We do a lot of laying around these days. Mostly out of sheer exhaustion, and the fact that watching a newborn sleep never gets old. In the rare moments when Stella is awake and not fussing, she's becoming more and more aware of her surroundings each day. Luckily, we've been given lots of great stuff for her to fix her eyes on, such as this mobile thingee from my most favorite toy company, ever. I predict a few bonks on the head for Stella as almost all of her toys are wooden (and little works of art, if you ask me).

But wait, did you notice what Stella is resting on? Didn't I say we've been given all sorts of wonderful gifts? As if Stella wasn't enough of a prize, we are now the proud parents of a Nancy Quilt in the most beautiful shades of green and purple.

Look at the sweet quilting......it's a good thing baby quilts are small so when they are outgrown they can end up on a wall. Although we kept the sex of our baby a surprise and managed to keep the gender colors at bay, now that the secret's out our house is rapidly being inundated with pink. I tried to fight the battle, but I'm clearly losing. In any event, purple and green is making me especially happy these days, so thank you Nancy!!

What I've Been Up To Lately...

The poor blog has taken a back seat to all of the goings-on around our house lately. I'd love to be able to post scads of crafty projects that I've been working on during this time, but the truth is there has been no glitter, no yarn, no glue, paper, or fabric doing much of anything lately...besides gathering dust in the craft room. But I DO have the most perfect thing that I've ever made to show for all of this time:Our baby Stella was born a little over two weeks ago! She is a whole baby, but this little foot gets me every time. Although, at the end, 9 months seemed like an eternity, the fact that a little person came out with all of her fingers and toes and fingernails and hair and ears and nose just amazes me. I'm a crafter who is never truly satisfied with what I've made because there are always flaws and foibles that occur along the way. However, looking at Stella, it is impossible to see anything other than perfection. Her one little nostril comes to a point in a way that the other one doesn't...and that's perfect. She has a little notch at the top of her right ear that she doesn't have on the left...and that's perfect. OK, she's not perfect about sleeping through the night, but I have it on good authority that that skill will come.

I have a whole bunch of things that I want to make for her but I'm not so good with the get-things-done-between-feedings schedule that she has us on. Suffice it to say, there's been a lot of napping going on around here. As the weeks go by, hopefully I'll be able to find the time to take photos and post more often, though finished projects might not be the main topic over the summer. The new adventure that is unfolding before us will surely keep me plenty busy, though, so we'll see what comes of it all:)

Shoes To Fill

Right-0, so the knitting project is going terribly. Despite having knitted a gauge swatch (I am so virtuous), I felt like the fabric was a bit too loose as I was knitting, The measurement for the cuff was over an inch under what the pattern called for, which seemed about right to me since the hem and cuffs needed to be blocked anyway. But then, as I finished the decreases and measured the bicep circumference, it came out an inch too big. Huh? Then I checked the gauge of the piece and found that I was knitting 5 more sts to the inch than it called for. So much for my swatch-making abilities. Still, I'm perplexed by the cuff too small/bicep too big dichotomy. I frogged it and will leave it alone for a little while because I have baby shower craftiness to get to. Oh, and as a mental note to myself: buy a ball winder. I never understood why people couldn't just wind a ball of yarn themselves (this is relaxing to me, and sometimes involves Andrew holding the skein - bonus bonding time), until I tried to wind 1200 yards of lace-weight yarn. Oh, now I get it.

Since I don't have anything to show for the last few days of knitting, here are the house slippers I made a little while back. My shoes came out a little small, which might be that I just wasn't being super-duper particular about maintaining perfect seam allowances, or because I put a few extra layers of felt batting in between the sole pieces to give a little cushioning. I am going to make a bunch more of these in different sizes, so my friends can wander around my house without the embarrassment of showing their holey socks (which is nothing to be ashamed about, I have my fair share of holey socks too).
And this is my first pair of baby booties. I have to admit the whole idea of there being a baby in the house in a few months still seems quite abstract. True, I go to the birth center every week for appointments and they hook me up to a machine that confirms that the being inside me that visibly makes my belly move around does indeed have a heartbeat, and true, my naval is almost gone and I can't reach the plates in the the cupboards because my belly can't clear the counter...but still, a real, live BABY? It's all a bit weird.

