Been working on something ...

... for about six months.  Figured I might as well give you all a sneak peek.

  

Made a few receiving blankets too, but those are in a suitcase in a closet and being six-and-a-half months pregnant, I couldn't get it out by myself.

This is my excuse for infrequent blog posts.  I've been trying to stay off my feet, which is challenging with two high-energy toddlers running around.  I had grand plans for a full hand-sewn layette, but the above (and those blankets) might be all we end up with.

Stay tuned, as I do have some stuff to blog about, including a road trip we took to Yerevan earlier this month, and some more crafts.  Hopefully I'll find some time to blog about those in the near future.

Step into my craft room

Actually, don't.  It's such a mess that Irina is itching to get in there and clean it, but I have a bunch of gifts yet to finish before the craft room becomes the guest room for our visitors next month!  Here is what I finished this week.

First, a birthday present for M, who is turning one year.  I made some play food out of fleece and a little drawstring bag to keep it in.  I guess people usually use felt, but fleece is what I had on hand.  This was really fun and easy, which is good because I'm planning to make a whole grocery store full of food for the girls for Christmas this year.

 

This is another fitted cloth diaper.  This time I used a bought pattern, and it was definitely worth the money.  It fits the girls much better than my previous attempts.

And finally, a skirted wool soaker.  I don't know that is was worth the effort.   It's super-cute, but takes twice as much yarn as a plain soaker.  Also, we spend a lot of time outdoors these days and hand-wash-only-wool is not practical for outdoor play.

One year later

Last week I finally bound off a silk lace shawl I'd been knitting for over a year.  Well, I only really worked on it for about two months, but then got to the point where knitting a single row took a couple hours.  Lace is very finicky, and I really need to be able to complete an entire row in a sitting.  Two uninterrupted hours have been few and far between for me the last year or so.  So the shawl sat, wadded up in my project bag in my nightstand, from sometime in July until last week, when I finally had an opportunity to go to craft night.  Turns out all I needed was a little momentum, and now it's finally done.

It has more than a few glaring mistakes.  If I were a little cockier, I might call them "Amish" mistakes, after the legend that Amish women intentionally make mistakes while quilting, in order to demonstrate their belief that only God is perfect.  Of course, my errors are entirely unintentional.

Anyway, I love this shawl.  I love the pattern.  I love it so much that I actually paid $10 for it (I usually just use free patterns I find on the Internet).  But I'm not really a shawl person, much less a lace shawl person.  And so I don't really know what I'm going to do with it.

I have found this to be a pretty common theme in my crafting.  Rarely do I make something that really gets a lot of wear.  When it comes to sewing, I think that's mostly because I'm not very good at it.  When it comes to knitting, I think it's because I like to knit with beautiful hand-wash only yarns, but I don't really like to wear clothes that can't go into the washing machine. 

I should really find a way to fix this problem.

Nesting

It seems both of us are! Today I

* cooked a huge pot of spaghetti sauce to freeze for meals after the baby comes
* washed and dried all of Figlet's newborn clothes, receiving blankets, washcloths and crib sheets, and put them all away
* continued knitting my latest pair of longies.

Today Jeremy

* put together my dad's old crib (which all of the Herbst kids slept in)
* installed the carseat base into our car and figured out how to adjust the actual seat
* finally hung the pictures on the wall (they'd been sitting on the floor in the upstairs hallway for two months)
* hung a tapestry in the first-floor hallway

We also attended a Cloth Diapering 101 session, took my sewing machine into the shop for a repair, hit a thrift store and a farmer's market, and did the week's grocery shopping. Now Jeremy's out with some A-100 buddies, and I'm watching old episodes of the original 90210 online. A very productive day.

Soaker city!

So I think I might be soaker'd out. Problem is, of course, that the thing I really want to work on is a sweater for myself. Only that makes no sense now, since I can't exactly try it on as I go and hope for an accurate fit.
It is the first big project that I have designed myself. I was kind of making it up as I went along when I laid it aside last December to work on Pop's vest. It's going to have short dolman sleeves and a cowl neck, and is meant to be worn over a turtleneck or long-sleeves shirt. I'd gotten this far in the weeks I worked on it. I'd like to say that I'll get back to it after Figlet makes his/her appearance, but all indications suggest I will have little opportunity for complicated knitting for quite awhile ...

Soaker-mania

I LOVE knitting soakers and longies. They take no time to knit, use up odd balls of yarn in my stash, and are just so darn cute! Stay tuned for more. (I think this might be what they call "nesting.")

