Charity Knitting -- Ideas for Patterns

Henry and I went to visit my mom in Carmel on Monday, and harvested a big box of charity knitting. She never knits from patterns, and I've had quite a few people asking me if I could help her put together some of the baby sweater and vest patterns that she created. I asked her in our last visit to start writing down some of the numbers, like cast on, arm hole decrease, cast off, etc., and she did a little bit of that. This time we went through each item together and I took lots of notes. There are a few vests in a basic pattern. The only things she changed were colors and the motif on the front. I can write up the notes I took for the basic pattern, but really any basic baby vest pattern would do. The motifs are mostly found in magazines, pattern leaflets, or pattern-a-day calendars.

 

I took notes for these little pants. But do people knit baby pants? Do babies wear pants without opening for diaper?

These two fish vests are very cute and quite complicated. She drew up the motifs herself and I took notes for the pattern, including stitch pattern for the back. There are also crochet edging on the collar and armholes.

The stitch pattern in this little sweater is what I named "starry sky" when I was a small child, and my mom had used it in many of her baby items. It's a slip stitch "knit one below" type of stitch, but I haven't seen it written up anywhere.

This vest has an interesting cross over knitted-in V neck. Otherwise it's a basic pattern.

This is the most complicated pattern in this batch. It's similar to argyle but the decrease is in the center line. It will take me some time to test knit and write up the pattern, but I think it will be very interesting.



No pattern for this vest! My mom is working on recreating the stitch pattern, since she didn't take notes and couldn't remember how she knitted it.

I'm at a bit of loss at what to do next. I never wrote a pattern before, and I would like to keep the pattern as close to my mom's original as possible, which means I will need to test knit, which will be time consuming. There are lots of quick and easy and basic patterns out there. On the other hand, would the complicated, intricate patterns be useful for other charity knitters?