AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

buttons...

Chris is now at home, taking care of Q, while I am attempting to bring home the veggie bacon, but not real veggie bacon (that's cruel) and to learn all of the things.

It is awesome, because, unlike daycare, Chris sends me a picture or two of our little boy every day. Or at least every day so far, as it is only day 2.

It is horrible, because the pictures make me want to race home and give our little boy a snuggle. I have not learned to either teleport or to colocate, so I cannot do that and keep the day job.

School is going well, or as well as one would expect for it only being week two of classes. I am even getting some knitting done. Not just the sweater I made for me, but I have a sweater for Q that is waiting for a button.

It is a sweater I started at Squam 2013.

Wow.

When it is finally done, I am going to be so happy to unveil that. People who were in my cabin that year will almost certainly remember the yarn and remember the project, because I was knitting away almost every evening on it.

Now, it is time to go and do more homework!

Finishing sweaters

I finished a second item in the beginning of June. Q needs replacement sweaters, because either they are shrinking or he is growing (I know which one it is) and the ones I made for him no longer fit his frame.

This one is the Offset Wraplan. I striped this with a random white yarn and all of the non-fingering yellow yarns I had in my stash. I mean it, there are at least two and more likely three different yellow yarns in there. A great stashbusting project.

Of course, the sweater doesn't fit him now. It is 12 month sized, and he has a few more months to go before I expect to be putting it on him on a regular basis.

One sweater down, and I still have the sweater I started at Squam left to go (also a 12 month sweater, but it is being knit on the 18 month plan). Not too bad for our little boy!

In June, I also made a couple of cakes. One of which didn't go quite so well. I tried to make the plum kuchen from Smitten Kitchen with cherries, but I didn't get the beautiful rise I got when I made it the first time. I will have to try again, because I love that cake.

I also made in June the Chocolate Peanut Butter Cake that Smitten Kitchen has on her site from the Sky High cookbook. I loved making that cake so much that I borrowed the cookbook from the library and hope to try another recipe or two from there!

Of course, now it is July, and soon it will be National Ice Cream Day. I have a staycation where I will hopefully make a ton of ice cream, knit a bunch on a shawl for Camp Loopy, and read a book. A most vacation-y of stay at home vacations.

Getting back in the swing of things

People never tell you when you have kids that your thoughts of having a schedule mostly go out the window.

There are lots of things they don't tell you, and because every family is different sometimes it is because they didn't know either. Only in the past month or two as Q has gotten more interested in play (crawling and cruising) have I gotten back in the swing of knitting.

I had this idea that I would be able to make 14 things in 2014, and it is true. I might be able to do that. As long as they are small.

Small like these.

These leggings are just simple tubes with some ribbing made out of yarn that I bought for a shrug (the three color one from Loop-D-Loop). They need a bit of elastic to hold them up, but otherwise they work.

Now, I need to figure out what other things I've finished so far this year, and see if I can get all the way to 14 items!

a blanket for baby M

So, gifts for babies. I know it is tempting to make sweaters or other clothes, but after my first experience making clothes that fit for about 6 hours I now make blankets, hats (aiming for year size), or toys. For my friends in DC, I made a baby hat and barely got it done in time. For my brother and his wife? I made a blanket. The knitting was done for over a month before I actually finished it. Yeah, a blanket with both lots of ends to weave in and a seam.

Why did I make a blanket with a seam?

Because it is awesome. I love the bold lines, and because it is high contrast it is supposed to be very good for poor newborn vision.

I used this yarn from Three Irish Girls. It was bold and very saturated. Sadly the red leaked a tiny amount, so the white wasn't quite as crisp as I wanted. Still a beautiful blanket.

This is a modular knit. Very easy and perfect for someone who can only knit in drips and drabs around baby needs. I wanted to make the Sweet William blanket, but it was clear after a single knitting session that I would never be able to concentrate on the blanket enough to finish it in a timely fashion. 

Like many projects, this one also got a little too big to knit on during my commute. Too big to fit in the lap.

After making this blanket, I need to want to buy those little clips to line up the seam. I used removable stitch markers and yarn needles to line up the seam, so I wouldn't have a lot of extra length to ease in at the end. I need to remember to put those on my knitting notions wish list.

