Swirly Summer Beret

So, this thing.

I wanted a new summer slouchy beret in cotton, something cute and multi-colored to wear around without roasting in the heat. I found this yarn on clearance and thought I'd struck gold. I am not overly fond of using variegated yarns in lacy patternwork so I went for the simple One-Day Beret, which I had previously used on this hat.

I don't know why this didn't turn out like I wanted. The wool one I made was too big, so I went a bit smaller and it's not too small, but not the fit I had in mind. I used Jeny's Surprisingly Stretchy Bind-Off, and I think it just doesn't work for cotton. Despite using a needle two sizes smaller than I used for the rest of the hat, it's just sort of stretched-out and lumpy and weird.

Piper likes it, though. She keeps asking "Is that my hat...or your hat? Can I wear it?" So maybe I'll just give it to her and make myself something else.

Party Favors

With her early-summer birthday, I usually try to do something summer related as a party favor. Last year we only had 3 kids over, so each kid got a sand pail with chalk, a small shovel, and a bottle of water in it. This year we had a dozen invitees, so I bought a couple 6-packs of scented bubbles (they're supposed to smell like different things, but they all smell like sno-cones to me) and some fancy tissue paper. I traced & cut star shapes out of cardstock and wrote on them with a silver Sharpie. Simple, easy, cool.

The kids really liked them, but I handed them out at the party as were waiting for the food (it was a at a big bounce-house place, so we were having the pizza they supplied with our "party package"). The only thing worse than one kid whining "When are we going to EAT?! Where is the PIZZA? I am TOTALLY STARVING TO DEATH RIGHT NOW!" is ten kids, all at top volume, in order to be heard over the noise of the indoor play-place. I grabbed the basket and started thrusting small packages into sticky hands as fast as I could while I whispered to my husband for the love of God, go find our party hostess and figure out where the hell the food is before they start gnawing on our limbs.

Before the pizza and accompanying "party hostess" made their way back to our bright-blue party room, I realized two things, two terrible and tragic mistakes I had made:

1. If you're making party favors to give to little kids, make sure they can untie the ribbon themselves, otherwise you will have a room full of preschoolers squealing in frustration because they cannot get your super-tight double-knots off the thing they want so much to open; and
2. It is not a good idea to give 10 kids sticky colored liquid unless they are outside and possibly surrounded by fire hoses.

I apologized to the parents, who all gave me a wave and a "Please. This is nothing. Two drops of water-soluble pale-blue bubble solution on that shirt will be totally eclipsed by something much worse any second now." But the kids loved the bubbles, and they all ran around blowing bubbles, smelling each other's bubbles, trading colors, and generally having a very good time with the stuff. Most importantly they stopped whining until the food arrived.

The only major problem was some tears from the birthday girl, because she can read her own name now, so she thought all these were hers. "But those are my presents! My name is on them!"

Blue Leaves Hat

This thing was so easy. She picked the yarn and asked for a hat, and I figured since she would probably wear it twice and then toss it somewhere, it couldn't hurt if it was something I could wear too, right?  I originally made 95% of one using this pattern. It did not go well. Too big, too floppy, just not right at all. So I pulled it out and started over. She was quite upset. She had been hovering and bugging me about when it would be done ("Is that my hat or your hat? It's my hat? Is it done yet?") and when she saw me frogging it she wailed "Mommy! Why are you pulling out my hat?! It's MY hat and I want to wear it right now!"

I gently explained that keeping the hat in its present form would make her look like some sort of smurfy pastry chef, or like a blue glob of goo was digesting her head.  She was undeterred and continued to whine. I gave up and started knitting the new one with the unused end of my 2nd skein, and let her wear what was left of the first hat until I needed the yarn. She eventually grew tired (and probably hot), and I found it under the dining table.

I picked a totally different pattern the second time around, with a little more attention to yarn weight and texture. This worked very well. It was my first time working off a chart, and I think I didn't screw it up too much. The hat looks okay, at any rate, and she is quite pleased with it. I made the "adult" size, and even though she's 4 and has a smallish head it fits her okay with the brim flipped up. It's a little big, but that means we should get some years out of it and unlike the first version, is not so huge it's falling over her eyes all the time. I can wear it too, which is  nice.

This yarn (Cascade Cotton Rich) is quite nice to work with - all the cool comfort of cotton with a little spring in its step. I really loved this pattern - so simple once I got going, and gets lovely results. I think it would be a great pattern for a yarn splurge, like some luxe wool-silk blend for winter. I love finding patterns like this, that look great and don't take up a lot of yarn, because I can spring for 1 or 2 skeins of something awesome and feel like I'm living the high life without spending $160 to make a sweater.

