Winter 2026 Knitting Champagne Cardigan Slipper Socks and Baby Knits New Moon Knitting Podcast.

Hi and welcome to the New Moon Living channel. I'm Hillary and today I'm going to be sharing what I've been working on so far in 2026. So I am back. I've been gone for a little while and that is because, big life announcement, I gave birth to my son this year. So I had my baby at the beginning of January and he's doing well, I'm doing well, we're all doing great, but I've had a lot going on in the last couple months and knitting and making YouTube content not been top priority. But I did finally have a little bit of time this weekend to go through what I've worked on so far this year and I thought I would share what I've been up to and maybe a little bit about what I'm planning going forward. So let's go ahead and get started. All right, so we'll start with what I'm wearing, which is also my first finished object of the year. This is the Champagne Cardigan, kind of, by Petite Knit. I'll explain why it's kind of, but I'll tell you a little bit more about the pattern at first, although lots of people have made the Champagne Cardigan, including myself. All right, so this pattern is by Petite Knit. It costs about $8.35 American US dollars because it's 50 Danish kroner. The gauge is worsted. It's a DK plus a lace in the pattern for a worsted gauge of 18 stitches and 28 rows over 4 inches. The pattern recommends knitting for Olive Heavy Merino, Sanisgarn Tinsel Mohair, and Sanisgarn Petite Knit Double Sunday. I used Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool in the color Nature's Brown. The needle sizes in the pattern are US 7, which is a 4.5 millimeter needle, and a US 2.5, which is a 3 millimeter, which I, if I recall, is only used for the Double Knit Button Band, but I ended up using a US 7 and a US 4, which is a 3.5 millimeter needle because of the variations I made to the original sweater. It comes in nine sizes, fitting between a 31.5 to a 59 inch bust. That's the bust size that it fits, not the final garment size, and I ended up knitting the second size. So yes, like I said, I've knit this pattern before and when I started working on this, I was like, end of my pregnancy, I knew a baby was coming pretty soon, so I was like, I want something that's like pretty straightforward, maybe that is not using my nicest yarn, maybe it's not like a fun new pattern I've wanted to try, maybe something I'm comfortable with already, and so I ended up picking out the Champagne Cardigan because I already own the pattern, I've made it before, I trusted the designer in the pattern to give me something that was like, you know, like a a comfort knit while I was kind of going through this major life transition. But I also knew I wanted to make a couple of modifications and they were straightforward enough that I thought I could handle it even with everything going on. So the big things I did was, the pattern is all one by one rib for the cuffs and the hem. I ended up doing a two by two rib, I just wanted something that was a little more rustic looking, I guess, and then I also knew I wanted a two by two rib for the button band instead of the double knit button band. I just, I had a feeling that that was kind of the look I wanted to go for, something that felt like I said, a little more rustic, a little more like grandpa's cardigan, and I thought that those modifications would give me more of the feel I wanted. I wouldn't necessarily recommend doing that with this pattern, I don't have a ton of notes for what I did and I haven't added them to Ravelry. I think there are much better patterns out there if you want a raglan shaping, you know, ribbed button band, like there are better options. I think petite knit actually has better options for this, but I just, working within my, the boundaries, the arbitrary boundaries that I set for myself, I decided to do these modifications. So I ended up using that US 4 needle for the cuffs in the hem ribbing to bring them in and make them nice and tight, and I initially had also used that same needle size for the ribbing on the double knit button band, and I ran into some issues. So first I didn't cast on enough stitches, and then with that smaller needle, those two issues compounded on themselves and I ended up with a sweater where the hem pulled itself up quite a bit, that bottom hem, and so I had to rip out the whole thing and try again. So I ended up doing the ribbing in the exact same needle as the rest of the body to keep it nice and open, and I cast on a couple more stitches in order to get the correct amount around the whole button band, because you pick up all of the stitches all the way around and then you do the two by two ribbing inward towards each other, and those few modifications the second time, fortunately the second time I had accounted for enough stitches and I had the change in the needle made it so that it drapes correctly. There is one lingering issue with that difference in the different needle sizes used for the ribbing on the hem and the ribbing on the button band when you look at the very bottom of my