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.

I LOVE this bunny. I’m making it for someone else, but I’m glad I bought enough yarn to make one for my own baby as well. I really like working with Lamb’s Pride Bulky. I’m using #9 needles and I’m enthused about the dense/sturdy results. It seems like a teething baby could definitely chew the hell out of this fabric, with nominal wear and tear.

Since I haven’t much else to write about, here’s a photo of my Tuesday morning knitting group:

Well, (some of) their laps, anyhow. I just started going about a month ago, and I really love what’s it’s doing for my knitting. I find I’m a lot more productive and keen on finishing things when I have a knitting-related event to show up for once a week. If I’m knitting in a void I tend to let things languish in drawers and never finish them. But I’ve been doing really well lately! Thanks, Other Local Knitters!

In other news, I am still Wicked Pregnant:

11 days to D-day. Not that I’m counting or anything…

Cute, no? I am trying to decide whether I am okay with the asymmetrical color patterning of the leg and cuff area or if I want to rip back one of the cuffs and make them match. I am leaning towards the former in an attempt to eschew my anal retentive tendencies, but it’s a tough call. I want everything baby-related to be perfect, even as I realize that it’s somewhat unrealistic to do so.

In between knitting the longies (three whole weeks! I can’t believe they took that long!) I knit a super quick lace ribbon scarf as a giveaway gift for my baby shower:

Unlike the longies, this scarf was a stupidly quick knit. Classic Elite Playful Weekend + size 15 needles + [*k1, YO, k2tog*] + a couple evenings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix and I had a finished handmade gift.

Nota Bene: If you ever end up knitting anything with this Playful Weekend stuff, BE SURE TO WASH IT before you wear it. I couldn’t believe how dirty this yarn was when I handwashed the scarf before blocking it. I just used a mild lavender shampoo and soaked it a while, but as soon as the scarf hit the water it turned the sink into a stinky brown morass. (Had I known, I would have washed the yarn before I knit with it.)

Next on the agenda: a pair of those cute Jess Hutch bunnies. I’m making one for my cousin’s baby shower in three weeks, but I love the pattern so much I decided I’m going to make one for my own kid as well. I bought Lamb’s Pride Bulky instead of Worsted, so I should be ending up with a bigger bunny than the one in the pattern. I plan on needle felting the details on the faces; since these are going to (hopefully) be well-loved by babies, I don’t want to mess around with buttons or safety eyes. I know I could embroider some facial features, but I find embroidery sort of tedious.

Anyhow, it feels good to have finished something!

Now, back to the grind.

Now that I have two soakers under my belt, I decided I wanted to try my hand at a pair of longies.  I really like the waistband of the two Curly Purly soakers I knit, so I decided I’d knit that waistband and then sort of wing it from there with a little help from Elizabeth Zimmermann.  (The February chapter of Knitter’s Almanac features some instructions for knitting longies.)

The Curly Purly pattern recommends a gauge of 4.5 or 5 sts/inch for the pattern, but the gauge swatch I did in the Noro @ 5 sts/inch (on #7 needles) seemed a bit, um, floppy.   I decided I really preferred the (thicker, firmer) stockinette fabric I got at 6.25 sts/inch on #5 needles.

So, I decided on a little pattern mod:

1. I cast on 72 sts for the size small waistband on #3 needles (4 sizes below what was needed to obtain the recommended gauge of 5 sts/inch) and worked the 1×1 ribbing as recommended.

2. I switched to #5 needles (2 sizes below gauge) and worked the *k3 p1 k1 p1 k1 p1*  and the *p1 k7* rows according to the pattern instructions.

At this point I’m supposed to switch to the #7 needles I used for the gauge swatch, but I don’t want that floppy gauge swatch fabric. Instead, I decided to figure out how many inches of fabric I need to make up for, and increase accordingly.

72 stitches of stockinette stitch on #7 needles at 5 sts/inch is 14.4″.   72 stitches of stockinette stitch on #5 needles at 6.25 sts/inch is 11.52″.    If I don’t switch to size 7 needles to attain the recommended gauge, I need to make up 2.88″ of space.  Staying on the size 5 needles at this point means I’m working with stitches that are 0.16″ each, so I’ll need to add 18 stitches.  (2.88/0.16=18.)

I’m not sure yet how I’m going to work these increases.  I could do a row of *k4 m1* but I’m worried that would be a bit…drastic looking.   I could stick one increase  at each hip marker for 9 rows.  I could also do one increase at each hip marker and one at the mid-butt for 6 rows.

