Sweater for Teddy

I’ve been reading Knitting
Ganseys, and one of the suggestions (with pattern) is
that you make a small sweater, for a doll or a teddy bear, that
uses some of the techniques that are a little hard to envision
when you don’t actually have yarn and needles in your hands.

So I made the pattern sweater for my sister’s teddy bear:

Teddy in his new sweater

Here’s a shot with a better view of the pattern (the back and
the front are the same:

Back, showing pattern detail

Doing a small sweater is a good idea — there were several
things about the pattern that I understood better doing them than
reading about them, and on the small sweater it didn’t take very
long, and wasn’t so difficult to rip out a few rows if you got
something wrong.

For instance, knitting the shoulder strap is a lot like turning
the heel on a sock, and it’s hart to see what’s going to happen
until you do it:

detail of arm top and shoulder strap

There are some conventions for making sweaters for humans about
things like what percent of the chest stitches you want at the
neck. They don’t all work for teddy bears, so I had to take out
the decreased neck gusset because I couldn’t get the sweater over
Teddy’s head. It was still a tight fit even with no decreasing —
if I were doing it again, I’d leave more stitches at the neck and
fewer at the shoulders.

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