Pattern:  Lace-leaf hat by Sophy T. O'Donnell
Yarn: Cascade Cotton Rich
My Ravelry details are here.

P.S. The other hat in the above picture will be blogged soon. I have mixed feelings about it.

Simo Dress

So here's a project I actually did complete:

Bribe her with a sucker? Why, yes I did.

Pattern: Simo by Cirilia Rose
Yarn: Berroco Weekend (75% Acrylic, 25% Cotton; 205 yds, 100g)
Needles: Uhh...8 maybe? I finished this thing like two months ago, I'm a bit fuzzy...
My Ravelry page for it is here. 

This thing is so stinkin' CUTE. And it was pretty easy. I think it only took me 6 or 8 weeks, carrying it around and working on it here and there - at a birthday party, as she ran amok in the children's museum, or while yelling "DO NOT STAND ON TOP OF THE MONKEY BARS OH MY GOD PLEASE GET DOWN BEFORE I HAVE A HEART ATTACK" at the park.

It's not written to be worked in the round, weirdly enough, but I did it that way anyhow, because given the choice between all that purling and turning and then some awkward join-up of yoke and sleeves and THEN two huge seams to sew vs. barreling right through in the round, only one piece to keep track of, a much-less-awkward join up of yoke and sleeves, and only a couple ends to weave in...duh. Of course I took the easy way out. It did, however, take me four freaking days to figure out how to sew up the sleeves. The very last little bit of finishing, and I was so stuck. In the end it was pretty obvious (sew the tube to the armpit), and I smacked myself upside the head for not figuring it out sooner.

There is a scarf included in the pattern, which I made in a violently bright pink color specifically requested by Piper. She wanted the whole dress made in that Barbie-vomit shade, but I persuaded her that a pink scarf would be cooler. Unfortunately, it never seems to be near the dress when I have my camera. Hmm, now that I think about it, I haven't seen it in a couple of weeks, not since she was using it to tie up one of the cats.

This was a nice yarn to work with. It's cotton-acrylic, in that mutlti-strand way, so I had a problem here and there with snaggy loops when the yarn bunched up, but it wasn't too bad. I normally avoid acrylic, but I thought 100% cotton might be too heavy or stretchy, so I gave this a go. I finished this a couple days after Easter, and she's worn it a few times. It got quite a bit of use on our recent visit to Michigan, when I discovered I had packed for 90-degree weather but they had 65-degree weather.

It's really too hot to wear it these days, but that doesn't stop her. She LOVES it, which makes me unspeakably happy.

2 Projects Per Month: 2011 Halfway Tally

As an alternative to my usual lame New Year's resolutions, I vowed that this year, I would power through my backlog of knitting projects by completing two items per month. I had almost no rules - the projects could be totally new or polishing off a work-in-progress, there was no particular order other than that dictated by holidays, birthdays, or swap requirements. Now that we're halfway through the year, I decided to take stock.

The news is....not good. I am not even close to meeting my goal. Take a look:

January: Grandma's Hat, Yet Another Milo
February:
March:
April: Bunny Nuggets
May: Simo Dress & Scarf, Pink Poncho
June: Do the four things I've started and frogged count?

So, if I totally power-knit for the rest of the year and finish three projects per month...hmm, that idea is so ludicrous I'm just going to stop right there. Most of the projects I have managed to finish this year remain unblogged, because it's gotten difficult to find time to take the photos, upload them, then sit down to write about the finished object.

Part of the problem is that I have been pulling apart as much as I've knit lately, sending myself back to zero on a weekly basis. And despite the magic of Ravelry, I still feel like my to-knit list is super disorganized. I'm having trouble putting a pattern into my queue more than once, so even though I'm making multiple items with the same pattern I can't put all the projects into once computerized list. I think I am also falling into the trap of "too many things on the needles at the same time," splitting my focus and forgetting where I'm at with each project.

In other news, we've had exactly two showings of our house. The only feedback we got, from one showing, was that "the house showed well, but buyer decided she wanted a two-story home." Our realtor had an open house and not a single buyer came. It's sort of depressing.

Even though the neighborhood (and not-from-this-neighbhorhood) kids are out in full force now that school's done, thus making me a nervous wreck and thoroughly miserable most of the time that I'm home, for the moment it's okay if the house doesn't sell. My husband got a new job and will be doing training for the next few months, after which he'll be assigned to a permanent post. The likely locations for that post are on completely opposite ends of the city, and not near Piper's school, so we won't know the best location for us to move to until the fall anyway. Even that could change during the late winter/early spring, when we'll know where she will be going to kindergarten. We are not sending her to the neighborhood school here, and most of the other public schools in this district are not so great either. We will be making the rounds of lottery drawings for charter schools, or possibly finding a way to send her to a low-cost private school on the north end of town. Since the north end is where she goes to school now, and that's where all the parents with school-age kids I know are, I know almost nothing about the schools on the south end of town. If we have to move to that area I'll really be in a pickle.

