A Vest for Wild Thing

My little buddy 'Wild Thing' turns 4 at the end of October. Why I felt I needed to start a birthday present for him now.... I'll never probably know, but start it I did!
I actually cast on the bottom edge last week (Wednesday at Royal Knitting!) and made it almost all the way up to the armpits. This is where I realized that I had not only made a size too large for this kid but somehow I had ended up with enough stitches that made it huge! I don't think it would have ever fit this kid!   Wow. I have no idea what I did, but seriously I think I was in the neighborhood of making a size 10 ~ for a much larger animal!  I was shooting for a  boy animal size 4! 
I love how I find out things when I knit. How to do stuff, how to make stuff work, how to NOT do something and well... just  loads of interesting things become apparent when I knit! Yeah, so most of the things I realize are from mistakes, but.... learning from mistakes is a good thing! Right?
This is what I've learned from this little sweater vest!   Frogging! Frogging is so much easier if I use my ball winder! It goes so much faster if I just pay attention to what the heck I'm doing, but sigh! The ball winder to frog the vest was really kind of fun!!

Starting over on this little vest was a really good idea so after ball winder/frogging I started over on Sunday and now that  today is Thursday,  I'm almost done!!  I just have to do a 3 needle bind off at the top of the shoulders (another new thing for me!) and then pick up stitches along the arm holes and neck edging and then complete a ribbed edge!  Woot!!  I even got a little adventerous and deviated from the pattern (who? Me? Never would have thought that now would ya?!) and added a little stripe on the front! The V neck with a ribbed edge will come from the top to the top white stripe. It's a little hard to see in the picture, but there are 2 top straps on each end of that gold stitch holder. They run in a v point down to the stripey section! I don't normally stray off the pattern path but in this case, the pattern is super simple and I wanted to have a little bit of Wild Thing's sister's dress in here! Just because I'm sure their Mom would totally smirk at the 'matchy matchy' thing!!
* Miss Butter's dress was made from the same yarn - Berroco Remix
Here are the pattern particulars:
www.knittingpureandsimple.com
#256 Simple Vest
#266 Little Girls Sundress
Berroco Remix - 100% recycled fibers and WASHABLE!!