In January I took my Christmas money to the yarn store and came home with 5 big soft squishy skeins of  beautiful green Madelinetosh superwash merino yarn.  (The color is Malachite, but I’m sure I bought worsted weight yarn and I’m not seeing anything that looks like it on their site.  I think Madelinetosh Vintage is the most comparable.)  I wanted a sweater with sleeves, so I cast on for my very own February Lady Sweater.

(this photo by Jonah)

It’s the biggest thing I’ve knit with a fancy lacy stitch pattern.   I made a hat for my mother in-law last Christmas which I constantly miscounted and messed up so bad I had to start over, so I was a bit nervous I would mess this up too, but none of those mistakes are noticeable and I never ripped a single row out.  About halfway through the body I realized I was twisting my yarn overs wrong which resulted in smaller holes in the lace, but I just kept on with that mistake for consistency’s sake.  I think that was a good thing actually because I think it would really stretch out of shape if it were knit any looser.

(this photo by Brenna)

I finished it the week we were getting ready for our Thanksgiving trip to Idaho.  There’s nothing like having a bunch if things I need to do (like laundry and packing) to make me feel ike I really need to knit or sew or create something.

It is itchless (hooray!) and warm.  I picked out the buttons with 3 littles in tow and have since decided I need to change them to something round that won’t be constantly skiwampis.  I’m also wishing that the buttons went all the way down, instead of just being at the top because I’m so newly un-pregnant.  Oh well.  I’m sure I’ll love how it fits next fall.

It certainly is the prettiest thing I’ve knit.  I love the magic of knitting.  I know I probably say that in every knitting post, but it is just so cool that a really long piece of string can be looped and looped into something lovely and useful.

We are traveling to Boise for Thanksgiving so today I did my most important preparation for the 30 (give or take) hours I’ll be spending in the car to get there and back.

Laundry you might guess?  Finding a lizard sitter, perhaps?  A trip to the library for books on CD?  Nope.

I bought yarn.

Today while the 3 big kids were at school I braved the yarn store with the 3 littles in tow.  Eva and Hunter were both asleep in their car seats when we got there, so I opted to take the stroller in.  Consequently I kept knocking things over with it.  Yarn stores are not frequented by doubler strollers, I guess.  And of course Hunter didn’t stay asleep.  There was much too much to touch and carry around and knock over for the sleeping to continue.

Luckily he’s cute.  The little ladies that work at the yarn store were very gracious when he decided to show me the skein of canary yellow yarn from the BOTTOM of the stack.

Ian found a lot of things he thought were irresistibly beautiful too, but since he’s 4 he’s not quite as destructive.  Not quite.

Eva stayed asleep.  Phew.

Amid all the re-shelving and even a potty break I did find what I needed.  You see, I’m going to make a Camilla for Brenna and a baby one for Eva.  I love the colors of the Quince & Co. yarns and thought for weeks about just ordering yarn, but I decided not to.  I am so wool sensitive that even merino is itchy to me sometimes and I know Brenna is the same way.  The Quince & Co. yarns are 100% American wool– not merino wool, just wool.  I don’t want these to itch– I want them to be worn and worn and worn, so I got a cotton blend yarn called Weekend by Berroco in exactly the colors I wanted.

I’m going to make them some skirts with ruffle fabric to match.

Now I’ve got to do that laundry and make lizard sitting arrangements before I can yet started.

The very first knitting I finished for Eva was this pilot cap and these little booties.  It was actually my road trip knitting from our trip to Idaho in June.  I intended for them to be the first thing we put on her after she was all dried off from being born, but the hat ended up being too big for a fresh newborn.

It fits great now, at 2 1/2 months.   On our way out the door to go grocery shopping yesterday I snapped a couple of quick photos of it in use.

The booties, on the other hand, are almost too small now.  They’ve seen a whole lot of use.  I love booties that tie on because they STAY on.  Socks just never do the trick.  These have been in constant rotation since the day she was born, along with the pink booties I ended up knitting to be her very first.  (You can see them in this post.)

