Category Archives: knitting

super stripy picky pants

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).

stripy picky pants

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.

wiggle time

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,

busy

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!

:)

tongue out concentration

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.

the waistband

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.)

 

a wooly diaper cover

Eva

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!

fluffy bum

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.

wooly

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

sweet sleeping

wooly diaper cover

off the needles and on the block

blocking

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.

SWIFT!

Yesterday the UPS man brought me some new toys!

swift!

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.

winding yarn has never been so fun!

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.

ball winder

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.

pretty yarn stacks

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!