One more picture, because I love this thing!

AKC - Hat!

Today is 10 for Tuesday, and while I do have 10 items that make me feel like a grown up (and I might pepper them in here), I really wanted to share a hat.

My best friend has two children, and I wasn't quite as much into knitting when they were born. Part of me feels bad that I didn't make them a cross-stitch project or knit something, but I was just getting into knitting and cross-stitch can take nearly forever. Now, more of my friends are having children, and many of them are getting knitted gifts. Last year it was a sweater set that did not fit longer than a sneeze and a baby blanket.

Baby blankets are my new go to project, because they don't need to be a specific size to be useful. However, one of our friends is having a girl and her "Internet name" is a bit Viking. Thus the hat.

I made this pattern (well, the boy version of it) years ago, before I was active on Ravelry. This time I made the girl version and, well, made the hair red for the red-headed step child of it all. Q was a terrific model!

I made the one year size and used Cascade Pacific in white, gray and orange. I used scrap yarn from a partial skein to make the ties at the ends of the braids.

My husband mailed the hat on Tuesday for the shower, because we just couldn't justify a long trek to Boston, and it was apparently one of the hits of the shower.

So, the pattern is Viking Girl Hat by Sarah Fama, and this is the second time I have bought the pattern (I couldn't find my original purchase or the file). The pattern is great because it includes two separate variants and sizes from newborn to adult. 

However, the pattern sadly references a few things, like embroidery, which are not shown in the pattern. The designer also did not indicate the best way to affix the wings and braids to the hat and just said to sew them on.

I sewed the braids on at the top of the bobble section. The wings I sewed along the front edge and top of the stockinette sections, so the wings would be able to flair out.

And my 10/Tuesday?

1. Seeing my friends build families makes me feel like we are all collectively moving into adulthood.

2. Paying bills, always.

3. Caring for our little boy.

4. Doing things I don't like on a daily basis. Right now, that is the dishes, at least once a day.

5. The day job as much as I love it makes me feel like a grown up.

6. Menu planning. Definitely this, because it is so much more grown up then scavenging from the freezer.

7. My coffee habit. It is bad enough that I need to find time to make more coffee concentrate, so I can save a few pennies making my own.

8. Learning to drive. 

9. Owning a house and all of the requisite maintenance that entails.

10. Having friends scattered all over the place, because it makes getting together and maintaining ties more of an exercise in being thoughtful and taking time in a way that didn't feel as true when we were so close together.

 

It's a hat!

Yawn!

When my mom was here at the beginning of October, we took her to what I jokingly referred to as crafter's row. Rosemont Garden has a bead shop, a gift shop, a random vintage/antique shop and Rebelle (fiber shop). We visited the different shops with Q in tow.

ReBelle is friendly to the breastfeeding set, so there was a bit of a break there and I wanted to buy a skein of yarn to make a baby hat. My last hat was a bit too small for even Q's newborn head, and while he has a few hats, none in his size were hand knits.

I bought a single skein of Koigu, which I had never worked with. There just weren't a lot of shops in the Boston area that sold it. Heck, I'm not sure any of my old local shops sold it. Even if they had sold it, I'm sure it wouldn't have done as well for me, because I gravitate towards yarns with descriptive color names. Color numbers are just not nearly as interesting.

Koigu KPPPM in P812 is a golden yellow with bits of blue and other colors. It took me about a week to knit the hat, using stolen bits of time. It then took me about 2 weeks to block the hat. It is a little big now, but promises to grow as Q grows.

The pattern is Cable Baby (rav link), a simple cabled rib. There are instructions in the pattern to add or remove a repeat to make a bigger/smaller hat, but I made the basic size.

At ReBelle, I also bought a small bottle of unscented Euculan. I don't like it quite as much as my bottle of Soak, but I haven't managed to unearth that in the process of unpacking. If you find it, please let me know (it's probably in the bottom of one of my yarn boxes). Otherwise, I might order it online when I run out again. Soak is awesome stuff.

Sleepy baby in a cute little cabled hat. I know he will grow into it. We can already see his growth. Each time we put him in one of his onesies, we can see how he is filling it out differently from the last time he wore it.

