Triangle bunting

So remember my Christmas stocking? I hung it and the rest of our stockings up on our mantle for the first time ever. Like, I got myself a hammer and nails and did them up right. Then Christmas was over, and I had stupid ugly nails sticking out of my mantle.

What would a normal person do in this situation? Remove the nails and patch the holes, probably. Or leave them and wait until next Christmas.

But a crafty person? A crafty person’s twisted brain would say “Lo! An opportunity to make a pretty thing dost shine on me here!” and would get busy making said pretty thing. So that’s what I did. I was especially glad to take this on since our mantle/”fire”place (electric joke that it is) was pretty snoresville and plain plain plain before. Needed a little something.

I gathered up a bunch of fabric bits that I figured would generally ‘go’ together in that cool “who knew those would ‘go’ together, but they do!” kind of way. I cut them into diamond shapes that would be folded in half to create triangles. I sewed up the edges and turned them inside out and topstitched in matching burgundy thread, then strung them on some string and hung that baby UP.

Some of this fabric has made an appearance here on the blarg before. The green paisley, if you recall, was leftover from the first pillowcase dress I made, and some of that burgundy/yellowy striped stuff made a ring sling a while back, too. I’m trying really hard to use up some of my fabric stash and it is slow going, friends! But a noble endeavour, as I would like to make some room for, you know, that kid I just had.

So there it is. It hides the nails rather well, doesn’t it? And we can leave it up until next Christmas.

Flexible knitting stitch markers

I’ve been knitting for over two years now, and have until recently been using little scraps of yarn and string as my stitch markers. I’ve tried to use the fancy stitch markers before, but have found that the rigid metal/plastic rings or loops ended up causing a ladder of loose stitches in my work. I’m a pretty tight knitter, so I really need something flexible to avoid this.

One of the lovely knit night ladies, Amy of Family Feedbag, was making some stitch markers a few weeks back using the typical metal rings. She got me thinking about how I could make my own, and I figured out a scheme to keep them flexible. I bought some cotton cord and some of those little metal clampy things that you usually use for attaching fasteners to necklaces and bracelets. Yes, clampy things. You can tell my jewelry-making experience is vast, right?

I cut a short length of cord, formed a loop, and clamped the ends into the clampy things using needle-nosed pliers. Then I attached some little shell beads that I’ve had in my bead stash for approximately 3 billion years. The beads naturally varied in colour, so I was able to make a set of five markers with one being darker than the rest. This would be useful if, say, one needed to mark the start of a round as well as other key points in the work (e.g., raglan increases).

So voilà! I now have some pretty stitch markers that are sufficiently mushable that they won’t screw up my knitting. Well, they’re an improvement over scrap yarn and string, anyway! Thanks to Amy for the inspiration!

In progress: Shhhhh…

It’s a surprise!  But I can tell you it’s a hat. For someone. Not for me, and not for baby A. I just cast on today. Oh, the suspense is killing you, right?

I’m knitting it as part of the Warm Up to Winter knit along (KAL) over at luvinthemommyhood. If you want to join, you have until February 8th to do so. Just click on the handy button below for details.

Now, can I get my project done in time? I’ve come down with a serious case of ‘startitis’ and have three projects on the needles right now in what I call the ’5% club’ — I’ve just barely started them and my Ravelry progress bars are all set at 5% completion. (I even have a sewing project very much in progress, to boot.)  I keep getting distracted by some new project that must be done right now and tossing the current project aside in favour of the new, shinier one. I think I have the knitter’s equivalent of the ‘eyes too big for your stomach’ thing. What would that be? Eyes too big for your borderline-arthritic finger joints? Doesn’t have the same ring to it…

But this KAL should keep me going. Deadlines are good for that. Plus, when this hat is done, it’s being sent out in the mail to its recipient (there is also a deadline for that, but more on that later). So my motivation may need to get comfortable hanging out with this one thing for a little while instead of doing its usual ADD thing.

Edit: Here are my other two ‘in progress’ babies:

Liesl by Cocoknits

An attempt to copycat my favourite (purchased) hat. See how far I got? So brave.

They all look sort of similar, don’t they?

Ah, baloney!

Abalone: (/ˈæbəloʊniː/) — I ate it when I was in China. It’s a delicacy. It… tasted like rubber, quite frankly. But I congratulated myself on being an adventurous eater and kept its beautiful shell as a keepsake. That’s my first story about abalone.

