Little ballerinas

I came across the Heidi and Finn Ballet Sweater pattern well over a year ago, and pinned it immediately.  It is the type of item that, to me, it makes sense to sew, as it's not something I could easily find in toddler and preschool sizes, and dance items like that tend to have an insane mark-up in my experience.  This weekend I finally bought the pattern and sewed up two for my little ballerinas.

I had two yards of a soft pink rib knit in my stash, picked up from the $2.97/yard mystery pile in the back of G Street Fabrics' Falls Church, Va., location.  Normally I would choose a cotton/lycra knit for something like this, but I already had this in the stash, in the right color, so ...

Excuse the dirty tights please!

I opened the pattern, read through the first couple pages of instructions (including the admonishment to measure your child before choosing a size), and then flipped around to find the size chart.  Except there is no size chart, not in the pattern, nor online.  I wrote to the email address in the pattern, and sent a message through Etsy, but didn't hear back and I wanted to sew them rightaway.  That was a bit annoying, but I found a post on the Heidi and Finn blog that said they are working to get size charts in all their patterns - hopefully they will do that soon.  In the meantime it would be nice if they had one online somewhere at least.

Anyway, without a chart, I guessed on the 3T for both girls. It worked, but I definitely need to lengthen it.  I think I might do a sleeve cuff next time too, to bring it in a little more, since I get wavy hems even using my walking foot (I feel like maybe it doesn't work right).

The sweater is a very easy sew, especially if you have a serger.  I did most of the work on mine, only heading over to the sewing machine for a couple instances of basting and top stitching.

I made a couple of alterations.  I noticed that the pattern calls for neck binding that is the same length as the neckline.  In my experience, this makes for a floppy neck.  I might have risked it if I were using a cotton/lycra blend, but since my knit's recovery isn't so good, I decided to cut the binding shorter.  I measured my neckline (it was 24" for the 3T), and cut my binding to 20."  I also cut the bottom band two inches shorter than the bottom of the main shrug, for the same reason.  It worked well.

I think I will get a lot of use out of this pattern - I bought the extended size-range one, that goes up to 12 years.

(Little sister is sick and wasn't feeling up to modeling for me.)