On Board

A little over a year ago I found that I was listening more and more to Zane Lowe's 'new music' programme on Radio 1 - particularly when I settled in for an evening knitting sess. For reasons that probably made no more sense at the time than they do now, I began a one woman campaign to get Zane to say 'knit' on the air by texting in response to his "who's on board" show opener. I was successful, and have even managed to be immortalised as knitting socks for rappers on the Radio 1 website.

So somehow Zane has sort of become linked to knitting in my mind. (I expect that news would thrill him.) A couple of weeks ago he became a father for the second time and it seemed obvious that it was time for me to put my knitting where my mouth (errrr...mobile phone) was.

I considered bootees or a hat but finally settled on the idea of a hoodie. I used a pattern from Chic Knits for Stylish Babies , knit it up in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran and added a few embellishments -- specifically a row of colourful beads around the bottom spelling out 'on board' and some specially constructed buttons.

When I came up with the 'on board' hoodie idea I thought sourcing buttons with letters on them would be easy. I'd be tripping over letter buttons - I'd be spoiled for choice.

Ha! How naive I was about the world of letter buttons. Turns out that buttons with letters on them are a rarity. I found 1 style of buttons in the UK - but they were kind of ugly and they were out of stock on 3 or 4 crucial letters. I found 1 style in the US - but they weren't great and I was too impatient to wait in any event.

Not put off by the great letter button shortage of 2008 I came up with the idea of using beads (letter beads being a little easier to source) and creating my own buttons.

I made the buttons by tieing the beads into the centre of plain 4 hole buttons - and I'm quite pleased with the effect. The biggest revelation was that with a lot of determination and a teeny weeny crochet hook you can get aran weight yarn through an itsy bitsy bead hole.

Unfortunately, I didn't learn how to take cool close up pictures of the beads before I sent the hoodie off -- so these fuzzy pictures of the detailing will have to do.









I will confess that I was thinking I'd not post about this -- there is something sort of embarassing about knitting a hoodie for a Radio 1 DJ's baby when you aren't 14. But when I read yesterday that Kate Moss made the news by trying (and failing) to get into the DJ booth with him in Ibiza I decided a handknit baby hoodie wasn't so bad.