mention that, in handknitting, the colors (and textures, if used) are what make the “fashion”? What keeps this collection so delightfully evergreen is that it’s written to encourage updating. Eaton provides information about gauge (crucial) and yardage (yours may vary, but yardage is more reliable than weight) for making these baby and toddler outfits with this year’s yarns. Gauges vary, so you will always be able to use this book to make something in the latest colors for each of the children you dress.

Instructions explain how to make eleven different hats (twelve if you knit the hood from the hooded jacket), a full dozen sweaters, three all-in-ones (one with long legs and sleeves, one with legs but no sleeves, one with neither), three pairs of pantaloons, one cap-sleeved vest, one skirt, one plain jacket, one hooded jacket, and five dresses, for children from infants to (typically) age eight.

Even in Maine, the secret to getting the adorable children who model these knits to look so happy, wearing them indoors, is that most of the sweaters are knitted in cotton. Gauges between 4 and 5 stitches per inch identify the minority for which the cotton yarn that’s always available in Wal-Mart or Michaels will work. Several patterns call for a gauge of 5.5 stitches per inch, which you might recognize as a gauge you can match with the “baby” acrylic that’s often available at good prices at Michaels, but beware. Babies will happily sleep under acrylic blankets and some teens and adults will wear acrylic sweaters, but at the age for which these designs are intended., when the choices are (a) sitting still and looking cute in acrylic, (b) running about and sweating and coughing in acrylic, or (c) running about with no winter wear at all, you know children will pick (c) every time. This is part of what the poet Stanley Kiesel called kidness. (Definitely not to be confused with kindness.)

I remember an especially adorable acrylic cardigan I received in primary school. I agreed with my elders that the fluffy yarn, suede elbow patches, and soft shade of blue were lovely and made this sweater precious. Then I went out on the playground, got into a game, hung the lovely cardigan up on a fence post, and never saw it again.

Years ago a certain scheming sister of mine left thirty pounds of unbearable cuteness in a little jersey shirt at that year’s location of the Internet Portal. The building was chilly; the outdoor air was cold. The child looked longingly at my display of sweaters and hats. The child snuggled into a sweater and hat in the right size, made of acrylic. The child toddled around the store all day waving and smiling to everyone and being the best little sweater model ever seen. So I said to this child, “You have been a Real Trouper. You have earned that sweater and hat. They are yours to keep.” The child took them home and, later that week, wore them to the park on a milder day, and we never saw them again.

If you want to see your work on your favorite children again and again, all winter, it’s worth the extra time and money to find cotton yarn that knits up to 5.5 or even 6.5 stitches per inch. (What about 3.5 stitches? One suggestion that works for many people is “Knit that snowproof hood in bulky acrylic and wear it only when snow is falling,” but you could also knit with two strands of lighter yarn held together .)

The colors of cotton tend to mellow with washing. To give kids who like bright primary colors (and us “Winter” types) a reasonable amount of time to wear cottons that are watermelon-red and flag-blue and black and purple, manufacturers tend to do what they call “overdyeing” cotton yarn. Colors will look bright and deep on the shelf and may rub off on your hands. This cotton is designed to be used in one-color pieces that are laundered a few times before wearing. If you use it in multicolor designs, a useful trick to know is that you can pin a skein or a few skeins of overdyed cotton inside a piece of white cotton fabric (e.g. a pillowcase) that you think would look better in a pastel color and then run it through the washer and dryer. I once laundered some overdyed red cotton in the same wash load with a white cotton blouse with nylon lace trim, and produced a lovely icy-pink blouse with snow-white lace that retained that distinctive color contrast for years.

A question Carol LaBranche used to ask about children’s pattern collections was: Can you make parent-child outfits using these patterns? Small children and adults have different body shapes, so you’d need to be careful. You could, for example, knit the “Yikes! Stripes!” snow pants suit, using the instructions for the 4-year-old child’s size as a beginning point, to make snow pants for a skinny adult at 4 stitches per inch, and very cozy they’d be. You’d want to change to the instructions for the 2-year-old child’s hat size; hat size change only slightly as a child grows up. You could begin the sweater with 70 stitches across front or back waist, increasing to 82 for the main body, and 72 stitches at the top of each sleeve, decreasing to 40 or even 30 around the wrist, and picking up 84 stitches around the neck. You could make pants legs with 76 stitches around the ankles and 172 stitches around the hip, and knitted suspenders. I often use children’s patterns to make distinctive adult sleepwear in this way. Of course I measure them against adults’ clothing to get the lengths right. Fitting knitwear to the hip area is always a challenge, but if they’re meant to be baggy pajamas fitting should not be a problem.