Tag Archives: baby sweater

Snow Day

Like many folks across the midwest today, I am sitting inside my house, watching the snow pile on the ground fast and furious, and enjoying a quiet day off work. The longer it snows, the harder it seems to snow. It seemed like a good time to take stock of all of my works in progress.

Brocks Aran
Brock’s sweater has continued apace, but I set it aside about a week ago because I was jonesing for something with a little bit more color and a little bit less mental involvement.

garter stitch baby kimono
Insert the Garter Stitch Baby Kimono. I’ve been working on this sweater a stitch here and a stitch there for the last couple of months, but this past week I decided it was time to finish it. (This has nothing to do with feeling like my due date is suddenly much closer than it was two weeks ago.) This is my kind of dye job. Bold. Bright. A little garish, perhaps, but completely adorable at the same time. (Yarn is Vice Yarns Paradigm in Plain Jane.)

baby hat
The sweater used most of the skein of yarn, but I wanted to make matching accessories anyway, and I just happened to have an undyed skein of yarn that is, if not the same base, a very similar one. I cast on a little hat and am planning on making a pair of Stephanie Pearl McPhee’s Cutest Booties in the undyed yarn with the bright yarn as the ties and the pom poms…I should have just enough yarn left for that.

latest handspun
Last time, I showed you some singles on the bobbin of the yarn I was currently spinning. The photo above shows what those singles became. It’s a squishy worsted weight two-ply yarn that I think needs to become a great big, warm, squishy shawl.

shawl ingredients
Pairing it with this undyed skein of merino yarn should help stretch to make the handspun into a great big shawl. This will be my snow day project–seeing how much of it I can get done before the snow clears up.

wensleydale
And if I need a break from knitting, I’ve got this lovely little ball of Wensleydale that needs to be spun up as well.

Stripey Baby Blanket
Or I could try my hand and decorating some more fabrics.

Stay safe and warm everyone!

Sewing as Literary Device

sweater6
I finished my Etherial last week. I think it looks pretty rockin.

Since then, I have finished, another sweater, my Tule which came out perfectly, but of which I have no photographs yet. They are coming, I promise.

Since I am still trying to keep up with my 12 sweaters in 2013 goal, and the Tule was Sweater #3, and the Etherial was Sweater #4, and it was already the end of May when I finished them both, I decided Sweater #5 would be adorably tiny. Yesterday I cast on the Newborn Vertebrae. Brock said this was cheating to keep up with my quota. I say, I never said all of the sweaters had to be full-size adult sweaters. And also, I have never knit a baby sweater before, so I am still learning something. Mostly I am learning that baby clothes go delightfully fast. I probably would have been done today, except I spent a very humid afternoon (I could have shut the windows and turned the AC, but I was concentrating too hard) making this!

totebag
I have not sewn in ages and ages. This some medium weight cotton I had sitting around to someday make project bags out of–and not necessarily what I would chose to make myself an everyday tote bag out of–but I do think it came out pretty cute. The pattern is form this book which I have had since I moved in to this apartment. (For those keeping score that was in July of 2010, so not quite three years ago). For some reason, I was afraid to work my way through the book–even after I bought a second sewing machin 2 1/2 years ago. And even though I use the second sewing machine mostly for mending (about once every six months), you would think that a person with two sewing machines might actually do some sewing….

Turns out, a person with two sewing machines mostly just fantasizes about sewing and then feels insecure about her abilities–even though ten years ago she had people offering to pay her to sew costumes….

That is what happens after allowing an interest lay dormant for a decade through a tumult of self-debt and the sort of feelings that are only ever realized in a Bildungsroman. But today, I sewed, and I am excited to do so again.

And finish my tiny baby sweater.