Here’s the second:

I know what you’re saying to yourself: “This doesn’t look like a marine gastropod mollusc!” And you’d be a very astute observer to say so. It’s a sweater.

The pattern for this sweater is called Abalone (by Beata Jezek). I love the idea of this pattern. I love the pictures from the pattern designer. I love the shape of it.

Except it kind of didn’t turn out quite right. I know, I know. It’s the worst when you knit an entire sweater and it isn’t what you hoped it would be. (Especially one that required, at one point, that I pick up over 300 stitches…)

Here’s my list of gripes:
- The math confused my poor (then-pregnant) brain. The designer offers stitch counts for a size small and then requires that you figure out your size based on your measurements combined with percentages of those stitch counts. It’s a free pattern, so I don’t feel like us pattern-readers are owed anything in terms of being spoon-fed the math, but still. This tripped me up more than I think was necessary. Or maybe pregnancy hormones + simple math = epic failure.

- It ended up a fair bit wider (across the back) than I was shooting for.

- Picking up stitches along the diagonal bottom ‘corners’ (where the increases were done) worked fine on one side, but had these strange sort of pock-marked holes every other stitch on the other side. I assume this is due to subtleties with how the increases were done (both were just M1 as opposed to mirrored decreases such as k2tog/ssk), meaning that the ‘holes’ through which the stitches were picked up were a bit different on one side.

- The i-cord bind-off looks great but is really time consuming, and mine ended up too tight, resulting in my curved bottom ‘corners’ rolling in or out instead of laying flat. Extreme blocking helped, but only so much. This kind of ruined the drape, and it was hard to tell that it was too tight while it was on the needles since the work was all bunched up on the circular needle.

- And one that’s entirely my fault: I knit it with undyed 100purewool, which, as lovely and soft as it is for 100% wool, ended up pilling like crazy almost instantly. I don’t think it was quite the right choice for this project. I’m still learning about how to match yarns to projects. And so we’ll call this a “learning experience,” I guess. (And a good impetus to buy a nice wool shaver. I got one for my birthday and I’m like a woman possessed, removing lint. I think I enjoy it a bit too much.)

But forget all those gripes. It wasn’t all that bad! It’s still definitely wearable, and is oh-so warm. Here are some more photos!

Behold curly corners! Ah, baloney.

A wise supervisor/mentor of mine used to say “today was a day for learning” when the day was a bust in all other respects. So this sweater is maybe the same. A project for learning!

Baby “Link” (Legend of Zelda) costume

Continuing on with my recent theme of wildly outdated and/or seasonally inappropriate posts, here was what baby A wore for his first Halloween (at 3 months old). He went as Link from the popular Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda. As a gamer with a hardcore case of video game nostalgia, this was my husband’s top pick for a costume for A. I was set on sewing him a good costume for his first Halloween, but wanted to keep it relatively straightforward so I actually had a hope in hell of getting it done. It’s tough to find sewing time with a newborn around. I know, shocking news.

The tunic and hat were sewn from a thrifted men’s long-sleeved polo shirt:

Large and green. Perfect for the chopping.

One sleeve was cut off and became the hat:

Chop chop!

Using one of A’s hats to get an idea of width.

I hemmed the bottom edge after I took this picture.

… and I used one of A’s existing shirts to trace as a quasi-pattern for the tunic part.

Had to take the pocket off, since it was going to get in the way of the magic.

I just made it a bunch longer so it was, you know, tunic-like.

After this I just sewed up the sides, underarms and shoulders. I left the collar edge raw and cut a little slit in the front so A’s head would fit through. Baby heads are surprisingly big.

The boots were also salvaged; this time from a brown knitted sweater (that our a-hole cat had chewed a hole into, rendering it scrap fabric instantly). They were based off of a pattern I found somewhere on the internet, but have since lost. (Sorry, blog. Bad linking karma for me.) I cut the boot pattern pieces out of one sleeve and serged them together (making sure the knit stitches didn’t completely unravel). The sash and belt were cut from the other sweater sleeve. Much faster than knitting them, I tell you. The “gold” belt buckle was a simple crocheted circle using some yellow cotton yarn I had leftover from the Republic hat. I machine sewed it on to the belt, then attached some hooks and loops to fasten the belt in place (hooks and loops were all I had on hand — velcro would have been better).