Grandma's Hat

Back in January, when I heard my grandma was not doing well with her chemo, I decided to make her a hat. Something soft and fuzzy and WARM.

I was still working on the Torture Tomten (which remains unfinished and is so horribly screwed up that I think it will have to be frogged) so I had all this fuzzy pink acrylic stuff sitting around.

I used the Felicity pattern (also seen here), some slightly bigger needles to accomodate the bulky yarn, and after a few days I had a fuzzy pink hat.

Hello, welcome to my dimly-lit bathroom. 

Fuzzy and pink is not normally my thing, but it turned out pretty cute.

I sent it to her with a nice little letter and some of Piper's artwork from school.

My grandma passed away about five weeks after I sent this, but as far as I know she did get it. I hope it brought her at least a little comfort.

The Santa Hat

A couple of days before Christmas, my child started asking me for "a Santa hat." After a few conversations, I sussed out that this meant any hat with a pom-pom, bonus points if it's pointy in some way. She requested red, and was quite adamant. We went to the yarn store and I let her pick out what she wanted (although I did have to steer her away from the $46-a-skein stuff ). She chose the brightest red we could find - some Cascade 220. I didn't finish it until a couple days after Christmas, but I think it's what she wanted.

This pattern is the "Vintage Pixie Cap" by Hadley Fierlinger from Vintage Knits for Modern Babies.
My Ravelry details are here.

More blurry, grainy camera phone pictures, hooray! 

I got most of the way done with the front ribbing and realized that it was going to be all loose and floppy and that I should've used needles 1-2 sizes smaller to make the ribbing tighter. I don't know why I didn't think of it, because that's what I always do with hat ribbing. So it's kind of loose. Oh, well. It will fit her for a while, I guess. I did the strap in seed stitch and made the end pointy, and it fastens with these two wee little rabbit buttons that she picked out herself. Maybe someday I will remember to get a picture of the nice seed stitch strap with its rabbit buttons, but for now you'll just have to take my word for it.

I can say that the bright red is very nice at the playground because she's always easy to spot.

A Little Christmas Crafting

Well, I am knee-deep in red worsted-weight wool and elbow-high in bread dough right now, but I thought I'd share what I made last night. It looked like this when I started:

Remind me to sew in the daytime next year so I can take a decent photo.

This was a t-shirt I gave my husband the first or second Christmas we were together. He loved it and wore it and wore it and wore it, until it had paint splatters and holes and frayed seams and the decal was starting to flake off. It had reached the end of its life as a garment, but I wanted to keep it in the family and he needed a good stocking. He's been using some cheapie dollar-bin one for a few years now and last year Piper and I both got cool stockings, so it was his turn. This was a pretty fast project, once I got going. I traced one of our existing stockings for a pattern, and spent some time fussing with placement to try and get the most leftover t-shirt fabric when I was done, but by then it was 11:43 on December 23rd and I decided just to hack it out of the middle because otherwise it would never get done.

 Here is the finished product, which will probably bring a smile to the face of anyone who has played Super Mario Bros: 

Hello, I am a Goomba Stocking. Nice to meet you.

I had the seam on the inside but didn't like the way it looked, so I just went around the outside, in dark-green thread because I have a huge cone of green thread and no green projects to use it on. The top band/hanging loop is a piece from the jelly roll pack I bought to make the binding for Piper's Beatles quilt (I thought the green was festive and it matched the stitching). I didn't line it, and I probably should've, but it will only have stuff in it for a few hours so I hope it won't get too stretched out of shape. The seam is extremely sturdy and I think it will be okay. Maybe before I put it away with the rest of the Christmas decorations I'll make a lining and tuck it inside and patch a couple tiny holes in the fabric and patch up the paint on the decal. Probably not, but I'll think about it really hard.

My husband is just tickled to death with the thing. He was touched because it's a shirt that has history for us, but he also thinks it's a pretty kick-ass stocking. 

Lunchbox

This project was a birthday gift for a dear little friend. His mom and I are pals, and she'd mentioned she was looking for a way to pack lunch/snacks for him on their adventures. I couldn't find a kid-size bento box that was affordable (or would ship in time for his birthday), so I made an approximation.

He's a big fan of sharks, so that was the first thing to find.

Then I tracked down some little containers that would nest inside it, and made sure there was enough room for a sippy cup or kid-size water bottle. I added a small freezer pack to keep everything cool.

The last part of the gift was cloth napkins. I let Piper pick some fabric, then I cut out squares and hemmed them using decorative stitches on my machine (also with a little help - "MOMMY! You hafta use THAT ONE! I want you to use the squares!"). It was pretty fun; I had never tried most of them before, and they looked cute in contrasting thread along the edges.