I ordered a bunch of really cute baby bootie patterns over here and then bought craploads of fusible felt interfacing that will last me for approximately eighty thousand more baby booties. Needless to say, this will probably be the baby shower handmade gift of choice for me for a while. Anyway, they were pretty easy to make, except for some tight turns which required a little finesse. I've already cut out some fabric for a few more pairs, and this time I've cut the fabric for the inserts a little smaller. The inserts I made for this first pair fit in, but they are a teeny bit bulky so I'll see if scaling them down a bit makes them fit better. Andrew picked out the fabric for these, which was a nice way to involve him in the process. I think I'll have him pick out fabrics for my projects more often, it adds a level of surprise and it's one less thing for me to obsess about...

It wasn't until I flipped these shoes right-side out and saw them as little booties that the reality of tiny little feet coming into the house seemed more grasp-able. What is about shoes that gives us such a strong image of a human being occupying them. If the news shoes the wreck of some disaster and I see a glove or a jacket strewn about I can generally handle it...if they show an empty shoe, I can't deal...what's that about?

Yarn, finally!

I ordered some yarn for this project from IK knits a while back. I found the substitute and colorway that I wanted, but had some trouble finding a source that still had it in stock. In the end, I ordered it and it got backordered and I sat around moping for a while. I didn't start any other knitting project, just moped. My recent adventures in frogging every single UFO I had laying around (the rewound yarn filled an entire large-ish tote bag) have made me wary (for now) of starting a project that I don't really love. Of course, I already have a great pair of socks that I was working on that I don't have enough yarn for and I don't yet have the heart to rip out (UFO #1), a brown cardi that I was working on a while back which I didn't frog because it felt too soon, but it's already too far in the past that I don't really remember where I left off (UFO #2), and something in a green linen tape yarn that I found the other day that escaped my frogging whirlwind (UFO #3), but who's counting?

Anyhoo, tired of moping about my lack of a pretty laceweight yarn, I went searching on etsy and found this lovely lavender skein from PennyRose Yarns. It was in stock, came quickly, and is a whopping 1200 yards, so I'm good to go. I'm not usually a lavender-wearing person, but being on bedrest has made me long for some pretty colors around me - - which explains why poor Andrew is perpetually asked to bring me a new bunch of tulips when the old ones peter out, even though there are 50 million other more important things he could be doing with his time. Anyway, I'm going back to bed, this time with yarn and needles, and I'm casting on. Look out!

How Much Bed is Too Much Bed?

Well, with two months of baby-growing to go, I've been grounded. As of two weeks ago, that is. Yuppers, bedrest. It's taken me some time to wrap my head around this crazy turn of events. I had imagined that I'd be working right up until the first contractions, a sort of living laboratory for my students (and as a bonus, a really good reminder of why it's OK to wait on the whole sex thing, kids). But alas, I won't be getting much more mileage out of my cute maternity shirts (or the blank ones that I'd ordered with plans to freezer paper stencil them). Instead, I've finally caved on the years-long debate we've had running in our home over whether or not to get cable, and I've discovered that there IS such a thing as Too Much Bed.

So, while I can't go to work and my social interactions have been limited to Andrew, my cat (the master of how to do bedrest), the occasional visitor who doesn't mind hanging out in my bedroom, and the entire cast of designers of HGTV, I've been trying to keep moderately crafty. The problem is that I have almost no patience for putting together nice photographs. This has made blogging seem like no fun. What a dilemma - - much in the way of crafty goodness to show, yet no drive to actually get the camera out and show it. I'll try to find a way to take good looking photos from bed, and then maybe I'll post some of the handmade goodness.

For now, here's a fantastic shot of the silver polish, doing her punk rock thing. We are acclimating Kateski to the new girls, and things are going smoothly. Kateski isn't pecking much, instead, she shows her authority by insisting on pushing the chicks out of the way and pecking the ground that they were working on...even when we've thrown food all around the coop. It's sort of like siblings fighting over toy turf or something like that (never having had a sibling, I can only imagine that there is some parallel between humans and chickens in this respect).

And with that, back to bed and the land of 30 minute room renovations (man, do I have big plans for our kitchen now...)

Busy Busy

There has been lots going on in our house lately! I've been growing a baby, we've been raising new baby chicks (in what will be the nursery...yes, I currently have livestock in our future nursery...), there has been crafting and baby shower planning and a new gym membership so that I can get my bloated self into a swimming pool. Yuppers, lots going on. With all of the activity, I haven't found the energy to photograph much. However, today is the first real beautiful Spring day on a weekend and we took the new chicks out to get their first taste of outdoor life.