Hmm. I think I’ll sleep on it.

In other news, I went to the flea market with my mom today and found some really pretty (and hefty!) vintage mother-of-pearl buttons:

I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with them yet. I want to use them to embellish some sort of knitted accessory, but what?

I know; I know.

The thing is, I’m totally going to need more yarn for baby knitting next week when I’m done my project! I’d tried to do the responsible thing and go to Stitch House Dorchester on Sunday while visiting family/friends in town, but was foiled by their “Summer Hours”–they were closed Sundays until after Labor Day. Which was not posted on their web site, annoyingly enough. Harumph.

Anyhow, yarn. I dusted off the wheel and extricated the mind-numbingly fine yarn I’d been plying:

I also skeined up the tiny amount of finished yarn, so I could reclaim the bobbin. It was the barest handful of fiber, but I counted out 40 yards of it. Out of curiosity, I weighed it:

My postal scale says 10 grams. I am tempted to find out how many yards per pound that works out to, but I am too pregnant to deal with the math. A few calculations in the google search window work it out to 0.000551155655 pounds per yard, but I am far too pregnant-brained to deal with it from there. I know you have to divide something to solve for X, but I’m far too mentally exhausted to reliably navigate the morass of middle-school algebra.

Speaking of pregnancy brain, here’s a picture of me (and my husband) from a wedding we attended this past Saturday:

What I lack in mental acuity at this point I clearly make up for in roundness.

Anyhow, now that I’ve got three free bobbins I’m spinning up a wonderfully boring little two-ply merino worsted:

I would have preferred to spin a three-ply worsted (for increased durability as well as general aesthetic reasons) but since one of my four bobbins is occupied, a two ply will have to do. I know I could have chain-plied my singles yarn into a three-ply, but I really want to err on the side of evenness. (I generally consider myself to be a pretty good spinner, but I still have a hard time staying uniform over multiple bobbins.)

When I’ve got enough of it to knit a pair of longies, I’ll kettle dye it periwinkle and get to town on a little frankenpattern I’ve been cooking up in the back of my head–I want the Curly Purly Soaker waistband, Elizabeth Zimmerman’s butt and gusset (from the February chapter of Knitter’s Almanac), and a pair of plain straight stockinette legs that I can have fun embellishing. My only question is how long to make the legs–since the bun’s still in the oven, I have no concept of what sort of inseam she’ll require.

Of course, I will knit none of this until I’m done my work. I won’t even swatch! I now hereby abandon this blog until I’ve finished editing the first four chapters of Applied Linear Models with SAS. But I reserve the right to take spinning breaks. And, um, dye the yarn.

They’re both knit from the Curly Purly Soaker Pattern, which I’ve been pretty happy with using.   I did the first one in purple Malabrigo, and the second one in some handspun Blueface Leicester.  I went back and embellished the first one because I thought it was a little plain-looking:  I needle felted some fiddleheads onto it:

I realized yesterday that the baby’s due date (October 18) is the Saturday of the NYS Sheep and Wool Festival, so I’m totally missing Rhinebeck this year.  It’s about a 5 hour trip from my house, and at least 6 hours away from where I’m supposed to be giving birth.  Well, poop.

I’m going to take a break from knitting this week, at least until I finish chewing through the 100 pages of copy editing I have to do for a freelancing project I’m working on.  Anyhow, I’ll leave you some cute photos of my cat investigating my latest FO:

It’s good to know Miss Jones approves of my knitting.

We Rogues of Wool

I poked around, and found this on YouTube:

OMG, it’s not just a spiffy-looking shirt! This guy wrote a sea shanty about knitting! For his webcomic! Which apparently also recently featured the librarian rap battle of the century, for which there is yet another spiffy shirt. (Although I’m really tempted by the sweatshirt–I want to wear it while crunching through leaf-piles this fall.)

As a knitter and sometimes-librarian (when I’m not otherwise occupied with knitting and babymaking) who is also a huge fan of webcomics, I find all of this to be pretty head-explodingly fabulous. Chris Baldwin, you have definitely earned a place in my feed reader. <3

Thanks for the link, Kerry!

I used to be a chronic spinster but lately I’ve become increasingly obsessed with knitting. Right now I’m working on a series of wool soakers for cloth diapering my impending child. (There is a bun in my nubile oven. A girly one. She’s due 10/18/08.)

Stay tuned for project notes, blabbering about patterns and yarn, and maybe even a rabbit or two.