mini quilt

I love the fabrics in this little quilt.

super stripy picky pants

This week I finished knitting this pair of pants for little Eva. They are oh so soft and oh so cute. I used the Picky Pants pattern from Little Turtle Knits and Malabrigo Worsted Merino yarn (which I also used on her newborn diaper wrap a while back).

I made a size medium hoping that would be the right size to fit her through this winter and it looks good. They are pretty big now, but she will grow.

It’s bittersweet, this growing thing my baby is doing.

On the one hand it is so much fun to watch her open up to this world– to see her eyes light up when she looks one of us in the eye, to hear her squeals of delight as we coo and talk to her,

to see her serious concentration as she bats at her toys.

On the other hand I just want her to stay tiny– just a tiny sweet smelling little lump I can hold up to my cheek. Growing is good, though. There is no way to resist all the chins and the rolly thighs…

and the smiles and giggles!

But I digress. This post is about pants, right? I really want to tell you about the waistband. The Picky Pants pattern gives 2 options– and elasticized waist or a drawstring waist. I got a wool diaper cover knit by a friend and she did this genius thing. She put elastic inside her i-cord. I love how it looks, so I thought I steal her idea and do it on these pants making them a pair of drawstring-elastic waist pants. I just made a 4 stitch i-cord the length I wanted the waistband to be (in this case about 16 inches) and threaded a 16 inch piece of 1/4″ wide elastic through it with a safety pin. I wove that in and out the eyelets in the waistband, sewed the ends of the elastic together, then closed up the i-cord around it.

Love it.

(And for those of you who are wondering, Eva is playing with the baby gym I made Hunter and she loves it. She bats and bats and bats away and often just wiggles herself to sleep. Super cute.)

Halloweeners

For the whole month of October I tried to ignore the fact that Halloween was coming– maybe if I ignored it well enough it would just go away? It didn’t go away. Everything turned out fine anyway. We even used some store bought costumes this year! *gasp*

Brenna was an elf.

We made some pointy ears out of skin colored felt and she scrounged the scrap bag for cape fabric. Easy-peasy.

Jonah was a fly.

Glasses from the Halloween store, pipe cleaner antennae, cheap shower curtain wings. Easy again.

Logan was a black dragon.

He made his snout thing, got out his bat wing-cape that I made him several years ago, and Barry sprayed his hair and painted his face for him.

Hunter and Ian were Iron Man and Bumblebee. They LOVE these costumes and wear them every day. I figure that since they are part of their regular wardrobe they were worth the investment– and earned me some cool mom points too.

Eva was a little skeleton.

She wasn’t nearly as excited about Halloween as the other kids.

This is my kids very favorite holiday. Jonah said, “Halloween is fun in our family. It brings out our creative genius.”

Yeah, that and candy. I’m glad it’s nearly all gone already.

a pumpkin post

A family of 8 needs a lot of Jack-o-Lanterns this time of year. I made the suggestion that we get just 2 or 3 pumpkins and carve them in teams, but I guess the precedent has been set and each person MUST have their own pumpkin.

That’s a lot of guts…