Piper made the wrapping paper and helped me tie the bow. She was quite pleased to give this special gift to her special little friend. I think his mother appreciated a gift that didn't require assembly or make noise.

Amazing What You Can Do With The Right Tools.

It's no secret that I love Babylegs. They have been one of the most useful items of baby/kid gear we've owned. They continue to be so, especially now that she's in preschool. The kids spend at least an hour on the (really cool wooden/natural) playground at her school every day, and they also spend time inside playing and doing art or other activites. The weather this fall has been pretty dry, with cool mornings and warm afternoons. Sometimes there's a 15 or 20-degree difference in the temperature between getting into the car at 9:00 and picking her up from the school playground at 1:15. I put her in shorts or a skirt + legwarmers in the morning, and when she gets too warm she can take them off, ditch her jacket, and run around without overheating.

However, at $12 a pair, with care instructions that include the words "hand wash," they are not exactly ideal for the rigors of paint, soap, glue, slides, woodchips, sandbox, hiking trails, and everything else she gets into at school. Plus the actual Babylegs styles seem to be getting both more cutesy and more gendered - lots more sections labeled "girl" and "boy" and lots fewer stylish designs - so I decided to just make her some out of knee socks.

I'd seen the tutorials around for a few years (and had a secret stash of knee socks hidden under some fabric in my closet, just waiting for the "someday" when I could get to them), so I looked over a few sets of instructions, threaded my machine, and got to work. It was supposed to be easy-peasy: just cut off the foot part, chop off the heel & toe, use the remaining small tube of fabric from the foot part to make a band, and sew it to the leg part. Ten minutes, tops.

You can guess where this is headed.

Even though I cut and pinned carefully, the knit sock fabric did not cooperate. It slipped. It dragged. I swore. I shrieked. I hunched over my machine with clenched hands and a sweaty brow. I tried different stitches, different machine settings. I sewed and ripped it out over and over. And after four days of failure, I remembered all the praise I had heard about ball-point needles. I bought a pack of eight.

Once I got home and put one in the machine, it only took me ten minutes to sew up all four pairs.

Ball point needles! For sewing knits! Who knew that would be the key to my problems sewing with knits?!

If only all my problems could be solved for $3.95.

(crappy cell phone photo, taken under compact florescent light bulbs, at night)

These are primarily Halloween ones, because I have a big pile of socks waiting to be legwarmer-ized but it was four days to Halloween at this point, so I wanted to do those first. The long blue ones were the experimental pair. I figured if I screwed them up, it was okay, blue socks are easy to come by, but I wasn't about to fool around with my $5-a-pair Halloween socks. Thanks to the needle change, they came out really well, except for the part where I didn't realize the argyle skulls would come out upside-down on the bottom bands. Oh, well. Eventually I'll get some plain gray ribbing and replace the bottom bands on those. Maybe. I sewed all these with a straight normal stitch set on the longest length, and they all stretch fine. I did not finish the seams in any way, because I am lazy and I keep forgetting to buy some pinking shears. I suppose they could come undone, but I don't really care. I made these partly because they're cute but mostly so she could trash them at school, so it's no big deal. Besides, if they start to come undone, that's Future Steph's problem.

The short ruffled blue ones I did with a zig-zag stitch, because they were toe socks and there was nothing to make a bottom band out of. Besides, this way they will fit nicely over her shoes and keep water/snow/dirt out of her socks. They also make some wicked cute arm/hand-warmers - I know this because I keep wearing them that way. Every time I do, Piper looks annoyed and asks me "Mommy, you have Babylegs on your ARMS! They are supposed to go on LEGS!"

Purple Poncho in Action

I finally got a photo of it where she's not naked or blurry. I realize that the poncho itself is slightly blurry in this photo, but trust me, it's better this way. This is the only one where she wasn't making some really freaky face. Wait, I did find one where she was only making a face that was merely a little weird and not really freaky:

She is exactly like her father; every time I pull out the camera he starts making strange, freaky faces too. Trying to photograph the two of them together usually causes me to pull out my hair, kick things, or give up and buy myself a gigantic sugary latte instead of shooting pictures.

Punkinhead

When my best friend's little boy was three, I made him a hat. And he loved it. And loved it. AND LOVED IT. He wore it everywhere. He carried it around and picked at its edges. Some kid at his day care tried to steal it, and my friend snatched it right back from the thief (and the thief's mother, who was all "Oh, yeah, it's our hat, totally") with a "I know this isn't your hat, because my friend Steph made this for MY kid. See the frayed parts right there? That's where MY kid keeps picking at it, because it's HIS hat! So unless the universe is SUPER weird today and you have a friend who also kitted your son a hat in these exact colors and which he picked apart in exactly the same spots, we're taking our hat home now."