I have a lot of knitting and cross-stitch I want to do, so I think my posts are going to increase once I grow another pair of arms to do all of the things. Happy knitting all!

some matchy-matchy action going on

Or there will be matchy-matchy action going on. The last of the Camp Loopy projects for 2013 was to use at least 800 yards of yarn. Now I had already made a baby blanket for project 2, so my options for making a baby item that used at least 800 yards were pretty limited if I didn't want to make a second blanket. So, instead I decided to make one of the more popular baby sweaters.... eventually.

But first I made Mama Vertebrae.

I made the next to last size, and as you can see it is a little big on me. It is supposed to be frontless, so the fact that so much of my baby belly is sticking out is fine. But the sleeves should be a lot slimmer in profile.

I think it will still be wearable with the extra room, especially once I no longer have the bump. It's still pretty awesome.

I started the sweater a few days into the month (it was sometime while we were traveling from Massachusetts to Kentucky) and finished on August 31st. It probably would have taken me longer if I didn't have Camp Loopy prodding me to a finish. The final ribbing was 447 stitches per row, which needless to say was enough to make me want to put down the project a bit more frequently.

I used Dream in Color Smooshy in the color Flamingo Pie, and alternated every two rows. Now this was definitely a good decision, because not all of the skeins matched quite as well as others. The back view (on Ravelry) shows a bit more clearly when I added one of the new skeins and the two rows alternated to actually make stripes.

I used 3 mm needles for the body and 2.75 mm needles for the ribbing, and I did twisted ribbing because I really like it.

September 1st, after giving myself a whole evening of not knitting this sweater, I started the newborn version in the morning. I'm already on the straight section of the body. It is such a relief to be working on something faster than a mostly stockinette sweater for an adult.

I should have a second matchy sweater in a week provided I don't work too much on my other project.

My other project is to cook. To cook a lot. Fine, to cook enough food for the freezer that if the baby comes when expected (not early) that neither myself nor my husband will need to do more than plop something from the freezer into the oven or microwave in order to still eat in the first month or so of being parents. If I get us past longer than that, then good enough for me!

Of course, that means things like vegetarian pot pie, vegetarian shepherd's pie, split pea soup, chili mac, vegetarian beef stew, twice baked potatoes and pretty much anything else I can research and make between now and the next pair of weekends. While I would like to think I can make more than that, I would like to be pretty reasonable after all and not bite off more than I can chew. Anyone have some good freezer meals? I don't care if they are vegetarian, because I can probably modify anything for that!

 

Swapping everything

Well, what to say on this nice sunny Wednesday?

We've completed move 1 to our temporary housing in Lexington, KY. It's kind of been a bit crazy. We've been here since August 3rd, and I went back to work on August 5th. I'm not sure, but I might have been a little bit better off if I had taken a couple of additional days to recover at one end or the other. The animals are adjusting well, especially Saru-chan, who is enjoying her new cat platform, one of our first purchases in KY.

Soon we will be moving to our permanent home in Kentucky. Given the geekiness of the home, our prep has included things like finally getting around to watching the reboot of Dr. Who (2005). We have painters in to de-beige two of the rooms, and movers who will empty our Pod and put at least the big items where we want them, a new bed, etc. It's going to be a whirlwind week at the end of the month, but thankfully I don't have to manage that and go to work every day. Instead I go to work, unpack a few things, and knit each day. A much better division of labor at this point.

Right before I left Boston, I was finalizing a swap package with a group of other people from Ravelry, who are also due in September.

One of my contributions was this steampunk octopus, which my swap partner had on her queued pattern list.

I bought some Cascade 220 Superwash (one color for my baby and a second color for hers) and some safety eyes (thank goodness for Etsy, when I remembered my normal source was no longer in business). I bought the pattern and knit away. The project was pretty easy and I decided to forgo the monocle and either a sewn felt moustache or a moustache button in favor of baby safety. My version will get the same treatment, but I have unfortunately a Camp Loopy project that is eating up all of my knitting time and then some.

I finished it just a couple of days before the move, and mailed it once we got to Kentucky (finding the post office was its own little adventure!).

Wow. The octopodlian is actually blue, but with how yellow this picture came out (the room was actually champagne and buff to better go with the day bed we had in the room) it looks very green!

