Welcome to the World, Katherine Alexandra

I am pleased to report that, after weeks of cajoling, Katherine Alexandra graced us with her presence on 11 January at 2:20 in the afternoon. She was 9.5lbs and 22.5" long. She is now two weeks and a day (almost exactly as I write this) and she's already outgrown her newborn clothes and is wearing 0-3mos. 

On the evening of Tuesday the 10th, having been having Braxton Hicks contractions for a week that we're finally starting to gain in coherence, and thinking my waters might have begun leaking, I went to the labour ward to be checked out. The midwife couldn't tell if they had ruptured or not so I had to wait for the doctor who didn't get to see me until midnight and even though she was certain the membrane was still intact she wanted me to stay overnight (and me without so much as a toothbrush). In the morning the next dr did the rounds and "as long as we have you here" wanted to rupture the amniotic sack to see if that would trigger labour. Folks, if you're a week overdue and you go to hospital, they will not want to let you leave without having your baby.

The midwives (I had a senior midwife and a student midwife - student midwives are wonderful and gentle and doctors are not) ruptured my waters around a quarter to 11, suggesting that I walk around the ward and if nothing started within two hours they'd need to chemically induce. I hadn't even finished standing up when my contractions started, hard and fast. I had texted Chris to ask him to come and bring my hospital bag and he got there just in time for the active stage of labour, pushing. Less than four hours after I went upstairs I was holding my baby and while I remember the events, the memory of the pain started fading immediately. Second babies are, even at 2lbs and 3" bigger than first babies, easier. 

We spent one night in hospitals together before getting kicked out in the morning (the talk of needing my bed started after I said I wanted to be discharged). Kristina was fine without me, except when they'd come to visit and had to leave me there. She didn't want to, loudly. But she seems to be dealing with having a baby in the house quite well, though we'll see how it goes when grandma goes home on Sunday and she no longer has a substitute parent at her beck and call.

Katherine and I had a bit of trouble the first few days when my milk hadn't come in; she lost over 10% of her body weight and was screaming all night in hunger, so under the midwife's supervision we supplemented with formula for a few days until it did. She bounced back almost from the word go and now we're getting on as smoothly as any new addition can.

Yesterday was Kristina's fourth birthday and today is Chris' 50th.

Progress Report: Knitting FO

Since getting my knitting mojo back in September and being semi-bedrested by my puffy feet since December, I have managed to get a fair amount of knitting done.  On the completed front:

Vanilla Socks, Opal 

These are toe-up with an afterthought heel, based largely on the numbers for Flexor by Clare Devine. This is my third skein of Opal Happy Sparkle from winter 2014/15, colourway "Surprise". I actually managed to knit up all three skeins this year is vanilla hand-bag project socks. If the swelling in my feet ever goes down (come out, baby, come out!) I'll even get to wear them. Oh, I started these in September as my holiday project and finished them yesterday. I've not had a great need for handbag knitting this half of the year.

Lush, Cascade 220

Lush by Tin Can Knits in Cascade 220 superwash worsted. I knit one of these for Sleepy Orchid back in the spring in pink, having knit a stockinet swatch I liked and found my gauge matched this pattern in stitch and row counts. So when the heat broke at work (on a snowy day) in April, I ordered 6 skeins for myself in black (uniform policy) and, with long sleeves, it was just enough. I used smaller needles for the lace yoke after sleepy Orchid's was too big, and still had to rip back the lace a bit to get the correct blocked measurements. I finished the lace panel, picked up and knit the collar, and had just picked up and started knitting down from the yoke when "morning sickness" made knitting a thing of the past. It took me a bit into my renewed interest in knitting to pick this back up - mostly because I'd bought two sweater quantities of yarn in September and I really wanted to knit with them but felt I should probably finish this first, if only to reclaim the needles. Also, starting sweaters when very pregnant seems silly. I picked the size for my 50" full bust, going down a size for my shoulders, and then knitting the 50" size from the bust down. It buttons over my very large tummy, so this will have lots of positive ease come baby, though probably not in the bust. I made the button bands slightly wider with the buttons and holes slightly offset away from the middle to prevent gaping and Sleepy Orchid picked blue "orchid" buttons from my limited stash. They're not what I would pick if I had a button shop to choose from but they do the job. Started 1 May, finished 31 December.

Flat foot Floogies, Knit Picks Wool of the Andes

 

This pattern is by Barbara Prime and includes both the bunny and the sheep (and can be adapted to use any of her toy heads). I reversed my two colours of Wool of the Andes bulky and went down a needle size from the rabbit, which I knit first, to the lamb. The rabbit does have a face embroidered on, honest, the pink just doesn't show up as well. I knit them for 2.0 but Sleepy Orchid loves them and keeps "borrowing" them. They were really fast knits and a good size in bulky wool, which has a pleasingly Sheephaven quality even in superwash. Started and finished in November. 

Excursion slippers, WYS Aire Valley Aran

Hunter Hammersen created these Aran weight slippers to start with the heel cuff and knit down to the toes. Would the other way be easier? Probably, but if you trust the pattern these take shape as if by magic. I used West Yorkshire Spinners in Denim as part of the Great British (yarn) Sock KAL in October. The pattern specifies more yardage than one skein holds, so I bought two but then knit a small enough size that one would have sufficed. Oops. Again, a really fast knit, even faster for the second one when I didn't have to check the pattern as often. Started in October, finished in October. 

Zapote, Ripplecrafts Merino DK

Sleepy Orchid lived in this jumper for a few weeks after knitting it, but alas rarely while holding still. Zapote, but Carol Feller, is supposed to have a hood so I bought 4 skeins but she didn't want one so I only used 2.5. Oh well. It has integrated pockets and toggle buttons which I put on wrong so it doesn't stay closed. The yarn is a buttery soft merino superwash DK from Ripplescrafts which Sleepy Orchid picked in Slice of Lime when we saw Helen at the Loch Ness Knit Fest. It has unfortunately been discontinued but there's still a few colours, including this one, discounted on her website. Started and finished in October.

Armley Beret, RC Merino DK 

I started Woolly Wormhead's annual mystery KAL with a skein of tonal blue "Stormy Seas" merino DK from RipplesCrafts which I also acquired at the LKNF (like I said, I went off the rails - I also got a gradient pack and a skein of sock yarn) but I felt the cables were being lost in the tonal shifts. As the cables worked out to look like Christmas Trees, I decided to make an ever so slightly smaller one in some leftover Slice of Lime to match Sleepy Orchid's jumper. As you can see, it was a success (she's holding still and smiling here because she thought I was taking a picture of ice on the railing behind her). Started and finished in November. 

I also knit a little cat for Sleepy Orchid, from a Barbara Prime pattern and kit from Knit Now; a Rosewater beret by Tin Can Knits in the leftover Blend No. 1 that I appear to not have recorded in Ravelry or ever taken a picture of; and two little beanie Christmas ornaments from a Hunter Hammersen pattern. But I've lost the will to keep blogging. I appear to favour certain designers. 

Post-Holiday Knitting Ennui

I haven't even been home from our holiday for a day and already I'm finding it hard to remember what I was knitting before I left, let alone why I was enthusiastic about those projects.

I took my current pair of socks (the ones for me, not the Bullfinch Socks of Never Fitting for Chris), and made good progress on them, considering travel time is decidedly not knitting time when traveling just with a toddler). I was 2/3rds the way through the first sock and I'm currently 3/5ths the way through the sEconomic sock, which is almost one full sock knit. They're "vanilla" socks with an afterthought heel, like my partridge ones but toe-up and a wedge toe and heel rather than cuff-down with a round toe and heel. I don't know which heel I'll prefer, but I know I like toe-up socks and I think I like wedge toes, and I love rainbow stripes however they come, especially when they sparkle.

Chris wanted to visit the Apple Store in Glasgow on the way back, only to learn that they closed for refurbishment this week so we stopped by John Lewis instead (actually showing up before they opened!) so I took Little Djinn to the haberdashery and looked at fabric for a dress a few internet knitter friends and I want to sew up (LoveSewingMag Threadcount 1501/Butterick 5982) and wear to the Edinburgh Yarn Festival in March. They had a lot of clearance fabrics, but nothing - clearance or full price - that particularly appealed to me. I don't feel ready for a lot of pattern matching and pretty much everything was obvious patterns (I prefer solids and weaves) in colours that don't suit my complexion. I eventually picked a red fabric with pink heart/cherry clusters with green leaves and stems. The greens are wrong, but the red isn't too yellow for me and that's the main thing. 

Now, as it's the Edinbugh Yarn Festival, not the Edinburgh Sewing Festival, the other part of the goal is to make a coordinating cardigan to match. Green is the obvious choice for the fabric - assuming the dress is at least a wearable toile - but not something I have a lot of in my stash. I have a sweater quantity of New Lanark Wool Aran in "tartan", an emerald green, and Aran knits up quickly, but I already have two sweaters in NLW: my Scollay in the DK and my OWLS in chunky. It's not exactly a next-to-the-skin wool, nor would it be my first choice for a "transitional" garment. I'll look at patterns for crop/vintage cardigans in Aran or Worsted and see if anything seems suitable...

And I just realized that a green cardigan over a red dress would make me look like a Christmas Tree. Pants. White or pink then. Of course, black would match my shoes. (I love coordinating as much as the next gal but I've got one style of comfortable shoes in two colours - black or oxblood - and those are the ones I'll be wearing.)

Meanwhile, I have the baby sweater I mentioned in my 2015 Gift Knitting Roundup, which I started on NYE. I have one sleeve to finish, blocking, weaving in ends, and buttons to attach and that'll be finished. Easy-peasy, right?

The current issue of Knit Now magazine came with yarn to knit a selection of small items and Little Djinn and Chris both wanted the Owl from the cover (I was leaning towards the zebra, even though that one is crochet and I'm not good at crochet). I knit the body before we left, still need to block it, sew it up, stuff it, knit the beak, wings and eyes (crochet those?) and sew them on. Easy-peasy, right?

I need to weave the ends in on my Lindgren mitts and block them. They're otherwise done. And it's cold so I could really use a pair of stranded colourwork mittens. Easy-peasy, right?

Instead, between loads of laundry and being a climbing structure for a small child (who is very happy to be reunited with all her toys and intends to play with all of them first thing) I am knitting a bright pink cat-bobble hat for that child. We'll see if this is enough to keep her head covered.

8 Weeks

Big news in this second month of Little Djinn's life: she's started looking at her hands and (drum roll, please), she rolled over! She rolled over for the first time on Thursday when I lay her down for tummy time and went to the loo. That's right, I was out of the room. I came back and she was on her back crying. Later, after she'd nursed and cuddled and was happy again, I set my mobile to record video, lay her down on her tummy and she rolled over so quickly I missed it again. Don't blink around this baby. I took a video which I can't seem to embed. I showed it to Chris (a few times) and Libby, on the bed before us, did a few corkscrews as if to say, "why are you so impressed? This is easy." We're over the moon. She's very close to rolling over from her back to her front and I was convinced she'd get that first but I didn't expect either to happen this soon. I really was completely floored when I returned to find her on her back.

We had our 6 week checkup after my last post and both of us are fine though the doctor wasn't able to hear Little Djinn's heart clearly so we're going back this week and on a different day we're going for her first round of immunizations. The Health Visitor will be out Monday to weight her again and check in. Little Djinn continues to like going for walks in her pram, though the grocery store and back seems to be too far for her patience. She's also lost patience for napping in her basket. She'll still sleep there at night, though she often cries for a bit before settling, but during the day she just won't do it, she'll only sleep on me. So I'm back to not getting much done during the day. On the plus side, she's sleeping 5-8hrs at a stretch and then going back to sleep for another 3hrs so I'm not too sleep deprived. Last week I was getting a bit worn down but she slept for 8hrs and then we took a nap together and my reserves filled back up.
Aged Parent is still in the hospital, no real change there. They think he'll be in hospital for 12 weeks from when they transfer him to the physical rehab hospital so that's a bit of a downer. No word on when a place will open for him.

I finally made Chris' birthday cake, a sticky chocolate pudding with coffee custard (I gave him a baby and he still wanted a cake). It was absolutely delicious, well worth waiting for, and it served eight not the suggested four. I also knit a little cabled hat but it doesn't quite fit over Little Djinn's head - it's big enough around but too short and of course I wove in all the ends before trying it on her. Now I'm trying to decide if I want to try and rip back the extant hat or just start over.

In book news, I'm reading the Shetland Quartet by Anne Cleeves after watching the drama "Shetland", based on the third book Red Bones, the book I'm on now. The adaptation is...curious in what it changed. Detective Perez' girlfriend, out of town in the book, is his dead wife and her young daughter is suddenly his teenage step-daughter. The girl's father is merely referenced in the book but they worked him into the show. They set they adaptation during Up Helly Aa, the fire festival at the end of January (which is when the first book takes place), instead of the spring, but how could they be working on an archaeological dig when the ground is still frozen? I'll find out tonight if they changed Whodunit. Mostly I wonder why they didn't just adapt the first book.

Mothering Sunday (Six Weeks)

Today is Mothering Sunday, my first as a mum, though it feels a bit weird as I'm used to Mother's Day being the second Sunday in May in the US. Little Djinn, clever girl that she is, ordered a few little presents off of the internet the highlight being a "Bestest Mum" mug and yesterday went tot he shop to buy a card for me, for her grandma, and a birthday card for grandma. She really does leave things to the last minute, doesn't she? I could have sworn we raised her better than that. Fortunately Grandma, whose birthday was yesterday, is in Israel right now so her birthday card should beat her home.

My baby girl is 6 weeks (and two days) old. I wanted to post at least once a month about her development and what we've been up to but until this last week she wouldn't let me put her down. The first two weeks I could (but didn't want to because I got endorphins from holding her and that's what kept me bright and chipper on little sleep and no down time) and then she became such a light sleeper that any attempt to shift her off of me resulted in her waking up. Leaving her on her back, no matter how tired she was or how long I left her, just lead to screaming. It was a lot easier to hold her during the day and let her sleep on me at night and work around the baby than to have her be so distraught.

This last week I said "screw it" to the warnings about never ever ever leaving one's baby on their tummy and lay her down that way and lo and behold, she'll sleep. She naps in her bassinet during the day and she sleeps there at night. These last two nights (of three sleeping this way) she didn't even fuss when I put her back after nursing, just fell asleep again. And for all of you nay-sayers, sleeping on the tummy is verboten because of a slightly increased risk of cot death, of smothering in the bedding. Little Djinn doesn't have loose bedding, just her mattress and fitted sheet and she's very advanced in the head-lifting and turning departments. She can already push herself all the way up on her arms and even in her sleep she can lift herself enough to turn her head. She's also sleeping through the night, or at least she would be if I wasn't waking her up to nurse. Chris ordered a breast pump for me so I can express rather than waking her up as I don't want to teach her to wake up every 3-6hrs the way I taught her not to sleep in her basket.

She's visibly changing week on week and almost day by day. She passed her six-week assessment early (the health visitor could see her performing most of the "tests" like staring at my face and smiling so she ran the rest). She spends a lot more time with Daddy and just today I think she started mimicking facial expressions. She likes it when I sing along with music and she's getting really good at grabbing and holding things, though not particularly on purpose. She's gained 2lbs and almost 3" and has started outgrowing her footie-pajamas in the 0-3mos size (purely a length thing, she's only 25th percentile weight-wise). We take her for walks, either in her pram or in our carry system. She sleeps when being carried, but looks around when in the pram which makes it a shame that pram-walks have almost always been at dusk or after dark. I have two slings for around the house, thus far the mai tai works best. She doesn't always want to be in it but for a while there it was the only way I could do things around the house with both my arms. Now that she's napping alone I'm catching up on much-needed housework and was able to bake a cake yesterday (what is Mother's Day without coffee cake?).

In less happy news, Aged Parent is in the hospital and has been for just over a week, after complaining about being short of breath. They diagnosed him with "water on the lungs" and put him on diuretics and then an IV drip and more recently found blood clots in his lungs so they're treating that as well. They're hoping to transfer him to a different branch of the hospital where he'd been going for physical therapy twice a week as soon as they have a place open. That'll be nice as it's in easy walking distance and it's not full of contagious people so Little Djinn and I will be able to visit as well. Within 24hrs of AP being admitted one of his neighbours knocked on our door to say he'd not seen him around and was he all right, and the next morning we got a call from his BFF saying he'd not been able to ring him on the phone. It's nice to know people are looking out for him.

In knitting news, I actually finished a 6 mos size cardigan for Little Djinn which hopefully I can blog about in more depth when I've finished weaving in the ends, blocked, and sewn buttons on. I'm working on the formerly-for-my-mother socks, having just turned the heel on the second one, though I need to rip the first one back probably all the way to the toe and re-knit it. I can work on that while my baby girl is sleeping on my lap or nursing (or most often, when she's sleep nursing, a skill I wish I possessed) and when she's napping in her basket I've been working on a cross-stitch project for her.

39 Weeks, Oh My!

Apologies for the particularly bad mobile phone/mirror picture this week. Chris came for a snuggle and I didn't want him getting bored and wandering off (his forbearance for being photographed is greater than that of the kitties, but not unlimited). We've made it to 39 weeks, 6 days to go (give or take actual arrival date, of course). I'm hoping to be a few days to a week late but not need to be induced so next Saturday is when I start eating pineapples or spicy food, drinking raspberry leaf tea, and bouncing up and down on my exercise ball all day. Until then, it's lying on my back with my feet up and my knees crossed. Or cleaning the house in preparation for my mother's arrival on Wednesday, whichever actually happens. The sad thing about my mother arriving is that I'll have to move out of the nursery/guest bed and poor Chris will be kept awake all night with my snoring. Even in a non-adjacent room, wearing ear plugs he can sometimes hear me. This is why I try and read for an hour or so after going to bed, to give him a chance to fall asleep before I do. Honest, it's for purely altruistic purposes and not because I'm a bookworm

Speaking of books, Mira Grant's Newsflesh Trilogy has been my latest form of crack. It's about a(n adopted) brother-sister team of bloggers and their crew some twenty years after the cure for the common cold and the cure for cancer got together to turn the recently deceased into zombies and the government conspiracies they unearth. I'm not a fan of the zombies, this and World War Z (has that movie come out yet? I live under a rock) are pretty much the entirety of my exposure to the genre. Oh, I've seen Shaun of the Dead and that movie where the kid has the rules for surviving a zombie apocalypse. Anyway, Newsflesh is as good as everyone said and if her urban fantasy series published under her own name, Seanan McGuire is anywhere near as good, I will be a very happy bunnybookworm.

On the knitting front things are looking less optimistic. The baby blanket/shawl is coming along nicely, I've knit the border along the first side and turned the corner, but everything else is in the frog pond.* The socks for my mother, I'm convinced, are not going to fit. They're a little long and too tight to go over the heel. I can't really try them on because my own feet, ankles, and legs are swollen but I'm convinced they're all wrong. Plan A is to knit the second sock to be the size I think it should be and then when she arrives I can frog whichever sock is the naughty one and reknit it. Chris' pullover otoh just needs to be frogged. I knit a gauge swatch but I'm not happy with the size it's coming out. I had him try on the body and it was quite snug which, combined with the denseness of the fabric, means it'll be too hot and not comfortable enough for him to actually wear. It took forever to knit in the first place, but I don't want to finish a sweater just to have it finished and not be worn. So I'll frog it and go up half a mm on the needles and start again at some vague point in the future.

On the more optimistic side, I have acquired *cough* yarn to knit Ravi Junior which is another Carol Feller pattern. It starts at the 6 months size but I think I'll do the next size up for Little Djinn to wear in the Autumn/winter. Not that a cardigan would go amiss in our Scottish "summer". I also acquired yarn for Snawheid and the matching mitt(en)s, Snawpaws. I don't actually know that I have enough yarn for both, but I'll knit the hat and see how much I have left.

~ * ~

* unravelling knitting is known as "frogging" because the stitches make a small "ribbit" sound as one pulls them apart. This sound used to make my husband cry, but he's become jaded to hours of knitting wasted.

Things are Starting to Come Together

We got a lot done on Saturday. We wandered around looking for a dresser for Little Djinn, both in charity shops and furniture stores, but didn't find anything we agreed on. I liked a squat one we saw in a charity shop but Chris thought it was meh and he liked an almost £400 one in a furniture store, but I'm not willing to spend that kind of money on something that will get treated the way children treat their furniture. So we're still looking. We then went to the curtain place that did the curtains in our bedroom and my FiL's place and made an appointment to get fitted for blackout blinds, both in our room and the nursery. He came around on Monday to take measurements but wasn't able to bring the book of blinds with him as they were being viewed by another customer, so we still need to pick those and curtains for the nursery.

We went to the post office in Tesco's Inshes to pick up the package we missed Friday, which turned out to be from Miss Laura and full of gifts for Little Djinn, including a blanket knit by her mother. Laura also sent us a little stuffed lamb which was on our baby registry which was particularly impressive given that the posting date was before we created the registry. I've always know that Miss Laura has impeccable taste.

We also swung by the new mega craft store in Inshes, though "mega" is a relative term. Certainly larger than anything comparable in the area, though it would be a bit small for a Michael's. I got some sock yarn for Christmas-gift socks (not for anyone who reads this, but one never knows) and some cotton yarn to try and crochet some snowflakes. The secret to happiness here is going to have to be low expectations as the only thing I am less confident in than my crochet abilities is my ability to follow a pattern using UK, and thus different from US, crochet terminology. If only it wasn't the same terms for different "stitches"....

On Sunday we cleaned the house a bit before going to my FiL's for tea (the beverage). He tried to call to tell us not to come as he had a cold, but we'd already left when he rang as I needed to be at work after the shop closed to help prep the shop for a corporate visit which should have happened this morning. My manager was freaking out about getting ready and the only real comfort I could offer was that, given the number of shops they planned to visit in one day, they couldn't possibly stay long. Their plan was to come up Wednesday, visit our shop from 8-10, and be in Aberdeen by lunchtime. Everyone who lives in, and probably most people who have visited, the highlands hears this and blinks. They clearly have no idea the actual distances and travel times involved. Hopefully they'll consider shipping product based on distance it has to travel weighed as a slightly higher factor against volume of the destination store. Promotional material that arrives the day before or day of an event is slightly less useful than one might imagine. Hopefully it went well and my manager can enjoy a highly-deserved virgin cocktail or five (like me, though for different reasons, the poor woman isn't allowed a drink) when she gets home.

On Monday, Chris and I had our first ante-natal class which was mildly irritating in a "why are we using all these silly euphemisms for a straightforward biological event?" kind of way. I'm going to take it on faith that the midwife leading the class (she's not a "community midwife", eg one who might actually be assisting in my labour) did pass courses on anatomy and physiology and is merely operating under the impression that we all failed basic biology. But we got a tour of the post-natal ward where we'll be after Little Djinn arrives, until we're ready to go home. The midwife assured as that being discharged 6 hours after delivery is not SOP here, and that three days is much more common at which I blanched. Three days stuck in a hospital, twiddling my thumbs? Fortunately the recovery ward's own material suggests one day before discharge which seems perfect for learning to nurse and a few supervised diaper changes before returning to the solace of one's own bed and partner.

One of the ladies in my Tuesday night knitting group is also pregnant, a few weeks further along than I am, and her ante-natal class started on Wednesday. The classes normally start around 32 weeks, but they're trying to squeeze us all in before Christmas, so I'm getting an early start.

Speaking of early, they called to cancel my ultra-sound appointment for next week, the one I was so excited about (and impressed to have gotten an appointment notification a month in advance). Apparently it was scheduled in error and they'll send me another letter to reschedule for the week before Christmas. Sadness. Chris suggested we could make private appointment to have an ultrasound anyway, but as much as I love getting to see Little Djinn, I'm not convinced it would be worth it. I'm a lot more used to being poor than he is.

That's the life of a pregnant woman. I'll be 31 weeks tomorrow, with 9 weeks left to go. I didn't take a picture this week, so you'll just have to take my word for it that I continue to look rotund. I'm starting to be exhausted all the time: yesterday I was ready to crawl back in bed half an hour after I got up and I'd actually slept through the night for once. I finished the center panel for the baby blanket I'm knitting for Little Djinn, picked up one of the side panels, and am working my way through the first lace chart (though it's so tiny, I'm using the written directions instead. My kingdom for a photocopier). I also took a picture of the purple blanket I knit way back whenever, blocked and displayed on the bassinet (Moses basket) in the nursery.

On the Needles

I have two projects I'm working on atm, a red shawl for me and a yellow baby sweater for Baby O'Connor:


Summer Mystery Shawl 2011 - Wendy D.
Supreme Possum Merino 4ply - 50g/210m - 40% possum, 50% merino wool, 10% silk
This is my first Mystery Shawl - a pattern where you don't know what the finished object will be (other than, in this case, a "shawlette") and you get the instructions ("clues") over a span of weeks, rather than all at once. The idea is to finish each set of instructions before the next one is issued. I joined this one later, before the third clue had been released and then accidentally knit the second clue first so I had to frog everything and start over. When the third clue came out, I only had time to knit the 24-row repeat once before setting the project aside to work on shawls for my bridesmaids so the fourth and final clue came out and I was nowhere near ready. I've since done two more repeats of the third clue and, because I added an extra repeat to the shawl, probably only have two more. It's bottom up so with each row there are less stitches to knit and it's going, ahem, increasingly quickly.


Basket-Weave Baby Sweater - Frances Hughes - Creative Knitting Sept. 2004
Baby Classic DK - 50g/151m - 50% acrylic, 50% nylon
Back when I started working for Barnes and Nobles, when magazines didn't sell, the covers were "stripped" and returned to the publishers and the rest of the magazine was recycled or thrown away (depending on the facilities available to that particular store) or, and this is the relevant part, employees could take them home. During this time, I acquired a lot of issues of a variety of knitting magazines (which I eventually tore apart and sorted the patterns I liked into plastic sleeves and binders - yeah, I'm that person). When I moved to Inverness I pared this collection down to bare bones and, even though I wasn't at the time knitting any fitted garments, I kept this pattern for a baby sweater, hat, and booties. I don't think it'll be a favourite pattern, but it's a nice project for when I'm lying (sitting up) in bed and have caught up on my RSS feeds and Twitter.

I learned to knit at a Renaissance Faire and loaned yarn and needles from one friend and taught to knit by another. This second friend is allergic to the wool I was using and taught me without touching anything and as a consequence my technique wound up a little...unique. For a while I was twisting my stitches and when I realized that, I changed my technique to prevent twisting and somehow wound up getting everything backwards. This was fine for most things, but both my k2tog and ssk leaned the same way and I only just recently realized why (I was wrapping my yarn around the needle the wrong way) and decided to fix it. A few projects ago I corrected my purl stitches so my stockinette lace would be correct and on this project I'm practising wrapping the yarn under the needle on the knit stitches.

This sweater set will be for Baby O'Connor, who is due later this summer. His mother is having a really rough time of it and they're hoping to induce as soon as the foetus is viable, so if I have time, I hope to knit some premie-sized stuff as well.

Baby Baby Baby

I have reached that age when all of my friends seem to be spawning (whereas five years ago they were all getting married - I guess I'm a late bloomer) and I have finally decided to try my hand at knitting baby garments. Some four years ago I knit a beautiful baby blanket, which is still sitting in my closet, unblocked and the ends un-woven in, and that was when I realized I wasn't yet ready to knit gifts. Too many of my projects languish unfinished or are judged unsuitable. I did go on to knit a couple of "stroller blankets" for co-workers' spawn out of acrylics as I figured if I don't have to weave in the ends (and could rather melt them discretely) then I wouldn't give up at the end.

But I'm trying to expand my knitting repertoire, to face new challenges, and when you're posting things to friends it's more difficult to have the "this blanket is for supervised use only - don't leave it on your baby, asleep in the other room - as heaven forfend there should be a fire, rather than burning like plant fibres or self-extinguishing like animal fibres, it will melt and when you go to pull it off your baby it will take his or her skin with it" talk. So natural fibres and the need to weave in ends.

I started with baby leg-warmers as I figure two little tubes would be perfect - no heels to turn, no seams to sew up, just a little tube and two ends to weave in. Easy! I started with the simply titled "Baby Legwarmers" and then another pattern from the same lady, "Super Simple Baby Legwarmers" but by the time I finished them the far-away baby I had in mind had grown beyond them. Has anyone else noticed that the majority of babies they know are at least in the 90th percentile of growth for their age?


But more friends announced they were pregnant and I had all this yarn, so I figured I'd start a baby sweater. This would be my second-ever fitted garment and sewing up seams seemed about as appealing as weaving in ends and a lingering fear of blocking, so I picked a very simple, top down, seamless sweater, "Cuddly Wrap Baby Sweater". Not knowing the gender of the expected baby, I made it in teal and it knit up in no time at all so I decided to try my hand at another, a "Seamless Yoked Baby Sweater" again knit from the top down, with the sleeves held on stitch-holders to be knit after completing the body. I learned a technique for slipping the first stitch of a round to make stitch or colour changes knit in a round look less disjointed.

Inspired by my sweater efforts I decided to make a matching hat and wound up using the carried-over stitch pattern from the second sweater with another hat pattern and came up with the "Slipped Stitch Baby Hat". I added the left-over button from the matching sweater as an added detail.


As long as I was going for a set (though the red leggings lack the slip stitch), I knit up a pair of "Fleegles Seamless Saartje Booties" a seamless variation on a popular baby bootie.

I posted all but the teal (super simple) legwarmers to Baby Stephanie, born a week and a half ago.