sweater, and that is it still pulls up and out a little bit when it's buttoned up. So the sweater looks really nice when it's open, I love the way it looks when it's open, but when it's all buttoned up right now there's just a little bit too much tension at the bottom until it opens a little bit. So I need to decide if that's something I want to try to fix, if there's a way that I can resolve that. I don't see myself ripping out the button band again, ripping out the hem, this may just be, you know, again it's not the nicest yarn, it's not my favorite yarn, if this is something that doesn't look great buttoned up, I almost never button up my cardigans anyway. So, but it's a fun experiment, you know, it's great to take a pattern I knew I already liked and make it something a little bit more fun and interesting and give myself a little bit of a challenge. Overall really happy with how it came out. The buttons I used, they're just like little resin buttons I got at a big box craft store or online, they're nothing special. I think my button pulls are a little bit big because again, they pull the fabric a bit more than I would like, so need to play around with how to improve on that in the future when I decide to go off script and make my own button band decision. But overall I'm very happy, this has been a nice cozy knit to wear, it was very cold here this winter for us, and so it was nice to have something warm to snuggle up in. I find the Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool a decent, quote-unquote, like rustic wool. It's not skin soft, it's a little itchy, but it's a real kind of workhorse yarn and everything I've knit out of it I really enjoy wearing, so, and it's priced in a way that that makes it a little more affordable than some of the more like indie dyers or even some of those other dyers and brands. So yeah, that is my first finished object of 2026, the Champagne Partigan, kind of, by Petite Knit. So my next finished object was a pair of slipper socks for my husband. When we went to Vermont Coupon Wool last fall, he picked out two skeins of a worsted weight yarn at Fiber Stash Dye Works, a worsted weight superwash merino. And initially he had picked them out with the idea he wanted a hat, but he decided that he actually wanted like a thick pair of slipper socks to wear for the winter, and so we looked on Ravelry and there was a couple of patterns that he kind of liked, but there's nothing that was like perks. He knew he wanted something with a lot of like pattern repeats and like a bold kind of design to it, so I ended up making something custom. So let me show you the socks real quick and then I'll talk through them. Fair warning, these are superwash merino socks. So they have pilled and I didn't clean them or anything and they've been well loved already, so they are in the shape they're in, but I wanted to share them. So this is what they came out like. So the two colors from the Fiber Stash Dye Works are called Champagne, which is that creamy yellow color, and then Grinch was the green color. So like I said, worsted weight yarn. I knit these on a US 4, which is a three and a half millimeter needle. Initially I had used the Cozy Toes pattern. That is a free worsted weight sock pattern to get an idea for like the number of stitches to cast on. It turned out once I started the stranded color work, they were too tight, so I had to increase the number of stitches. I used the Chartminder app, it's a web application, to just come up with these little like stitch repeats. It's nothing unique, I'm sure plenty of other people have done the same patterns. You know, I just played around with them until they kind of made some shapes that I thought were cute. I did a wrap and turn heel, because that's just a heel shape that I like to do, and it fits in very well. And yeah, these were a real fun project to work on. A big thick worsted sock goes pretty quickly. I had a really fun time figuring out how I was going to make all the little patterns go together. I think they came out pretty well. Like I said, if I could do it again, if I wasn't kind of tied to a specific yarn that he had already picked out that he wanted to use, I probably would not use the Gouache Merino for socks. But they are slipper socks, right? So they're for around the house, it's not, they're not, it's not wearing them to weddings or anything like that. So if they get a little pilly, if they get a little worn, that just means that they can well look. But yeah, these were fun to work on. These were self-drafted colorwork socks for my husband. And my last finished object is the Baby Bear Bonnet by Pernille Larkin. This pattern costs about $5.85 American. It is a 35 Danish kroner. The yarn weight is DK, or the gauge is a DK, so it recommends a fingering and a lace held together. The gauge is 23 stitches and 34 rows over four inches. The suggested yarn is knitting for olive merino and soft silk mohair. I just ended up using one strand of DK. I used Lion Brand Respun in the color Raven. The recommended needle size is a US 4, which is a three and a half millimeter for some of