No matter how you swing it, patroning yarn shops with my husband is different from patroning yarn shops by myself. He forces me to slow down and reminds me to take a look at the gorgeous samples that the shop owner/employees have taken the time to knit up, otherwise, I’m often someone who runs in and out to pick up yarn for a specific project (a habit developed out of necessity when working for Webs Yarn Store). In fact, if he hadn’t been there when I impulsively decided to pop into Norwich Knits I probably would have walked out empty-handed instead of with the two coordinating skeins of Malabrigo that I left with.

The initial plan was to make two short sleeved Hyphen sweaters and while it’s true that I loved working the pattern (the yoke stitches were the perfect pop of interesting), my second plan was to work up a coordinating pair of pants. Then I decided to knit the sweater in a size larger and realized that I hadn’t purchased enough yarn for the pants!

With a quick pivot, I worked up a pair of coordinating leg warmers (I’ll do a separate post on that because I translated a pattern from German and it’s worth sharing!) and a hat. So happy with the end result, right down to the red flower buttons I found.

Speaking of buttons, I used my sewing machine’s button stitch to attach the red flower buttons and I’m sold. Despite the knit fabric, they are firmly attached it took a quarter of the time. 100% recommend this technique :]