More duds

Yesterday I finished Figlet's first soaker (to go over cloth diapers). The cloth-diapering ladies on Ravelry rave about wool's ability to repel moisture and its natural hygienic properties. So I'm going to give it a go. I had wanted to embroider something on the back of this soaker, but decided not to overestimate my talents, especially given that the baby will probably only fit into this thing for a few weeks. I've been thinking a lot about Babuskha, though. She embroidered beautifully. If only I'd had the foresight to learn it from her while she was still alive!

Figlet's new duds

I have admittedly been slow on the knitting - first trimester morning sickness was killer, and the motion of knitting actually made it worse. But since then, I've eked out a few little cardigans for Figlet. He/she is going to be one well dressed kid, no?

My first adult sweater!

I finished this sweater earlier this summer, but didn't post photos, as it was originally intended to be a anniversary gift for Jeremy. While he was here, we decided to forego anniversary gifts this year, since we're taking a trip to Italy - not cheap - at the end of October. Now that Jeremy has seen his sweater, you can too!



Obviously, this is not Jeremy wearing the sweater. Truth be told, I could have made it a tad longer, and perhaps a tad looser, but I will try to stretch it out when I block it. [Note: For non-knitters, blocking is a process whereby you soak the finished item, pin it down, and let it dry. You can often stretch an item made from wool or alpaca while doing this.] But, it's only the first one. I'm sure there will be many more to come. And I'm still REALLY proud of myself!

More yarn

If Jeremy doesn't post again soon, this may turn into a yarn blog. I apologize in advance, but I really don't have much else to talk about.

Here's the Wollmeise that came in the mail today:



That's two skeins of Brombeere (blackberry) and one skein of Rittersporn (larkspur). The Brombeere photographs pretty true to life, but the color of the Rittersporn in the photo doesn't come close. It's a deep sapphire blue with hints of purple. And now I need to stop ordering sock yarn.

My first shipment of Wollmeise!

My Red Hot Chili Wollmeise arrived today.

It came in this cute little package:



With a little extra skein just for fun ...



And the main event ...



The color really does glow. I am a believer!

More Magical Unicorn Yarn

I was bad today ...



Really bad ...



The top one is Brombeere (blackberry) - I got two of these - and the bottom one is Rittersporn (larkspur).

I have blogged before about the phenomenon that is Wollmeise. My first order is waiting at the post office for me to pick it up tomorrow, and yet, I could not resist ordering more when I happened upon another shop update today. This is sock yarn - and I'm not even a sock knitter! I will probably use it to make baby clothes at some point (no, I'm not pregnant), or maybe a shawl or two. The colors are just so beautiful.

In sadder news, my left wrist has been killing me the last couple of days. I'm terrified of carpal tunnel ... it means no knitting! So I will have to take a couple of days off from working on Jeremy's sweater. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself ...

More knitting

Another gift for expecting friends:



A scarf for J (which I can show here because he saw me knit the first half), modeled by me:



And my first 2008 project for me: fingerless mitts, knit almost entirely on my flights to and from Chicago. I wore them in my freezing cold office today, and they helped keep my hands warm. Also very fun to knit - anyone want a pair?

Red Hot Chili

Today I scored the Tickle Me Elmo of yarns. Through my obsession devotion to Ravelry.com, which is sort of a Facebook for knitters, I learned about Wollmeise. Wollmeise is a brand of yarn hand-dyed by a German woman named Claudia. She has acquired a cult following among knitters. New stock doesn't last 10 minutes on her Web site. She used to give her fans advance notice on the updates, but had to stop because the demand would crash her site. Now, she updates at random times on random Fridays. People get up in the middle of the night every Friday for months and months to check the site, and still miss out. I happened to check the site this morning, and lo and behold, there was some yarn for sale. I bought one skein of a red-orange-pink colorway called "Red Hot Chili" just to see what all the fuss was about.



Yarn should not excite me this much!

What I've been doing

and









They're both gifts, but one has been gifted, and the other will imminently be gifted. I'm pretty happy with the way both turned out.

Sheep, wool and love

Last Saturday, Debbie and I drove out to the fairgrounds in West Friendship, MD, to attend the annual Sheep and Wool Show. It's one of the biggest fiber festivals in the country, and is to knitters the equivalent of the Trekkies' Star Trek convention. We had been looking forward to it for awhile, but were not prepared for the sheer number of other people who had also, apparently, been looking forward to it. This is a small part of the parking lot:



We checked out the alpaca ...



And the sheep ...



And the lambs.



And the lamb - yum, gyros!



And ribbon fries ...



And, of course yarn. And more yarn. Beautiful yarn.







It was just the best day.

The End.