Change of plans.

I had planned to put in a small vegetable garden today, but when I woke up this morning, it was snowing. I ran outside to take some pictures before it all melted. Because that's what snow does in Texas.



But the last time I checked, it was still snowing. Hello, spring.

In other news, a friend of ours has opened a new Etsy shop selling handmade wooden cutting boards.




He gave us one as a housewarming gift a few years ago, and we just love it. It has become our main cutting board. Beautiful, functional, and durable. So if you're in the market for something beautiful and handmade for your own kitchen or a gift for the foodie in your life, stop by Wolfe Woodworks and take a gander. And if you don't see what you have in mind, convo Phil for a custom. I bet he could hook you up.



It's snowing even harder now. I think I'll snuggle in for the last winter nap of the season.

Happy birthday, baby!

Eliza's birthday went off without a hitch. Her actual birthday was on a weekday, so we didn't have her party until the following Saturday. On her birthday we went out for a pancake breakfast, which is her favorite. When she sees pancakes on my plate, she starts rocking in her seat and going "Mmm! Mmm! Mmm!" because she knows I'll share with her. Actually, in the last few days, she's started doing that any time I'm eating, which means that we're going to have to start having healthy lunches at home rather than picking Daddy up and taking him out to lunch every day. What I deem good enough for me to eat and what I think is good enough for her to eat are two very different things, but they're going to have to converge.



In between her birthday and her party, she started pulling up. I just realized that I don't have a still photo of this yet, although I did catch it on video. It's hard to get a picture of her doing things lately because she's very interested in having her picture taken, so if she sees the camera, she stops what she's doing and gets all excited about that.



The party was a small affair with family. My brother and nephew flew in, and we don't get to see them often, so that was nice. We had homemade chicken salad sandwiches on homemade bread with homemade lemonade. I didn't do a lot in the way of decorations. I ordered a cake to match the dress that I made, and we picked up some balloons to decorate the dining room. Eliza loved the balloons, and kept signing "lights" at them. I couldn't stand to give her sugar or anything that might stain the dress that I made her, so she ate a carrot zucchini muffin with cream cheese and honey icing and sprinkles on top instead of the chocolate cake.


Lights!

Afterwards, she got her first haircut. More of a trim, really. She was born with lots of hair and almost all of it fell out when she was about 6 months old, leaving just one little strip down the center of her head that we called her mohawk. When her hair came back in and started getting thicker, the mohawk started looking pretty silly. Her father was very attached to it, though, and said I couldn't cut it until after her birthday party. Silly Daddy. I didn't tell him that I had done it, and when he discovered it, he said that I had scalped her. But I think he's gotten over it. She also had a single curly hair over her ear that was past shoulder length, but I haven't seen it lately. It must have fallen out, and that makes me a little sad. Silly Mommy.



Her one year pediatrician's appointment was on Tuesday, and the doctor said she couldn't be doing any better. He was impressed with how smart she is, and it was nice to know that someone who isn't family thinks so, too. Her vocabulary has been exploding lately, and it's so much fun to watch her grow.



Grandma and Grandpa stayed through Wednesday, so we've been catching up on laundry and slipping back into our old routine the last couple of days. I cut out the fabric for another little dress, but I haven't sewn it yet. Not that she needs any more clothes! Grandma and I went shopping and it wasn't until I packed up some of her too-small winter clothes and hung up all of the new stuff that I realized just what a spring/summer wardrobe this little girlie has. I think we'll be good until fall.

I don't usually do this, but

Photo nerds, head over to Alexis Miller's blog to put your name in the hat for a camera giveaway. I know I'd love to win!

I made a dress!

I don't think I've sewn a garment since my mother made me learn to sew in junior high. Wait, there was one dress I made for E while I was pregnant, but it doesn't count because I could barely get it on her and she never wore it. So I was really nervous about this because it had facings and box pleats and I was sure it would be hard. But it wasn't. The worst part was figuring out that putting in snaps sometimes sucks (apparently previous experiences with snaps failed to teach me that lesson) and then having to take them out without ripping the dress and learn to make buttonholes on a new-to-me machine.



You can't see it in this picture, but the hem facing is red.

The pattern is Oliver + S Birthday Party Dress, which is appropriate for an upcoming event, and the fabric is from Repro Depot. Because I'll take any excuse I can get to order fabric from Repro Depot.

Finished

I finished casting off the Pi this morning. It's smaller than I had anticipated.