My swap package was going to also include sweets and yarn, but a little accident of the weather meant that it included sweet and yarn. I knew I was taking a risk transporting chocolate covered gummi bears without a deep freeze cooler. So, instead of both regular gummi bears and what I call gummi bears in carbonite, it was just the regular. The yarn, was a gorgeous skein that I mightily resisted calling my very own.

I received my swap package yesterday from kdea547.

This package was huge! It had a cute newborn onesie, a little baby raglan sweater with a matching penguin hat, the tube wafer cookies (that I'm too lazy to look up the actual name), and penguin stitch markers! My husband made cute sounds as I was opening things up, because I saved the package until we were both home to enjoy it. (And you can see how messy our temporary housing is. You'd think with only a 1 bedroom place for a month that we would be a lot more careful about keeping the tables all neat and what not.)

The swap was a lot of fun, and I hope I'll be able to participate in the one that we're expecting to do around the 1 year mark.

GOAL!

Hockey season has only been over for almost two months, but hockey is always on our minds here.

I'm due in late September, so there is a possibility (though these are sized bigger than a newborn) that our baby will get to see hockey on TV and watch their first game all dressed up to root for BU.

The baby sweater is the Baby Pullover, a free pattern from Bernat. I followed the lead of another BU alum on Ravelry who had done most of the grunt work for turning the sweater into a hockey sweater. What I did that was different? I decided I still hate seaming and so knit the entire sweater in the round. This mostly worked until I got to the neckline and had to coordinate instructions from multiple sections of the pattern at once. Definitely a spot where writing things out ahead of time would have been key.

Next up was the Baby Robitaille helmet, which was a quick knit though slower finish because I put off sewing on the single snap. Once I had the snap separated it was, well, umm. Yeah. That. I did have to have someone separate the snap for me, because I had just trimmed my finger nails all the way back. For once I didn't even sew half of the snap on backwards. Take that pregnancy brain!

Lastly, I made the hockey skates (it's a free pattern on Craftster). Now the skates look huge, and while we hid it for the photo, I need to resew on the blade portion on the back skate. I don't think the pattern had any sizing or gauge guidelines, and given I don't really know much about baby booties I knit away not thinking about their size. It's possible that they will fit fine. My husband has very wide feet, so this might be for the best!

Oh, and for the blades, I took my grey yarn and cast on 24 stitches using a size 4 needle. I knit the even rows as instructed, but when it came to separate for the upright portions of the blades, I knit 6, bound off 12, and then knit 6.

We bought two pairs of 14-inch white shoelaces for the sweater and the skates. If I had to do it over again, I'd buy the next size up, because these were too short to easily tie. 14-inches sounds so much bigger until you are actually faced with the reality of lacing a garment.

It's not the booties, but it is a finish

I have a ton of projects "on the needles" right now that are just done and waiting their blogging moment in the sun, but we are in the middle of packing and I've been too crazy to just get it done!

Now, Camp Loopy project 2 was a project using at least 500 yards that either had more than 1000 projects or was in more than 1000 queues that we hadn't done before. I did the Pinwheel Blanket, which I had admittedly attempted before and failed spectacularly. I did probably 10-20 rounds before I realized that I apparently couldn't keep the increases in my head.

This time I wouldn't say I did better with the increases per se, but I was relatively consistent. There are areas that I am pretty sure I messed up on, but they are either hard to see or hard to fix, so c'est la vie!

I used one ball of Kauni (130 grams) and two out of the three balls of Madeline Tosh DK in Glazed Pecans.

It was awesome, and it is for the baby and is wonderfully unisex!

Of course my blocking boards weren't big enough, so it might look better in the distant future when I buy more blocking boards. Obviously something that won't be happening in the next month or so.

As for the packing, it is going. I did almost all of my clothes except for the stuff for the upcoming week this morning, brought a box of yarn to mail this morning, and have the kitchen about 1/2 way done. We have mugs and glasses left to pack and most of the pots, which isn't too bad for a Wednesday departure (next week!).

My next Camp Loopy Project is Mama Vertebrae (with an extra skein to make a matching baby sweater). If I finish that as expected, I will have finished 4 baby sweaters, a baby blanket, booties and a hat. Obviously there is a bit of room for more projects before I'm due in September. Fire away with any suggestions!