She can be pretty fierce when it comes to her kids and her hand-knits.

Anyway, her little boy loved it so much that he literally loved it to pieces, unraveling and picking at it until it was in shreds. It took me a couple of years, but I finally got around to making a replacement. I actually finished this in March or April sometime, I think, but then it got really hot and they were moving so I didn't mail it off. I came across it this week when I was "rearranging my stash" (i.e. taking all the yarns out of their containers and lining them up and touching them and dreaming up 10 projects for every skein).

It's orange, like the original (she called him "my little pumpkinhead" when he was a baby). It really is a nice, pumpkin-y orange, not the traffic-cone color it shows up as in these photos (and wow, does my camera hate to focus on oranges, reds, & yellows). I got the stripe a little too high on this one, but oh well. I hope he likes it. My friend said that not only did the little one love the original hat, but that her older son and her husband had all taken turns wearing it as well, so I'm thinking of making a few more to send to them. It's still pretty hot out, hardly wool-hat weather yet, and this pattern is super-fast, so I think I can manage two more by the time the snow flies.

And yeah, I know this yarn is mostly acrylic, which I usually try to avoid like the plague, but this is machine-washable and inexpensive. I'd rather give an inexpensive gift they will use (and is easily replaceable when some kid steals it or her husband gets it all greasy under the car) than a show-piece they're too afraid to wear. He loved this hat, and I can keep cranking these babies out until he goes to college, something I could not do with a more expensive or delicate yarn. Sometimes I gotta suck it up and make peace with the non-natural fibers, you know?

Pattern: Sparkling Pom-Pom Ski/Toboggan Hat (sorry, you have to log in to see LB's free patterns)
Yarn: Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick & Quick
Ravelry details are here. 

Purple Poncho

This took longer than I intended, what with our busy summer and near-constant company. It was supposed to take a couple of days and wound up taking over a month. But she really loves it, and it was easy. I was so afraid of sewing it up that I had the finished pieces done for almost a week before I seamed them together. I'm not sure if I did it exactly right, but it looks pretty good. This was a really inexpensive project. I used stash yarn, but this is discloth cotton, and it's less than $4 for two balls.

Pattern: Spice Girl by Candi Jensen, from Total Baby Knits
Yarn: Lily Sugar n' Cream Solids
Ravelry details are here.

She's worn it around the house a couple of times - she likes to put it on and dance around (to the Beatles, natch). She's worn it out of the house twice, which is pretty good considering it's still over 90 here every day. I'm hoping to put it on her and get her to sit still so I can snap a photo. Silly of me, I know.

A New Low, or a New High, I'm Not Sure Which

Last week, we dressed up like cows to get free food. 

Oh, yeah. Head to toe. 

A certain chicken-sandwich chain to which we have recently become addicts had a "dress like a cow, get free food" day. We weren't going to go, but all three of us were hot, cranky, and anxious that day, so I took a white trash bag, a black trash bag, two of my husband's old white undershirts, a pair of scissors, some tape, and, with a little assistance, 20 minutes later we had three cow costumes. All three of us got a totally free lunch, and Piper loved her costume so much she wore it continuously for the next three days. We had to pry it off of her at bedtime, because three-year-olds don't understand that wearing a giant plastic bag to bed is not a good idea. By about day 5 of being loved on, it bit the dust, and we gave her the two decorated shirts to run around with, much to her delight. 

As we cut and taped and fitted, my husband said he thought I was pretty awesome for taking a pile of stuff that most people would throw away and making costumes out of it in less than half an hour, although he was unsure if the fact that we were doing it only for the free food canceled out the awesome part. 

"I'm not sure either," I said, "But I am hungry." 

Also, I think this is the biggest tangible reward I have yet obtained from any sort of crafty endeavor or project. I am not sure what that says about me, or my craft skills, but I can tell you that a free lunch tastes DELICIOUS.

A Fairly Rockin' Felicity

Due to ozone alerts, hot weather, my child's desire to be naked most of the time, company, and my own exhaustion, we've spent a lot of time indoors lately. I felt like I was in the grip of some heat-generated inertia, and my usual cure for that is to knit something. A small, fast project, something to shake off the funk and get my gears turning again.

Piper dug a ball of pink I-don't-know-where-it-came-from-but-I'm-assuming-it's-acrylic yarn out of my stash and asked for a hat. I was afraid I might not have enough, so I asked her if it was okay for me to add black stripes. She eyed the yarns critically for a moment and signed off on the project.