I carried on with the crochet cast off, even though I'm not sure I like it, because yarn became an issue. I had enough left for maybe one more round.

I may have gotten belligerent about it at the end, but whether I finished on time or not, the Olympics gave me my first finished knit of 2010*. In March. Can you believe that?

*Well, there is a baby sweater that just needs buttons, and this isn't blocked yet, so I guess those two are nose and nose.

No gold here.

I started casting off in Friday, but I wasn't sure I liked it, so I put it down and haven't picked it back up. Oh well.

Now I can get back to sewing!

Many stitches.

The Happy Stacker is complete! Yay!


Pattern by Heather Bailey, Cosmo Cricket "Girl Friday" fabrics, and lots and lots of ric rac (as it should be)

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to take a wee break from sewing and actually clean my house. Too bad it won't clean itself. I keep waiting.

And I've made it through the 48-row section of the Pi shawl. I now have 576 stitches on my needle. I only have to go around 40-50 more times, and then knit on an edging. I'm trying to decide if I should switch to a lace pattern now or not.



Probably not. And I clearly forgot that, when knitting lace, I do not like to pull from the inside of the ball. We're on the verge of a collapse, here.

Progress.

Eliza is teething again, and we had a very rough night last night, so I was tempted to just sleep when she slept today (which wasn't much), but, coffee-fueled, I forged onward.


Don't they look like yummy little cakes?

I finished one more ring last night and two today. One ring tomorrow and the pole that they all stack on (instead of the stand-in four poster), and I'll be done. I might be a little sad. This is a fun project. I've been tucking jingle-bell-in-a-cage cat toys into the rings as I stuff them, so they make noise as well. I can't wait to see her play with it.

As for the shawl, I'm on row 33 of the 48-row section, and then I'll double my stitches again and knit 40 or 50 more rows, per EZ's directions, or until I decide it's big enough. I might put it down and tuck in early tonight, though.

Getting into the spirit.

So yesterday I cast on for an Olympic project. I had a skein of handspun laceweight singles (Hello Yarn "Air" merino/bamboo -- another example of me turning a small spinning project into a long one) by my desk that was meant for an Elizabeth Zimmermann Pi Shawl, and when I looked at it this time, it said, "knit me." And I thought, "why not?" This is something I can do at night when I can't be sewing. Nothing could be easier than stockinette in the round, but it is the sort of project that I would never finish without a deadline. So I cast on and made up for some lost time. The rows are already getting really really long, but I only have about 70 or 80 to go. The real beauty is that I can always just cast off where I am on the last day and still win gold.



And I started another project today involving five rings. A fabric stacking ring set for Eliza's birthday. I just finished the first one, and it wasn't as tricky as it looked in the pattern. She's taking a late nap that may just turn into going to bed insanely early (she does this every so often), so I may have a chance to get ahead on this as well while I wait for the fabric for her birthday dress.

Housekeeping.

I used to have Blogger comments. Then I switched to Haloscan, and all of my old comments got hidden. Haloscan no longer exists, and they want me to transfer my comments to some paid service, which I am not going to do. So I uninstalled it and now the original Blogger comments are back, but any comments left through Haloscan are gone. I almost decided the blog wasn't worth this headache, but it turned out not to be so bad.

The bad news is, Blogger doesn't always give me an email address so I can reply to comments. The good news is, I'm really bad about replying to comments, anyway, and now I have an excuse.

So I did finish the sock.

And I started the next one. And I only ripped back the cuff part twice. Once for thinking I still had the chart memorized from the first sock, and once for not paying attention.



But it's OK, because these may be my favorite socks EVER and they're worth getting right. We'll ignore that one of the motifs starts in a different place on each sock (again due to thinking that I still had the chart memorized from the first sock), OK?

And it's time for the Knitting Olympics. I was a year late for the first go-round, and so I've basically been looking forward to the 2010 Olympics for three years. But now that it's here, I don't wanna. I have two pounds of wool sitting by ready to be spun into a sweater amount of yarn and right now I don't wanna. "Don't wanna" is probably not part of an Olympian's vocabulary, but this is my hobby and I don't want to make it suck. For one thing, I keep swearing off big spinning projects, and I keep starting them. I have a 3-ply sock yarn on the new wheel* now that's been going since December, and I am not a multi-project spinner. Also, someone I know has a birthday coming up soon, and her mama has decided to sew her not only a birthday dress, but toys as well, and I don't think she should put that off until the last minute. Especially since the party is at our place. And it might still be chilly, so she might need a knitted shrug to wear over her sleeveless party dress. So will I compete or not? If I decide I want to, I will. Maybe I'll finish that sock yarn and knit the socks. Some challenge, huh?