the edges, and then a US 6, which is a four millimeter needle. I used both the recommended needle sizes. It comes in six sizes that should fit a child's head from one to 24 months. I knit the second size, which I think is recommends a three month. This is the hat. I've knit this before for other babies, and I just think it's a really cute little accessory for a small child to have. I really like the way that the ears are shaped on this hat. A lot of bear bonnets or bear hats I've seen, I've even made some of them. You kind of just knit like a regular hat, and then you knit the short rows like an additional sort of shape that you fold in on itself that makes that little ear shape that you attach at the end. I just really like the way that the ears are incorporated into the actual shaping of this bonnet. So the whole thing is knit flat, and then you use short row shaping to build out these little ears, and then this is kind of hard to see because this is all black yarn, but then you do decreases down the back of the hat in order to create the back shaping, and you end up with this little bonnet shape, and then you do a... I've been out of the game a while, I forgot... I-cord. You do an I-cord around the bottom for the ties. I, like I said, knit this before. I like this pattern. The size three was a good size. It fits. It was a teeny bit big when I first made it, but now it fits really well, which makes sense. It's almost three months old. I think I would make this again in a larger size for maybe next winter, but yeah, it's great. Definitely a fun pattern. The one thing I would say is like because of the way that this is all shaped, you and like how everything works together, you end up with a lot of ends for like a very small hat, you know. It's not like there's a weaving in process at the end that like you don't normally have to deal with when you're knitting hats for babies or adults or whatever, but I think it's well worth it just from the way it comes out, and yeah, I would recommend this pattern. I would knit it again. That is the Baby Bear Bonnet by Pernille Larson. All right, so I have two whips that I've been working on. The first is the boho style mosaic sweater by Irene Lin. This is a top-down raglan sweater with some big mosaic knitting color work on the bottom and on the sleeves. I was really feeling like sort of like 70s style kind of sweaters, and I thought this really kind of like fit that vibe that I was going for, and I really wanted to work on a mosaic color work project, so I picked this out. The pattern costs $5.50 American. It is knit at a worsted weight gauge of 19 stitches and 25 rows over 4 inches. The recommended yarn is Brooklyn Tweed Shelter. I used more of that Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool, had like three sweater quantities in my stash, and I kind of just, I didn't have any other worsted weight yarn and I'm trying to get rid of it, so used more of that. The colors I used are Natural and Nature's Brown. The recommended needle size is a US 7, which is three and a half millimeter, and a US 8, which is a four millimeter needle. It comes in five sizes when you look at it on the on Ravelry. Really it's like four sizes because there are two mediums, but one's like medium more cropped than like a medium kind of long, so it only fits like four different bus sizes, and I think I did the math right from centimeters. The max bus circumference is only 57. So yeah, take that with a grain of salt. I wasn't totally thinking about the sizing when I picked this out. I was just looking at the mosaic part of it, but there you go. I ended up knitting the second size, which is intended to be a 47 inch bust. The pattern, it's good. Let me show you a little bit of what I've been working on. I made a lot of progress. I finished the body. I have done all the color work and the bottom hem, and I did one full sleeve. So yeah, there's the things I like. The things I like about this sweater, I like this kind of texture detail where every x rows you do one like reverse or one kind of garter bump. I think it just gives it like a little bit of extra detail before you get to the big color work section. I like the design of the color work. Mosaic, I've never done the mosaic knitting in a garment. I've only done it in accessories, and now I think I know why. Because mosaic color work feels like it takes so long and you're not making as much progress because every row is worked twice. I guess if you're not familiar with mosaic color work, the way it works is you work one color at a time and you split the other color stitches. And so because of that, you end up working each row of that design twice. In the round, you just work two circles, but then if you're doing something flat, you work one in the knit and one in the purl on the reverse side. The nice thing about that is you don't have to worry about stranded color work. Sometimes, for me especially, my tension when I try to do purled stranded color work is not the best, but because I'm only working with one color, I don't have to worry about that. So that's a positive, but also it