Pampered Baby & Button, Button

I've just spent two afternoons in the company of my wee granddaughter, Sophia, who is just over five weeks old. She's a colicky little one, although in this picture, she's pretending she's not.

I thought today I'd post a picture of the sweet little dress I knitted for her. It is one of those wonderful patterns that looks far more complex than it is to knit. Now I've long been a natural fiber snob, but I decided to make this in Encore (75% acrylic, 25% wool) for the sake of washability and my daughter-in-law. I was nicely surprised by how pleasant it was to knit with and pleased with the looks as well.

It has a 3-button placket in the back.

The buttons became a matter of obsession with me - I had to find just the right ones and went both to Hobby Lobby and JoAnne's. I wound up buying 3 different kinds of buttons and bringing them home to make my decision. I chose two different kinds of red rose buttons, and three sets of primary color buttons. I kept placing the different buttons on the laid-out dress and looking at it every now and then. I even took them down to my LYS, Riverwools, and got the opinions of Martha and Val! The rose buttons appealed to my sense of whimsy, and I considered using three different-colored buttons, but the ones I finally chose, three matte-finish red ones, appealed most to my sense of design.And look, I've written a whole paragraph about the Button Dilemma. One of the things I'm trying to do in my effort to actually finish things is to try to not let myself get stalled by this sort of decision-making. Details are important, but if I let them take up huge amounts of time and brain bandwidth, I wind up feeling frustrated and....silly.

This pattern came from Knitting for the Pampered Baby by Rita Weiss. It has some of the most appealing patterns I've seen and is astonishingly reasonably priced at $14.95. Hamilton Books has it for $9.95.

As for the red rose buttons, they wound up on these Leafy Wrist Bands: