Every day this week I’ve woken up feeling like that drugged kid David post-dental surgery; “Is this real life?! Is this really happening?!” I would probably only be slightly less surprised if I wake up tomorrow morning to find I’ve turned into a giant cockroach.

THAT PICTURE WAS FIVE DAYS AGO AND I’M ONLY GETTING BIGGER, PEOPLE.

The mind boggles. Ah, well, knitting. At least there’s knitting.

Seth-the-unwilling-blogger has taken up the needles once again and is about halfway through a pretty sweet-looking Baby Surprise Jacket for my recalcitrant critter:

I don’t have a huge amount to say about it, since it’s not my project, other than we’re both sort of baffled by it and are relying on our faith in Elizabeth Zimmermann to see it through to a finished sweater. Right now it looks like some sort of weird logic puzzle for sheep. At any rate, the Noro Silk Garden yarn in #246 is freakishly gorgeous and I am almost sort of jealous of the feto for getting such a lovely sweater when he or she doesn’t even have the decency to, uh, show up within a reasonable timeframe.

My own knitting is less interesting, but I’m trucking along here and there when I’m not sneaking in a few rows on Seth’s project. (The Noro! It’s so cracktastic!) First up is the no-longer-a-baby-blanket blanket I started back when I was waiting for Baby #1 to hatch:

As you can see with my giant 13 pound cat in there for scale, it’s long gotten past the point of being a baby blanket, but honestly, I like having the mindless knitting available at hand so much that I just haven’t wanted to stop working on it. I still have 1.5 balls of Paton’s Classic Wool Merino in my stash, at which point I will have to call it a day (er, year or two) and cast off, but in the meantime I’m just not ready to let go.

And as always, there’s a soaker:

As you can see, I decided to try making one with steeks instead of actually shaping legholes and whatnot. Basically I made a sack and then set up steeks for where I wanted the legholes to be. Since taking these photos I’ve cut the steeks and started knitting the leghole ribbing. The size and shape of this soaker are pretty ridiculously wrong, but I think it works in terms of being a proof-of-concept sort of thing. It seems to be entirely possible to make a good soaker this way, and hey, if my kid is still in diapers in the 3rd grade, well, I’ll have a soaker for that.

I have to say, I still get a major thrill from looking at steeks. SHAPING BE DAMNED; I WILL CUT YOU!

I think I might actually finally be fortunate enough to say that I’m in a good enough place with my baby butt wardrobe that I can take some time off from making soakers and maybe make a project or two I’m more interested in knitting. My dear friend Margie has taken a huge chunk of her valuable knitting time this year to create FOUR SOAKERS for my kids’ butt wardrobe, in addition to the cute little pants-and-hat set she made for Eve when she was still in utero. I feel superlatively blessed to have such a badass knitter in my life. <3

First up, mittens for my husband! It’s currently Ass Cold in New England; our first bitterly cold snap of the season, really, and I realized this weekend that my poor husband who goes to work at stupid-early in the morning was doing so bare-handed. I’m using Michelle Porter’s Easy Basic Mitten pattern to make him some stripey, bulky orange-and-green hand protection:

Detailed project details are this way. Seth’s hand circumference matches the pattern as written, so the only mods so far are that I’m lengthening it to accommodate his long man-fingers, although I am fudging row counts to get the 4-row stripes to fit in evenly. I have some plans to crunch numbers to make the thumb gusset on mitten #2 fall on the opposite side of the mitten, so the stripe jogs mirror each other. (I’ve been trying to do jogless stripes, but when you’re working with such big stitches it’s really hard to fool the eye completely.)

And…I’m making the kiddo another soaker. I’m knitting the LPB on size 8 needles for this, which is resulting in a totally dense bulletproof fabric I think will work great for stopping leaks. Eve’s fitted-style cloth diapers are Crickett’s in Toddler+, which work great, but with the doubler insert they make her butt huge, and the soakers required to cover such an area are rather epic indeed. At the rate she’s growing I only have a few left that fit over her diapers. The lady at my LYS on Sunday (I was in there because I ran out of black yarn) saw my soaker-in-progress asked me if I was going to felt it. ::snort:: If this thing ever does get felted I think I could use it as building material.

After this soaker is done I’m going to try and make a pair of longies out of a recycled wool sweater. I have the sewing skills of a cavewoman, but honestly, I really need a break from knitting all these damn butt sweaters.

Butt Knits

In my last entry I mentioned being thisclose to done on my Ecological Wool soaker.   I’ve long since finished it.  Here it is, in action:

As I mentioned on Flickr, (way back in October when I finished the thing,)  I generally like to post in-use photos of my finished knits, but I think I’m going to stop doing this for my daughter’s butt knits.  I know she’s still quite small but it does feel sort of weird to take pictures of her butt for the Internet.

My final verdict on Cascade Ecological Wool for soaker knitting is a mixed one. Ecological wool is ostensibly a heavy-worsted to light-bulky weight yarn, but it’s spun so it’s light and lofty. I had to knit it much tighter than the recommended gauge to get a suitably dense fabric to act as a waterproof barrier for cloth diapering. That being said, I love my finished soaker. As time-consuming and inconvenient it was to knit with size 3 and 5 needles, the resulting fabric is perfect, will wear like iron, and I’ve got a soaker that should work for my kid through potty training.

That being said, I have a second kid on the way, and with two kids in diapers at the same time, I need a lot more soakers, and I need to make them much more quickly. My next butt knitting project is going to be knit with Lamb’s Pride Bulky, and will probably involve steeks so as to simplify the knitting process.

From Vestvember to Vestcember, and even on to Vestuary

After I finished the Epic Ecological Wool Soaker, I decided it was high time to knit something for my husband.  (After two years of marriage, I could no longer hide behind the curse of the boyfriend sweater!)  We’re both fans of Jared Flood (and more generally, dudes in sweater vests) so when I saw the Alberta vest pattern I knew it was perfect for him.  Then I heard about Vestvember on that there Internet, which really sealed the deal, so we took a field trip to Webs that weekend to pick out yarn for the project.

I already had a bag of Noro Kureyon in a discontinued colorway (#199) marinating in my stash that Seth really liked, so we decided to pick a solid color for the body and the ribbing and use Noro for the stripes.  We ended up going with Lambs Pride Worsted in Chocolate Souffle, because it was a good match for Kureyon in terms of weight and fiber, and the color looked good with all those random brights and subtle greens in the Noro.  The Noro was so busy, too, that we decided to do the ribbing in Chocolate Souffle as well, to keep the non-Noro colors subdued and perhaps lend some restraint and avoid the whole Noro Clown Vomit effect.

This photo here was taken with a flash and isn’t a really good representation of the brown–it’s really more of a richly deep, almost black color.  It looks a lot better in natural lighting, I promise.

This project was a big challenge for me in more ways than one–in addition to trying to knit jogless stripes in the round for the first time, it involved STEEKS.   STEEKS, which in time I will eventually be able to type in lowercase letters, are strategic cuts in your knitting  (really, CUTS!  LIKE, WITH SCISSORS!)  to allow for things like armholes, neckholes, and cardigan openings to come into being without actually knitting them as you go.  The vest was basically a conical tube, which I subsequently sliced open to create places for Seth’s head and arms to go.    I took a whole mess of photos documenting my STEEK process, which I will upload sometime in the near future, as the process really warrants its own blog entry.  In the meantime, I will say that Eunny Jang’s Steeking Chronicles were an invaluable resource.  Here’s a photo of my sliced-open gauge swatch, which I used for practice STEEKS before moving on to the vest:

I went with the crochet-stabilized method, obviously. Worked like a charm, despite my being a total crochet idiot. (More on this later, along with photos of the teeny-tiny scissors I bought to cut open the vest steeks.)

New Baby Prep

Lamb The Second, who we are still calling Flipper despite our rumored better judgment, is cooking along satisfactorily. Here’s a photo circa October:

Being pregnant while chasing around a very active older baby is waay harder than I thought it would be. My daughter isn’t walking yet, and so still needs to be carried in and out of buildings and up and down all the copious stairs in my living space. (All 25 pounds of her!) As hard as it was to parent my daughter during the first trimester epic exhaustion phase, this third trimester is physically kicking my ass in ways I didn’t anticipate. That being said, I feel like we’ve hit a good stride together lately in terms of my taking care of her well and keeping her happy, so I’m trying to enjoy the easy groove of these last few weeks of being alone together before our daytimes turn into a party of three.

As part of my new-baby prep I am trying to clean out what was once supposed to be my “craft” room but never really evolved from my Boxes of Fiber Crap area. I never have time to spin yarn anymore and probably won’t for the foreseeable future, so I’ve been sorting through my spinning stash and separating out various fibers that go well together. About two weeks ago I drove down to Still River Mill (less than 20 minutes from my house!) and met up with Deirdre to give her a giant bag of white wool from the stash. Sometime this spring I’ll go back and retrieve several pounds of bulky weight polypay-merino blend yarn, which I often like to fantasize about knitting into a Sylvi.

I’m still slowly delving into my fiber collection. I’ve got a bunch of gorgeous natural brown romney wool and alpaca fibers sorted out, and I plan to throw some varied green merino and alpaca fibers into the mix to get a heathered brown and green yarn, probably in worsted weight. As sad as I am to retire the drum carder, dyepot and spinning wheel for the time being it’s fun to sort through what I have and dream about being a commercial yarn designer.

Potential Guest Blogger?

My husband Seth did some really impressive knitting recently.

Don’t you think this project warrants some blogging? I already know all the project details but I’m still dying for him to blog about it.

I am going to try to wrestle a few paragraphs out of him this weekend if at all possible.

It’s the Confection Baby Shrug, although I did some number crunching in order to knit this up with Cascade 220 Superwash, which is a much finer gauge of yarn than the pattern calls for. I’m really glad I took the time to do the math, because the resulting garment is much lighter and seasonally-appropriate.