The pants were the only part I didn’t make, so no exciting story there. I think they were from American Apparel? Who cares. BORING.

We took A to a family-friendly Halloween party at our local community baby/parent centre, and of course no one there knew what he was supposed to be. But that’s not terribly surprising, I guess, since most of the other babies in attendance were far more easy to identify (a pumpkin! a cat! a dinosaur!). I might have seen a glimmer of appreciation from one of the other dads well across the room from us. Nerds usually aren’t the most outgoing folks, so I may never know for sure.

But you know what? Obscurity be damned; he was one cute frigging Baby Link. Frig! Right? Frig.

Pixie boy

“Squashie”: knitting model extraordinaire

Time-travel with me, will you?  The year was 2011…

When I was still all kinds of pregnant last summer, my pregnant Ravelry pals organized a secret swap. We’d put together a fun care package for a randomly-drawn fellow preggo that had something in it for the mama and the baby-to-be. The package I sent was to my friend, C, who was expecting her eighth (yes, you read that correctly) baby. (Seventh boy, to boot!) I included a bunch of fun stuff for her (some local honey, some wool roving, some earrings, a silly kid’s book, etc), but the item I made myself was this goofy/adorable (goofdorable?) blue pixie hat.

This is the second time I’d knit the Stella Pixie Hat, and I love how this one turned out. This time, as a more experienced knitter, I had wised up enough to know that I should follow the recommended needle size/yarn weight/gauge written in the pattern. And lo and behold, it actually turned out… (gasp!) to be baby-sized. Success! (My last one was big enough to fit my own head… but oh well, a giant toddler bean will do it justice in the future, I’m sure.)

Baby J: much more lifelike

And doesn’t it look great on her little boy? Back when he was a newborn (when this picture was taken — if you look closely you can even see his little newborn peely hands!), he had the perfect squishy old man face to make him look like a garden gnome in it. Now, he was born in the summer, in the southern US, so it wasn’t exactly seasonally-appropriate back then, but hopefully it’s getting some wear this winter now that things have cooled off. Thankfully, it’s super stretchy so will last him a while.

Enjoy your hat, baby J!

Shannon cowl

So, for my last installment of “check out this shiz I made for Christmas!” (which should really stop now, since it’s January and all), I present to you the Shannon cowl I knit up for my dad’s girlfriend. The pattern is one of Jane Richmond‘s recent releases and knits up so fast, you want to make a billion of them. Thank you super-bulky yarn and giant needles. The perfect Christmas craft for the frazzled knitter.

This is kind of a neat one for me because I recently joined up with Jane and her knitty pals at their weekly knit night. One of the other die-hard knit night members there is Shannon from luvinthemommyhood, after whom this lovely cowl pattern is named! So I know both the designer and the namesake of this cowl pattern — how cool is that? Fairly, I’d say.

This project was neat (do the kids still say ‘neat’ these days?) for another reason: I successfully knit cables for the first time ever! Very exciting. And given how simple this pattern is (along with the huge yarn/needle situation), it was the perfect way to learn how. I don’t know why I’d been putting off learning cabling for so long. It only looks fancy — it’s actually very easy to do! So well done, self, for learning a new skill. Back pats for me.

Here is another shot of me wearing the cowl before I sent it off in the mail. I think the cowl’s rich red wine colour is a bit truer in this picture, though I still manage to resemble an albino giraffe.

Well, with that I’m officially embracing the new year. Hello 2012!

Tutorial: Ergo teething pads

My kid drools. A lot. Whether or not this is caused by teething (he has sprouted his two bottom teeth in the last 6 weeks) is up for debate, though clearly he’s got both going on these days. He puts anything and everything into his mouth. Anything that crosses his little mouth’s path seems to be fair game for a good nomming.

Naturally, when we carry him in the ErgoBaby carrier, he sees those puffy shoulder straps as two big built-in teethers, and goes to town on them. This soaks them instantly. So instead of constantly washing the carrier (not recommended by the manufacturer), I figured I could sew up some strap protectors easily enough. Ergo sells some made of terrycloth for about $20 a pair, which I personally find impossible to justify as a person who owns a sewing machine.

So here’s my version. Took about 10-15 minutes. Sorry I didn’t get any photos of the in-progress steps — I was a woman on a mission and wanted these done, stat.