I used the Lil’ Midi Bean pilot cap pattern (found through Ravelry, of course) .  The booties  are Christine’s Baby Booties which is such a wonderfully simple pattern I think I could do it from memory now.  The yarn is a bamboo/silk/merino blend made by Crystal Palace that is so soft.

I guess you’d say I’m in the knitting mood.  I have my green Febraury Lady Sweater nearly done! (I’ve been working on it since January.)  Hopefully it will make it on the blog soon.

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.)

I’m still working on that birth story post, so in the meantime I thought I’d post some more pictures of our sweet little girl.  She’s been such a blessing– and sleeps 5 or 6 hours every night!

While we were on our trip to Idaho in June I knit this little diaper cover.  I had yet to knit a diaper cover that would work– but on baby #6 I finally did it!  I used the Warm Heart Woolies Plain Wrap pattern (you’ll need to sign in to ravelry for that link to work) and Malabrigo worsted yarn.  Malabrigo is SO soft and felts easily, so it works really well for a diaper cover.  I added aplix hook and loop to fasten it which makes for easy changes.

It is so fun to snuggle a baby with a soft, fluffy bum.

I’ve got a birthday deadline coming up in a little less than 2 weeks– and look how far ahead of the game I am!  The knitting part of Ian’s sweater is done and now I’m blocking it.  Once it is dry I can sew in the zipper.  This may be my most favorite knitting project to date.  It really will be so cute on him once it’s done, because it was already super cute in it’s strings-hanging-off crumpled and curled state.

This is the pattern I used from Petite Purls.  I really wanted to use the Spud & Chloe yarn it called for because I had looked at it and felt its machine washable softness several times at the yarn store.  I knew it would be expensive, but I didn’t realize that it was going to be a full $16.00 for a 50 gram skein.  Multiply that by the 7 skeins I was going to need and, well, it was just more than I could spend on a sweater for one child (especially when I have lofty hopes of knitting for all 5 of them this year).  With a little internet searching I stumbled upon Jimmy Bean’s Wool and it has this cool feature where you can search yarn by weight.  I found the Spud & Chloe yarn I wanted and compared all the yarns in similar weights.  I ended up getting 5 skeins of Cascade 128 superwash.  It was so soft and silky to knit with and cost about half as much as it would have otherwise.  It was a bit lighter than the called for yarn, so I had to knit it on size 10.5 needles instead of 11, which meant I just needed to knit the number of stitches for a size 6 and use the measurements for a 4 to make it turn out right.  I’m curious to see how it wears.  The Knit Picks Swish superwash I used for both my mom’s and Hunter’s sweaters gets a bit pilly with use.

Once I get the zipper in it will be torture to not put it on him until his birthday.

And I need to find a fun zipper pull.

Yesterday the UPS man brought me some new toys!

I’ve gotten very ambitious in my knitting aspirations after my Christmas gift accomplishments and Hunter’s birthday sweater.  I have this goal in the back of my mind that I will knit something spectacular for each of my kids’ birthdays, something for myself, and maybe even get ambitious enough to knit something for Barry too.  7 or 8 sweaters in a year is totally doable? Right?

With a goal like that there is sure to be a lot of yarn in my future– and every crafty endeavor is much more fun with the right tools.

Hand wound balls are a bit fumbly and tangly to make from big loopy skeins, and bit fumbly and tangly to knit from.  With a swift you can easily hold that big loop of yarn.

And with a ball winder you can make speedy work of creating a perfect center pull ball that behaves so nicely as you knit without rolling away or tangling up.

With all the spinning and winding that could be done it was quite a while until the kids let me have a turn to try out my new toys.

I did get a turn after a couple of balls were wound– and then admired how neatly they stack on my craft shelves.  So satisfying.

Oh, and my silk screen class post is over at the Rhythm of the Home blog today. Here’s a BIG welcome to any new friends stopping by!

It’s February.