* Did I mention I got another spinning wheel for Christmas? No? Well, that's a whole other post.

I leave you with this image from today. Blurry spots are snow on my lens.

Snow angels, she says, are not so fun after all.

I may never finish knitting this sock.

I've had this sock yarn (Lorna's Laces in Old Rose) in my stash forever, mentally tagged with this pattern (Nancy Bush's Traveler's Stockings). I think Grumperina knit that combo way back in the day, and I thought it was pretty. I think I maybe even tried the pattern in a different yarn somewhere along the way and got lost in all the twisted stitches. But not this time. This time, those twisted stitches were actually fun.



But, alas, the fun ran out all too soon, leaving me with nothing but stockinette and zigzag clocks. And as much as I love a sock with clocks, these clocks are driving me crazy. For some reason, I am obsessed with having one clock zig where the other zags, and it doesn't take very much mindless knitting for me to get them going at different rates. Which leads to dropping of stitches and fiddling and frustration, and, finally, ripping.



But at least I have this shiny new little nook in our bedroom in which to be frustrated with my knitting, accompanied by my favorite podcasts.



My mom bought me the chair at an estate sale. It's really too pretty to cover up with my lace, but you have to put the lace somewhere, right? How else do you enjoy something that you have knitted but will never wear? One of these days I'll even get curtains up in our room.

Oh, and that door behind the spinning wheel? That's the wool closet.

Um, happy 2010!

And to all a good night

Between two new teeth (and more soon to appear), Thanksgiving at our place, vacation, a trip to my mom's, and more Christmas cookie baking than you can shake a stick at, there hasn't been much time for blogging the last month or so, but I have a feeling that things will settle down before too long.

Have a wonderful and safe holiday, everyone.

Toys

We keep a small basket of toys in the living room for Eliza to play with. It doesn't hold much, so it's easy for me to keep the toys picked up and away from the dogs when she isn't playing, and I can rotate things in and out to keep her interest. She loves to pull them all out, one by one, and play with them. This can keep her entertained for quite a while. I especially love it when she pulls out a book and 'reads' it.



This morning, she finally got a new addition to the basket that's been hanging out in my "on the needles" sidebar for way too long. I knit this bunny and felted it early in my pregnancy, and he's been hanging out in the knitting basket waiting for a face and stuffing since.



Isn't he a dandy? I actually made all of those toys that aren't in the basket: Goldilocks, the patchwork ball, the puzzle ball, and the cloth book. I'm not sure what to take out in order to make room for Mr. Bunny. She loves the bear and both of the dolls.

She also likes to make a move on Mommy's toys every now and then.



Someday, little one.

Pixie

As much as I love Eliza's Cubba Hat, it seems to be getting a bit small. And I liked that she had a blue/purple hat and a pink/orange hat, so one or the other matched any given outfit. So I flipped through my Vintage Baby Knits book (because I want to knit just about everything in that book) last week and cast on for the Stella Pixie Hat.

What a great little knit! Looking at it, I expected it to be shaped with decreases or short rows, but it's not. When you knit it up, it looks like this:


The "ribbing" on the top isn't really ribbing at all, it's purl welts. Because if you knit vertical rows of knits and purls, the purls recede, but if you knit horizontal rows of knits and purls, the knits recede. And these horizontal rows of knits and purls pull in, just like ribbing, only in the other direction. So you knit this rectangle with no shaping at all, just taking advantage of the nature of knits and purls, and then you fold it in half and graft the top. Voila! Hat. I am such a sucker for clever patterns.

Except when I folded mine in half, I didn't have the same number of stitches on each side. It's always something with me, isn't it? So I went looking and found my problem:

An error in the stitch pattern. Lesson: don't knit this pattern in semi-darkness.

What to do? That blip threw off the pattern for the whole left side of the hat. Should I rip? Of course not. I pulled it off the needles and dropped a whole section of stitches. I probably didn't have to drop even as many as I did, but I figured it would be more of a pain to keep track of exactly which stitches I had to drop how far, so I just pulled the needles out and started pulling.


Yet another reason to love double pointed needles.


Coming right along.


Oops, missed one.