A few days later, I presented her with this:

She had hovered anxiously over me during the knitting process, inspecting it as my fingers worked as fast as I could go, asking "Is my hat done yet? Are you done knitting it yet?" at least three times a day. She actually wore it for an hour or two:

And miracle of miracles, I actually got her to sit still for a few pictures.

Pattern: Felicity by Wannet Clyde (Ravelink)
My Ravelry details are here.
And here's one more picture, since it will probably be October before it's cool enough to wear it for real and get some shots of it in action:

Quilt Top

An in-progress photo from making the quilt. I took it that night, emailed it to myself, and forgot all about it.

What you can't see in this picture is all the cat hair, bits of thread, and random debris stuck to the back of that flannel sheet because our spare room/office/guest room always gets forgotten when the vacuum cleaner comes out.

Piles of Surprises

More birthday posts, I know. Yes, her birthday was at the beginning of the month but the craziness and business have dragged it out so that the posts have spanned all of June. Probably July too, if I don't get it in gear...anyway, here you go.

 

 
We don't use the fireplace very much for heating the house, but we get a lot of mileage out of it as a staging area. Whenever we have something to give her, gifts for birthdays and what have you, we put it in front of the fireplace. Then we wait for her to notice the goodies in the morning. The surprise and delight on her face every time is killer. This was her little pile of birthday gifts this year:

- Birthday Shirt, which has become a yearly tradition. For her 1st, we bought one of those generic "Birthday Girl" ones from some big-box store, and I was never satisfied with it. So last year we made her one with iron-on transfers, featuring owls (It said "Who's Two?", ha-ha). This year, of course, it was totally Beatles-inspired. Next year I might try stencils or something, because every brand of iron-on transfer we've tried barely lasts one day before starting to flake off. Sometimes they're peeling in a matter of hours.

- Beatles Quilt, made with love (and some choice language) by Mama.

- Yellow Submarine Hoodie, also made using iron-on transfers. When they flake off I will replace them with nice embroidered patches; I just couldn't find the ones I wanted in time so I used transfers.

- Spider-Man Sticker Book - Spidey is loved very nearly as much as the Fab Four in our house, and stickers are a continual source of fun. This was a HUGE book with tons of stickers and little scenes to place characters in. I still expect to find Spider-Man, the Green Goblin, and Mary Jane stuck all over the house.

- Dragon PJ's - my husband picked these out for her, because, although they are from some cartoon movie she will probably never see, they had a little cape with hood that Velcros to the shoulders, so that it looks like a dragon costume.

- Beatles Coloring Book - we made this ourselves. I took an old 3-ring binder and filled it with all the readily-printable Beatles stuff I could find on the Internet. I hit the jackpot when I stumbled upon pages from a never-published Yellow Submarine comic book. They are AMAZING, and many are only half-colored or less, so it was perfect. I also added a set of 10 Smencils (those things are awesome) for her to color with.

- Wooden hand-carved (but not by us) train toy - just the engine car. She's way into trains at the moment (show me a 2-3 year-old who isn't), and was quite taken with this one when we saw it at the farmer's market. The guy who makes these is really nice; I plan to go back and get some of his kid-size furniture, doll furniture, and step stools. 

- Cardboard Playhouse - we had seen one at the mall, but as it cost $60 and we could not bring ourselves to spend that much on something our cats would probably use as a scratching post, so we made our own. I came up with the concept (I might have even drawn a sketch or two) and my husband did the execution. The purple duct-tape was my idea; I wanted something that looked like trim and we needed a way to shore up everything. The bad-ass chimney, however, was all him. It's totally awesome.

I waffled between thinking it was too much and being convinced it was not enough, or between being proud of all our hand-made-by-us/artistic/hand-made-by-local-crafters stuff and being gripped with fear that she would scorn our hard work and ask for a new set of Yo Gabba Gabba dvd's. I needn't have worried, because she loved all of it. She put the hoodie on immediately and dragged the quilt around with her. She was thrilled with the coloring book and tried out the Smencils right away. She played peek-a-boo in the playhouse and pushed her train up and down its walls. When we left to go out for her much-anticipated birthday pancakes, she insisted on bringing along at least half her presents. This, of course, meant that ten minutes after we left the driveway, the back seat of our car was littered with colored pencils, various articles of clothing, and half-colored pictures, but I didn't mind one bit. We had been up until 3:30 am finishing all this stuff for her, and even though we were exhuasted, I did not begrudge her even a minute of sleep. Not when I could look into the back seat and see my newly-three-year-old girl, wearing her hoodie and scribbling away in her new coloring book while softly singing "All You Need Is Love" mixed with "Happy Birthday."    

"This is special. It's mine."

 

"This is my special blanket. It's my Beatles quilt." 

