Two friends recently welcomed new babies into the world. My favorite way to welcome babies is with knitting so I made each of the babies a cardigan.

First up, a navy blue cabled cardigan with little elephant buttons.

The elephant buttons are absurdly cute. We  found them at Jo-Anns. I was going for some basic buttons, but no, there was an entire wall of animal buttons. I couldn’t pass them up.

The sweater is knit with Cascade Superwash 220 in a navy color called Midnight Heather (color 1924). The yarn is described as a worsted, but is more of a light worsted or DK. The sweater has a completely seamless construction. It’s knit from the top-down with raglan sleeves. The garter stitch button band is knit at the same time which means no picking up stitches to add the button band on after the rest of the sweater is knit (picking up stitches is one of my least favorite knitting-related things to do).

The cardigan has simple cables on on the fronts and running down the center of the back. It’s sized for a one year old with a 20″ chest circumference and is about 11″ long. I love how easy this was to knit once I’d planned out the stitch counts. It came out just about where I expected it to (hooray for math working out!), but is just slightly narrower in the chest than I’d like.

The second baby gift is a striped cardigan. Much like the blue-cabled cardigan, it is completely seamless and knit as one piece (no picking up stitches here either). And that button wall at Jo-Ann’s again had the absolutely perfect buttons. The owls match the yarn colors pretty perfectly.

The yarn is Jojoland Tonic in three colors: AW332, AW132, and AW316. The colors are very fall, but it’s a 12-month size so it should fit through next fall.

Each of these sweaters was a pretty quick knit and used only ~440 yards. I’ve seen the striped one already on the little recipient and he is too cute for words; I can’t wait to see the navy one on the recipient.  Of course, finishing these knits means the weather in Baltimore will officially turn sunny and warm!