Materials:

• Terrytowel washcloth
• Scissors
• Velcro (hook & loop tape)
• Sewing machine & thread
• Serger (optional)

Step 1. Start with an old washcloth you are no longer using. Cut it in half so you have two identical rectangles.

Step 2. Serge around the edges of each half. If you don’t have a serger, do a zig-zag stitch or finish the edges however you like.

Step 3. Cut 2 lengths of velcro a bit shorter than the width of the short end of your rectangles.

Step 4. Attach the velcro to your terrycloth. Ensure that the soft velcro piece is sewn to the opposite side of the pad as the scratchy piece (so when you loop the pad around your Ergo strap, they will grip together). I did this hastily, using adhesive velcro (which helped to hold it in place for sewing). You can see the ugly stitches that resulted from my haste. (Oh, motherhood…)

Also: I folded one edge over about an inch or two before sewing on the velcro. Part of this was laziness (couldn’t be buggered to measure and cut it), and part of this was my idea that it might anchor the velcro better to have it go through two layers. In retrospect, I think measuring the piece properly (using your Ergo strap to eyeball it is fine) would do just as well — you don’t need both layers. Plus, my wonky fold is not great. When you do this, do it better than I did, please.

Here is the pad folded to show both velcro’d sides.

And joined together, as it would be on the Ergo:

And in place on the Ergo, fresh for the nomming:

So there they are. Possibly the best upcycling of an old washcloth into something that would otherwise cost you $20, amirite? Baby A’s verdict: om nom nom!

Skin brightening toner

It was a Christmas miracle. My dear pal, Anya, was my randomly-chosen Secret Santa gift recipient for the second year in a row, guys. The powers that be were like, “Jana, one year is insufficient! You must get Anya another secret gift!” and I was like “okay!”

Thankfully, Anya is just about the most easygoing person I know, and she loves all kinds of stuff (and has a nicely organized Pinterest account, to boot), so she’s a pretty sweet name to draw for a gift exchange like this.

Some may remember that I used my knitting powers to craft up Anya’s Secret Santa Surprise Scarf last year.

This year, while I didn’t knit for her gift, I did make part of it! I mixed up a batch of Shwin & Shwin‘s lemony Skin Brightening Toner, which Anya had helpfully pinned (so I knew she’d like it). I even made my own label for the bottle, using the image from the original blog post. Though I realized that I spoiled the “secret” component of the gift exchange by printing my name on the label. I forgot that our group of friends typically open our gifts and then try to guess who gave it… oh well! Mama brain strikes again? How long can I go on claiming that?

Unfortunately, baby A was not coping so well at our Christmas party, so my husband and I had to take him home early. This meant that we missed out on the big gift exchange portion of the evening, and so I didn’t get to see Anya’s reaction live and in person! Lame!

Possibly less lame is the rest of Anya’s gift. I paired the toner with two terribly cheesy (and trashy!) thrifted romance novels (which I really hope she loved, because one of them was all about chasing rainbows and the cover was even rainbow-coloured and full of clichés about how rainbows are so hard to catch… seriously amazing) and two jars of dark chocolate sauce that I hope she drank straight from the jar drizzled on something divine immediately.

Merry Christmas, Anya!

Honey Cowl

Now that Christmas is over, I can post about more of the crafty gifts I gave! There weren’t many, as I have that baby and all to reckon with, but this one was my favourite. It was a gift for my mum. And much to my delight, she ended up loving it.

There is a part of me that always worries about giving something I’ve hand-made. Will the recipient like it? Will he/she use it? (And, commonly, if it’s knitting:) Will it itch and therefore be the worst gift evar?

But she liked it. Hooray!

The pattern is the Honey Cowl by Madelinetosh. A lovely, simple, slip-stitch honeycomb. It was easily memorized and pretty impossible to lose my spot. I think those are two pretty important knitting pattern features for a zombie-brained new mum. My only gripe was that it took an age to knit. I thought my fingers might fall off near the home stretch, there, but I did it. I got it finished with just a couple of days to spare before Christmas. Win!

 

It was such a labour of love, that once it was done, I was a bit sad to part with it!  And it was so very very soft, too. And squishy. I’d make another for myself, but… remember the part where I griped about how long it took to knit? Yes. Yes you do.

Oh well. I have these photos to remind me. And a pleased, slightly-warmer-than-before mum who happily sported the thing all Christmas day (and the day after). That makes me smile.