You may remember that our white crested black polish, Kateski, had a severe injury a while back that required local anesthesia and stitches (which, like idiots, we agreed to go ahead and pay for on a chicken). Kateski's absence from the coop caused the other two non-crested chickens to forget about her and then peck her relentlessly upon her return. So those two were relocated to my mom and dad's coop where they are happily integrated. Poor Kateski has been by herself and being the wee chicken that she is, we've had to bring her inside each and every night during the cold, cold winter we've had (I already mentioned that we're idiots, right?) We needed more chickens and they needed to be of the crested variety so here we have the newbies:

Anastasia on the right, the silkie on the left (it's impossible to get a single shot of the silkie because she's constantly glued to the hip of one of the other chicks...that sounds like hen behavior, right?!)
Amelia (foreground) and K2. Little punks.
The mohawk money shot.

Anastasia is the only one who is currently named and she's the black and white one with the fantastic black mohawk. She's a silver polish. There is another white crested black polish (we've been calling her K2 for Kateski the second, so maybe that'll stick), and a black silkie. The silkie isn't crested, but we got her and K2 because three of the four crested chicks we ordered died right after delivery (and we couldn't get to them fast enough to get them hundreds of dollars worth of general anesthesia and stitches). So, technically two of the three chicks we have right now aren't sexed and could be roosters. Oh my. We are sending some serious XX chromosome vibes to these chicks every day, so hopefully it'll all work out...we spend a lot of time trying to analyze chicken behavior ("hey, K2 is wandering off on her own, do you think that's because she's a rooster?" or "that chirp didn't sound very dainty...do you think it's a rooster chirp?").

So those are the new girls. That's right, I said girls.

In baby craft news, I've finished the quilt top for the baby quilt (no photo yet, coming soon) so I'm deciding whether I want to try to do the quilting myself or send it out. In either case, I'm trying an eco-friendly bamboo batting which I'm excited about. I've also got some blank maternity shirts ordered and I plan to try out freezer paper stencils on them.

Stay tuned (or not, I know I can be slow about this blog thing...)!

Knitting Fever

Perhaps it's because I have a quilt day coming up this weekend, perhaps it's because I joined this knitting race (for some insanely odd reason, considering I didn't even have the time to check the site and realized today that the pattern had actually been posted yesterday), perhaps it's because it's still snowing here despite the fact that I am ready for spring, or perhaps it's because I'm still working my way through the fourth season of Lost (yes, I am always a season behind), but for whatever reason, I've been into knitting lately. A lot.

I like many of the patterns in the book Knitted Toys, but needed a small project when a little family emergency had us sitting in a hospital waiting room for a while a few weekends ago, so these mice fit the bill. They are cute, though I didn't pay attention to gauge at all and so they are more rat-sized and I didn't take the time to go to the store to get the perfect color of floss to match the ears. However, if baby spaghetti squash notices anything, I'll be surprised.

And of course, I'll be doing nothing but knitting the project for the contest, the Hemlock Ring Doily Throw, which I've been oohing and aahing over on Brooklyn Tweed for a while. Technically, I should be racing to the yarn and needles right now so that I can cast on, but I'm just going to take it slow and be happy about the fact that I'm really psyched about this pattern. This is why I was never good at competitive sports. I'm not much of a must-win person. That, and I'd rather be sitting on the sidelines knitting rather than chasing a ball around. Oh, who am I kidding, I'd rather be sitting on the sidelines poking knitting needles into my eyes than chasing a ball around. Yeah. I don't really like competitive sports.

I do have a third knitted project on the line, but I'm not going to share much about since it's currently driving me insane and it's technically a gift, but I just wanted you to know that I really mean it when I say there's a lot of knitting going on around here!

As I reread this post, I can't help but notice that it's pretty bland. I'm going to chalk it up to these flippin' pregnancy hormones which have me completely nutso today. I haven't been able to do anything right since breakfast where I burned the bacon, tried to butter the toast IN the toaster oven to keep it warm since I had to make more bacon and dropped butter into the toaster oven which I could then not get out, then burned the bacon again, THEN burst into tears and needed to be rescued by the only sane person living in this household right now (hint: he isn't the pregnant one). It's been a banner day.