felt like it took so long. I actually had to like, I finished this first sleeve and I had to put this down and work on something else for a while that felt faster because it was driving me nuts how long everything felt like it was taking. Yeah, so those are the things I like about it. The pattern itself is, you know, like I said, it only comes in essentially four sizes and the details on ravelry are a little bit sparse. Like there was some, some information about it I was only able to get once I downloaded it, like those specifics on like the sizing and stuff. So yeah, I don't know if I would make this again or if I would like fully recommend it, but it, it's been interesting to work on and I'm, I'm pretty excited to have a final object. I think it'll be a fun semi-statement piece in my wardrobe. I think it'll be nice to wear like on cold nights in the summer if I go camping or to the beach or something like that. But yeah, I'm looking forward to having this piece done and I think that's all I'll say about it. So yeah, that is the mosaic boho style mosaic cardigan by Irene Lim. And my last whip is the Puttysaurus by Little Theorem. This is a another top-down raglan cardigan that is all garter stitch and it is designed, I think, primarily for babies and children, but it fits a multitude of sizes, which I'll get to in a second. So this pattern costs seven dollars American. It is a worsted weight pattern. The gauge is 18 stitches and 36 rows over four inches in garter stitch. The recommended yarn is Cloudborn Fibers Superwash Merino Worsted Twist. I ended up using a Caron Cake, um, Caron Cake Blossom, I think, is the line of these particular Caron Cakes and the color I used is called Tide Pool. The needle is a US 8, which is a five millimeter. Like I mentioned, this comes in a ton of sizes. It comes in 17 sizes, meant to fit a bust or chest of anywhere from a zero to three months all the way up to a 58 to 60 inch chest. So there's a lot of range. You could make them for the whole family. I think this is kind of fun and if it turns out good, I might make some for my nephews who are like five and two. So yeah, that's a really nice little feature of this pattern. So I'm knitting the second size, which is three to six months, and this is what I have so far. So yeah, I finished the whole body and the sleeves. Like I said, that mosaic knitting cardigan was driving me nuts. It felt like I wasn't getting anywhere and so I was like, let me, let me just knit a baby sweater because that's going to make me feel like I'm making a ton of progress really quickly. And it did! I finished all of this in a week and so that's nice to have done. So pretty standard, kind of like raglan cardigan so far. Nothing that interesting in particular. I mean, it's, it's nice but like, um, all of the kind of fun features of it are missing. The hoodie part and the sores part are not part of it right now. But, um, yeah, it's all, it's garter stitch. There's no kind of like ribbing or anything at the bottom of the sleeve for the hem. And the next step, so all of, you use a provisional cast on when you cast on your, at the top for the raglan. And so next up, I will be picking up these stitches to make the hood and then once that's done, you do these little garter stitch triangles along the back and the back of the hood to make it a little dinosaur shape. So very excited to see how this turns out. It's been really fun. I think I'm going to order some cute dinosaur toggle buttons because the pattern does recommend using toggle. It's, it's written for like toggles, not for buttonhole closed buttons. Uh, and so I think I'm going to order some little toggle buttons I can use for, for toggle buttons. There are, um, in the pattern there is instructions if you want to do regular buttons. Um, but I kind of like the idea of the toggles. I thought it was cute. Uh, there is also some, uh, writing for if you want to do some waist shaping for like the larger adult sizes. Uh, but again, this is for a tiny human and so I didn't worry about that. Um, but yeah, overall, uh, good pattern, well-written, enjoying making this. I think this yarn is very cute. I often don't use like big box acrylic yarns, but I, I happened to have some, uh, in stash, um, from a while ago, I think. And so, uh, yeah, it's, it's a, it's, it comes out really pretty, this, um, variation in color. So that is this for now, the Hoodisaurus by Little Theorem. Okay, and that is all that I have for today. Thank you so much for watching. I don't know when I'll be back. Hopefully soon. I'm hoping now that things are kind of settling down, I will have a little more, uh, time to knit and also to make similar videos. But, uh, I don't know, no guarantees. Uh, new motherhood is, um, it's unpredictable. And so still trying to figure everything out, but this was really fun. I'm happy to be back. I enjoyed making this. And, uh, if you liked this video, uh, feel free to give it a thumbs up. And if you want to see more of what I'm doing when it comes, uh, feel free to subscribe. So once again, thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one.