The finished shrug is too big and doesn’t fit yet, but I took a couple of shrug-modeling shots with the baby anyhow:

I’m thinking she’ll be able to start wearing it sometime this fall, hopefully right when the weather turns. I’m looking forward to it!

For the (as yet) uninitiated of you out there in my mostly-imaginary blog audience: this sweater is knit from Elizabeth Zimmermann’s legendary Baby Sweater on Two Needles pattern, otherwise known as the most popular baby knitting pattern in the known universe. It’s so popular, everyone on Ravelry is knitting an adult version of the sweater for themselves, aptly named the February Lady Sweater. (And yes, I want one of those too.)

But I digress. This particular sweater was knit sometime in the mid-1970s for my friend Jenny, when she was a wee human. There’s a tag sewn into it that reads “Handmade with love by Elsie.” It’s knitted in some sort of vintage sport-weight acrylic baby yarn, and instead of buttons there are eyelets with a crochet chain of cool minty-green yarn threaded throughout. It’s a pattern mod I’ve never seen on this sweater, and it’s an interesting (and probably safer) alternative to buttons.

Dear Elsie,

Love,
Amelia

Both the new baby and the bunny came out fabulously, and my cousin recently posted some photos of them together:

They look happy together, don’t you think?

On the knitting front, there’s not much else to report. I’m a halfway through the first sleeve of my Confection baby shrug, and the Endless Baby Blanket is nearing 50% completion, having gone through two full balls of Paton’s classic wool merino.

I did end up buying three skeins of the super cheap Cascade Eco+ closeout at Webs. I ended up ordering it online and paying for shipping, however, so it didn’t feel like such a crazy deal. (I live an hour away from the warehouse/store in Northampton, so I always go in person. But I wanted to skip the journey out to western Massachusetts with the baby, so I ordered in this time.)

The muted lilac color looks great in person, and the wool is nice and soft. I’m looking forward to working with it someday, if I ever finish either of my two current projects. The baby is time consuming and I don’t actually get to knit all that much. She’s damn cute, though:

I’m using Cascade 220 Superwash for the first time and I’m really liking it. It’s SO MUCH SOFTER than regular Cascade 220. Right after I bought this skein at my LYS (Mt. Laurel Yarns in Sturbridge, MA) it showed up 30% off at Webs, but I like it so much I’m not going to complain.

I did run into one roadblock–according to the pattern, “any worsted weight yarn” is fine, but C220 is way too skinny to knit up nicely at 4 stitches per inch. I much preferred the swatch I knit up at 5.5 stitches per inch, so I ended up crunching the numbers and rewriting the pattern for a finer gauge. It was an interesting exercise, and I’m glad I took the time to do it. I like the fabric I’m knitting, and I am enthused about the prospect of (maybe?) getting it right the first time.

In other news, I made a trip out to Webs on Saturday for my April foray into the 35th anniversary sale. I’ll post photos of my haul very soon. In the meantime I am quietly living with the shame of having become somehow physically unable to leave the store without an entire bag of Noro. (No, really. This is the third trip in a row.)

The Lamb was born on October 23, at 9:04 pm, weighing in at 7lbs 12.5oz, and measuring 19 inches long.

She’s utterly perfect. We are completely agog.

In baby knitting news, we realized when we got her home that all her hats were too small for her wee newborn head, so we made her a teeny hat right away. I’m working on a second teeny hat for her now, but it’s been slow going with the incessant nursing she’s doing. I need to figure out a way to knit and nurse at the same time.

The wool soakers I knit for her fit well and work perfectly. We love them. They’re much better than the PUL/plastic covers. We had her in a Thirsties cover for a day and a half at one point, but we noticed her butt was starting to get red. (The wool is breathable, so her butt is looking pretty great now.)

I will post a zillion baby-knitting photos eventually. In the meantime we’re sort of tied up with the getting-to-know you process. Taking care of a newborn is much harder work than I realized, especially the nursing.

News as it develops.

Hey fetus-lady!  We’re dying to meet you! You are welcome to join us at your earliest convenience.  Really.

Since there is literally nothing left for me to do in terms of baby prep, I’ve been knitting something mindless:

It’s a baby blanket, knit in stockinette stitch from the center out. There are ten evenly-spaced m1 increases, worked every other row. That’s it. My plan is to just zone out on it until it’s big enough, and then add some sort of decorative border to finish it off. There’s a leaf border in Nicky Epstein’s Knitted Embellishments I really like.

My favorite part of him is his butt:

Mr. StringFactory made it for me, so I’m still technically a pom pom virgin. But I really like how it came out. It’s so cheeky and cute. Nice butt, Mr. Bun!

I’m still pregnant, alas.  I don’t want to start a new knitting project requiring all that much thought until after Baby’s out, so later today I’m going to cast on some sort of very easy baby blanket I can work on while I’m waiting for her to show up.