All I want to do is sit and knit.  I’m not sure if it is the actual act of knitting that I want, or the finished product.  Because, it is really cool to have a whole sweater that I made with just one long piece of string.  I think it’s the magic of taking that ball of yarn, and one stitch at a time, one row at a time turning into something lovely and real and useful.

So, yeah, all I want to do these days is sit and knit.

So, that present Hunter was opening was this little sweater.  I used Knit Picks Swish dk yarn.  Hunter sat on my lap as I ordered it and I let him pick his favorite color.  It’s pretty bright!

The pattern is the Child’s Placket Neck Pullover from Last Minute Knitted Gifts.  I made a 2-4 year old size with a bit bigger gauge than called for so that is would fit for a while.  A lot of Ravelers said it seemed a bit small made as written. I think it fits just right.

I also took him on a trip to the Fancy Tiger to pick out a button.  He fell in love with the little wooden panda.  The bonus is that it makes him want to wear his sweater all the time!

His other favorite gift of the day was this “crocagator” from Barry’s sister and family.  It RROARS a lot– and made me realize that in my reluctance to add to our collection of stuffed animals he has never gotten one of his very own.  He really loves it.

I love the finished product of knitting- and watching the magic unfold one stitch, one row at a time.

And I love when my handmade gifts are well received.  I wish I had taken pictures of my mom while she was here.  She wore her Christmas sweater constantly!

Geesh, is it really this far into the new year all ready?  I have had a hard time getting back into the swing of things here after my Christmas break.  We did have a good time with Barry parents in town.  Christmas letters did not get mailed, neighbor treats did not get done, but such is life during a busy time of year.  I’m hoping our friends and family will be pleasantly surprised to get Valentines this year.

So, I decided to focus on making handmade gifts for our parents this year, rather than the kids.  I started in November with a sweater for my mom, then moved on to hats for my dad and Barry’s parents.

The sweater was my third Shalom.  (See the first two here and here.)  This time with sleeves!  I had really wanted my blue one to have sleeves, but miscalculated the amount of yarn I needed.  Truth be told, the thick wool it is knit with would be SO hot if it did have sleeves that it is fine just how it is.  I do wear it a lot.

It turned out really cute and I hope not too itchy.  My mom is super wool sensitive like I am.  I tried Knit Picks Swish Chunky superwash merino.  It was really nice to work with and I love the color.  I think it is soft enough too, as long as you have a long sleeve shirt underneath.

I know I need to broaden my sweater repertoire, but this is such a simple sweater to knit and fits cute on just about everyone.  Top down knitting is marvelous because you can try it on as you go.  I just really, really love this pattern.  Maybe I’ll move on to another top down cardigan this year.  I’m really dreaming of making a really soft brown one of these that I could wear every day.  What do you think?  Is it different enough?

So, on the left there is the hat I knit for my mother in-law and on the right is the one for my dad. (Find these patterns at knitty here and here.)

I had to keep starting my mother in-law’s hat over.  Either the baby would get a hold of it, or I would lose count on the lace pattern and really mess it up.  I knit it at least 4 times– I probably could have knit another sweater with all the time it took– but it turned out cute in the end, I think.  It’s obviously knit from the same yarn as my mom’s sweater and I love the color.

The one for my dad is my first ever foray into cables.  It was quick and fun and much easier to keep track of than the lacy leaves of the other hat.  It is knit with the softest yarn I have ever, ever used– malabrigo baby merino.  He modeled it for me during our Christmas day skype chat, so I know it fits.

I knit another hat for my father in-law and only have one photo of it.

I don’t know if it will ever really get used.  I should have taken into account the fact that he uses hats just to keep the top of his head warm and not his ears and made it a bit shorter.  Hopefully knowing that he was one of the few recipients of my hand made love will be gift enough.  It’s made from the same yarn as my blue sweater– soft and warm.

So, there you have it.  My first post of the new year about the old year.  Just wait ’til you see the handmade gifts Brenna and Jonah (and I, of course) made each other.  They’re awesome.