Almost done. (And the munchkin woke up.)


Where I should have been an hour ago.


Grafting.


And, hat!

Now let's try it on.

Heh.

Side view:

See what I mean about the purl welts?

She didn't need the added height of a button band to fasten it, so I crocheted a quick chain and wove it through the cast on edge for a tie. I had some tension issues from the surgery, but a quick bath and run through the dryer (yarn is Cherry Tree Hill Supersock, so no worries about felting), it's mostly evened out.

Happy Halloween!

Cisco Hat by Berroco
My handspun Corriedale, "New Day" by Spunky Eclectic



Maybe a little big for this year, but I think she can make it work.

Down to the wire

While I was waiting on new yarn for more longies, I picked up this scarf that I started last year. I remember I started it because I wanted to make something from Nancy Bush's then new lace book. I had two balls of Kidsilk Haze, and I figured I'd just make the scarf as long as I could with that much.



When I picked it back up, I was surprised to find that I was further along than I had remembered. For some reason I thought I remembered figuring that I could get 23 repeats into the scarf with the yarn I had. But that was a year ago, and my memory is sometimes very faulty (and also my math), so I disregarded that and knit until it looked like I had about enough yarn for the top edging, which was 24 repeats. Except of course I didn't have enough for the top edging. So I picked out the (sticky mohair) cast off on the bottom edging and ripped back a few rows, cast off again, knit a few more rows on the top edging to even it up, and cast off again. And I still barely had enough to get it done. I was literally cutting yarn tails off the dangling ends and splicing them into my cast off, and I still had to knit the last two stitches together to barely have enough to finish. I've never been so happy to throw something in a water bath and call it done.


Triinu Scarf, Nancy Bush, "Knitted Lace of Estonia"
Kidsilk Haze, Fern
US3 needles

Thankfully, the fuzzy mohair hides the many ends. I think it turned out lovely. And it's just the right length.

KnitaLongies

You know how you start knitting something and you just can't stop? At this point in the Longies Knitalong, we're supposed to be working on short rows and gussets. The timeline is slow going, because a lot of participants are new knitters and all have small children. I've knit three pair.


This pair, in Peace Fleece "Moscow Magic Pink", I knit in the medium size. The fit is about perfect, which means they'll be too small before long. In fact, the length is better with the cuff turned down. So for the rest I moved up to the large size and knit a 1.5" cuff that I can turn up for now.


Peace Fleece "Violet Vyehchyeerom"

I put the third pair ("Georgia Rose") on her today and thought we'd go for a walk and get some cute pictures, so I put her in the stroller instead of the carrier like I usually do so I could carry the camera around my neck.



She wasn't too impressed. We walked to the park and saw some geese.



She wasn't too impressed with that, either.



Life's tough when you're teething. Or maybe she just wants some mittens.

I think I can finish three more pair of longies before the knitalong is over, and then I'll make her a jacket from the leftovers. (Who needs to do housework when you can knit?) The yarn just came in the mail today!

Too much?

More little girl knits

I meant to be knitting something for me, right? Perhaps finishing up a 2 1/2 year old UFO? Well, I pulled that old thing out of the yarn closet, held up the front piece that I had finished oh, so long ago, and the thing darn near went down to my ankles. And I decided I didn't want a sweater quite that long. So if I was going to knit it, I'd have to start over. And if I was going to have to start over, why not do something new? But what? Well, I had to think about that. And while I was thinking, I figured I might as well be spinning. And I knew exactly what I wanted to make with the yarn I was spinning.


Ravelry

I split the roving (well, technically, the top) down into 20 or more pieces. Pencil roving, basically. And then I spun it into 450 yards of fingering/sport weight singles. What a lovely, quick way to get a finer gauge yarn! And the Corriedale was perfectly soft and happy to be airy singles. I just can't get enough of the colors. Adrian is a genius. They'll have to pry my fiber club membership out of my cold, dead hands.

For the dress, I started with the Little Sister's Dress pattern, but modified it a lot. Partly because my gauge was a little different.



I ended the yoke where it was supposed to be joined for knitting in the round, then knit 4 rows of stockinette on the front and back before increasing for the underarms, using the schematic and my gauge to calculate my numbers. Then I just increased every 7th row until desired length, which is longer than pattern calls for. I used one of her dresses as a template.

Oh, and the yoke and hem are in garter stitch. Because garter stitch makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

What next? I guess I'll just have to work on her longies while I think about that some more.