Little Girl's knitted top

When I haven't been canning tomatoes, freezing tomatoes, making oven-roasted tomato sauce, making green tomato relish, or making salsa, I've been trying to squeeze a little knitting into my day.

I'm finding it harder to just sit down and knock off a couple of rows now that there's a puppy in the house. Sage takes tremendous interest, which is to say way too much interest, in everything I do. Her interest extends to trying to steal my yarn, my needles or my pattern, whichever is handiest to her. So before I can start knitting, I have to make sure I've built a little fortress around myself to keep the enemy too-curious puppy away.

I have managed to complete a "Like Sleeves for kids" knitted tunic top, though. This will be for our little friend Phoebe, who turns four in November.

I spotted a completed "Like Sleeves" at the Cashmere Goat in Camden in July. I loved its simple design, so I bought the pattern and yarn.

I used Plymouth Encore yarn for this project. The pattern calls for 100% wool yarn, but I'm not sure every child is comfortable in wool, and I'm not sure every young mother wants to wash woolens by hand. Plymouth Encore is only 25% wool, and it's machine washable.

The "Like Sleeves" pattern is translated from the Japanese, I believe. It's a simple, straight-forward pattern, but I did get a little confused here and there.

The title, for instance, baffled me until I realized that "Like Sleeves" means "Fake Sleeves." There's a sentence about midway through the pattern that says, "Those stitches just worked will be upper back body and work in row." I never did figure out what "work in row" means, so I ignored it and no harm seems to have been done.

The most confusing bit of instruction, which caused me to lose two full days of knitting time as I paced the floor and tried to decipher what it meant, appeared in the "Finishing" portion of the pattern. Now that I look back on this, I realize I was being thick-headed, but this is what threw me for a loop: "With circular needle and RS facing....knit 11 sts on waste yarn...." I thought this meant I was to do a provisional cast-on, which I've never learned and don't want to learn. I couldn't figure out why I needed to do a provisional cast-on while knitting the neckband. I looked at Youtube videos of provisional cast-ons, I visited Ravelry and read the notes of others who've knitted this top, I fussed and fumed.

Then finally, on Day 3 of No Progress, I finally saw the light. The instructions are NOT saying "knit 11 sts ONTO waste yarn, they are saying, "Knit 11 sts WHICH YOU ALREADY HAVE ON WASTE YARN." Phew. That I could do. Why I'd insisted on misinterpreting that line of instruction is beyond me.

The Like Sleeves top is now done. Yesterday I started knitting a hat. The hat shouldn't cause me stress because I've worked with this pattern many times.