As my husband predicted, she loves the thing. She curled up with it in her tiny rocking chair, murmuring about her "special blanket" and napped under it the very first day. She drags it around the house and offers to cover me with it when she can see I'm in a rotten mood (double heart-punch there). When people ask what she got for her birthday, she can, with a little leading, tell you "My mommy made me a Beatles quilt." 

There was quite a kerfluffle at bedtime a couple of days ago when it had to be washed and was not yet dry at bedtime. It had to be draped over her dresser to air-dry, so that it was in the room with her, even though it was too damp to use on the bed. No other blanket will do. 

Even though I shake my head every time I look at that rumply binding or any of the 100 other mistakes I made, I call this one a win.

The Beatles Quilt

My in-laws departed this morning, and although I am still decompressing from their visit (while trying to put my house back together and help my kid through junk-food withdrawal), I wanted to start sharing the birthday crafts. This was the biggie, in terms of money, time, planning, perseverance, and sheer determination.

Most of the front is one big piece I bought off of Ebay, after I could not find a satisfactory way to use the Beatles fabric I had on hand. I knew she would totally love, it, too, which was why I hovered in front of my computer one night a week before her birthday, anxiously awaiting the end of the auction and upping my bid to make sure I got it. In the end, with shipping, I think I paid about $27, which is three times what this stuff sold for originally, but that was two years ago and they didn't make more so what are you going to do?

It was already wide enough, but I added the black strips at the top and bottom to accommodate for the length of a three-year-old vs. the usual baby-quilt, doesn't-cover-the-whole-crib-mattress length. The back is part of a top sheet from a set of flannels that had seen better days. After conferring with my friend Amy, who hand-sews gorgeous quilts (the adorable baby one she made before Piper was born is still in rotation and gets regular use at our house), I decided not to put any batting between the layers. The flannel itself was fairly weighty and I wanted Piper to be able to use it in all seasons. Plus, it's been excruciatingly hot and humid here and the thought of trying to work on a heavier blanket, much less put it on my easily-overheated kid, made me want to scream.

The first thing I discovered when trying to trim up the top piece was that all of my scissors suck. Every last pair. I would've given both my pinky toes for a good-size mat and rotary cutter, but since I did not actually start work on the quilt until the day before her birthday and the thread, binding supplies, and a few other doodads had driven the project cost up past $50 I decided to just power through. I messed up a little, since I was hacking away, but hopefully it doesn't show.

The second thing I discovered is that my sewing machine hates me. It really, really hates me. At one point during this adventure, it completely stopped working and would only emit a loud, screech-like beep while flashing red lights. No amount of pleading, cursing, turning it off, or unplugging made it stop. I cured this by unplugging it, getting a screwdriver, and taking off the cover for the mechanical area where the needle is; the only problem was that once I'd replaced it and plugged the machine back in, it started randomly sewing by itself. It was seriously possessed, sitting immobile when I tried to use it but then whizzing away without me even touching it. I again unplugged it and unscrewed the cover, inspected everything, blew a little canned air around, and put it back on. It cooperated fine the rest of the night, much to my relief. 

The top and bottom got puckery when I sewed on the black strips, which is when my Google-Fu helped me discover that I am a dum-dum who was supposed to cut off the selvages. I could not bear to rip it all out (and by now it was 10 p.m.), so I just moved the fabric over 1/4" and sewed it again. Which is probably good, because I'm sure I'll have to wash it, not to mention my kid can be hard on her stuff, so at least I know at the top and bottom parts will stay put.

I pinned it all the way around the edges and just sewed "in the ditch" (is that the right term?), the seam between the black & blue parts, on both top & bottom. Then I went once all the way around in the purple border area. I called that good enough for now - eventually I will go back and hand-sew a few stitches here and there to keep things where they belong - and moved on to the binding.

Oh, the binding. I had never done binding before, and Googling it at 1:00 a.m. is not a path to perfection.  I had the perfect stuff for it; a jelly-roll rainbow of pre-cut 2.5" strips I bought at Wal-Mart of all places. They're the same pattern as the black top/bottom strips, actually, a subtly shaded graphic dealie that went nicely with the busy patterns of the panel. Anyway, I had to sew enough strips together to make a binding, and it took me a few tries to get the angles right. The more I did, the better I got, so by the last couple pieces I was confidently whizzing along.

Putting it on was something else altogether.  I had read what Heather Ross and Amy Karol had to say on the subject, and both advised hand-sewing it on the back, which was not an option. No time, no patience, no skill. I could've just sewed it inside-out, turned and top-stitched it thus eliminating the binding altogether, but I really wanted the look of the rainbow binding around the edge. The other directions I found, for a no-hand-sewing way, were not so great. I started out with poise and confidence, which quickly degenerated into me shoving fabric through my machine while swearing, sweating, and nearly crying at 2:30 a.m. I think I did cry, actually, because I could not figure out how to do the mitered corners without creating a big lumpy mess. My directions were totally inadequate; no amount of clipping and turning and shoving and smoothing could totally fix the problem, so I just did the best I could.

Somewhere around 3:00 in the morning, sweating in the super-humid Southern night, sitting at my possessed sewing machine, looking at my crooked stitching and lumpy corners, tears welling in my eyes, I felt like a total failure. Failure as a person (why could I not get it together and not only decide on but start this project months ago?), failure as a crafter (again: lumpy, crooked, puckery, NOT RIGHT), failure as a mother (what kind of mom would give this wreck to her kid? Who gives only handmade presents anyway?). My husband, who had also been up working on other projects, saw me sitting there dejected, and said:

"I know what you're doing. STOP IT. It's not as bad as you think, and she is going to love it. Now finish the damned thing so we can get to bed. Stop obsessing and just do it."

And he was right. No, it was not going to be picture-perfect, but it there was love in every one of those crooked stitches and lumpy corners. I realized that love had kept me going, even though I was running on 3 hours' sleep because I had also been up late the previous night working on presents. We had looked for other presents, we'd spent months poking around on line and taking torturous trips through the toy aisles of Target, Wal-Mart, Toys R' Us, and every other big-box store. We had looked in specialty toy stores and learning toy stores and every place we could think of. All that looking, and we could not find a single thing that was right for our funny, chatty, Beatle-obsessed kid. THIS was the right present, this and the other things we'd dreamed up. I loved her too much to give up and go get any old made-in-China-plastic-thing. I owed it to her to see it through, to give her these gifts I knew she would love. So I put my pedal to the metal and was done by 3:20 a.m. We set up her little pile of gifts near the fireplace, like we usually do, took a couple of pictures, and fell into bed.

The Hat That Wouldn't Die

This was supposed to be an easy project.

A simple pattern, a ball of mill ends, a way to indulge my slouchy beret obsession, something to keep the chill off my head. Start at one end of the ball, work until I ran out of yarn, two ends to weave in. It was supposed to be finished while there was still a chill in the air.

Of course, it didn't work out that way.

It went pretty quickly...the first time around. 65% of the way done, I decided I didn't like how the ball of mill ends was arranging itself into super-thick stripes. I also noticed that because I started at the end with dark brown/black, and the increase lines were pretty visible, and the whole area was surrounded by a lighter brown, the hat looked like...well, frankly, it looked like a butt. I'm not talking about a two round, peachy cheeks butt. It looked like the other part of a butt.


Congratulations, I said to myself. You have knitted a butthole hat. This is sure to be the pinnacle of your crafting career: a knitted butthole.

I can't wait to see what sort of Google hits I get off that.

Anyway, I sighed and ripped it out. All the way out. Then I started from the other end of my ball, got 70% done, decided I hated the first color in the line-up, and frogged it again. Then I got 75% done with the next incarnation and ripped it back to 40%, because I had to break up the large blocks of color that were forming.

What you see here is the fourth version; I finally gave up and hacked into the ball in several spots to get the striping/color block effect I wanted. So much for only having two ends to weave in.

I made the ribbing part extra-long because I the ball of yarn just kept going and and going and it made me think it might be both cute and structurally helpful to make the ribbing long enough to fold backwards. It works pretty well. It's a little too big, and I might have to shore up the front with some elastic cord or else use 36 hairpins to keep it from sliding off. Or I could just un-flip the ribbing part and pull it over my forehead, which makes me look like a dork but means I don't have to fiddle with it every 30 seconds. Side note: do you have any idea how hard it is to take a picture of the side/back of one's own head? These were taken with my phone camera while my daughter wrapped herself around my legs and howled because we were out of strawberries. I'm lucky I managed to get any photos of the thing at all.

Ravelry details here.

Overall, this is a nice pattern (I used to to make a little hat for one of Piper's dolls* quite successfully) but I think this project was just cursed. It was my first experience working with mill ends, and I will do it again. The lure of so much nice yarn for such a cheap price is irresistible. I really dug this marled yarn, whatever the heck it is (I think it was in with the Lorna's Laces stuff in the shop, but I can't remember for sure). There's a scarf pattern in the Winter/Spring 2010 KnitScene written for marled/ragg yarns that would look cool in this sort of many-colored mixture; it might also make a smashing Milo (I know, I have a problem). I am keen to try other brands and types, because it was such an adventure and it's an inexpensive way to test a yarn. Next time, however, I will have to actually remember what I'm buying, instead of just going "Oooh, pretty!" and stuffing it into my shopping basket.

*Hey, did you know that a hat sized to fit a medium-ish doll will also fit nicely on the head of your average-size housecat?