Day 2: The Zoo

Not gonna lie, I love the fact that the title rhymes (did not plan it which makes it even better!). Yesterday I took Em to the zoo for the first time. Unfortunately we didn't get any pictures near the animals, but I still have the proof in front of the gift shop. She did pretty well (including sleeping through half of the time we were there), which is always something to be grateful for.

365 Days of Gratitude

Day 1: Mobile blogging from my phone. Hopefully this will allow me to blog regularly. It won't be about knitting everyday, but I'm keeping and continuing with the same blog.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

As Expected

From previous posts, I'm sure it is assumed that I haven't been posting due to having a baby. The assumption would be correct. I have been too busy to knit, blog, or do just about any other regular activity. It's all totally worth it!

One day old in the blanket I knit:



One day old, first family photo:



Ready for her first walk (do you think her mom's a knitter...ha ha!)



One month old:



Time is really flying and I love her more and more each day!

Trellis Lives Again

When my cousin had her first baby, I knit Trellis. It was the first baby sweater I knit, for the first baby in that generation of cousins. Sadly, the sweater was stolen. I wrote about it here.

Now that I am having my first baby, I decided to reknit this sweater. I may have mentioned before that I don't always love knitting cables, but I love the way they look. All I can say is thank goodness this is a baby a sweater. It might be her only handknit cabled sweater, but never say never.

When knitting for baby, I have been trying to stay away from pink, assuming that we would get tons of pink clothes (which we have). I had pink buttons for this sweater already that I bought about three years ago when a knitting shop closed. I thought about doing a white sweater about a minute before reminding myself that this would be for a little person that will probably spit up a lot. So, pink it is!







Also, this year for New Year's Eve, we didn't really do anything. My sister-in-law came over and played video games with my husband while I finished a book I was reading. We kept it low key and just stayed home and I was actually able to stay up late enough to watch the ball drop.

Here's me & baby on NYE, 36 weeks :)

Catching Up

I can't believe it is already December! Yikes! I haven't even started thinking about Christmas knitting. All I can think about are baby knits!! Fortunately, I have stock piled some finished knitted items throughout the year. Just have to figure out what goes where.

So, finished knits. I did end up finishing the rainbow striped socks; and in less than a week. Definitely worth frogging!! They are plain, simple, and I love them.



I have a bunch of leftover rainbow yarn, so I made this baby hat:



Then I seemed to get on a kick of baby knitting. During a recent knit night, one of the knitters brought some of her leftover sock yarn and let everyone have at it. Now, I have a ton of these leftover sock yarn balls, but somehow when it comes from someone else and there are different colorways, it is just so much better. With the one ball I took, I made this hat:



I thought I had enough leftover still to make a pair of infant socks. I got this far on the second sock and ran out of yarn:



So clever knitter that I am, I ripped out the top part of the hat and knit off from the hat onto the unfinished sock and then finished the hat up again. Hopefully the hat will still be long enough. Here are the finished socks:



Next I decided to knit another pair of infant socks that would match the first baby sweater I made for our first baby. You would think that I would have learned my lesson. Here is the first sock:



And the second sock:



As you can see, I managed to do it again. Unfortunately, this time I did not have a rolled brim hat that I could steal some yarn from. Doesn't quite work the same with a finished baby sweater.

Recently, when listening to the Knitmore Girls Podcast, they advised that "it never hurts to ask." I am usually one that doesn't like to ask for help or especially for freebies. Don't get me wrong, I love freebies; I just don't like ASKING for them. But then I remembered the knitter from knit night who gave away all those leftover balls of sock yarn and thought I would turn to Ravelry.

I just have to say, knitter's are the nicest, coolest people ever!! Within a couple hours of posting my desperate request, a fellow knitter on Ravelry (who I did not know previously) offered to send me the required yarn to finish off my sock. Amazing!! And, to boot, she let me know that she wouldn't be able to mail it to me until Monday because she was in the process of moving. Are you kidding me!?! Awesome!!! There should definitely be some good knitter's karma coming her way.

So basically in the last month, I have been doing more knitting than blogging, which I sometimes feel bad about, but not really. Let's face it, it takes much longer to knit things to blog about than it does to actually type up the blog post. Besides how can you resist knitting when it's cold outside and this is your view from the couch:



(That boy LOVES the fire!).

Also a baby "bump" (more like bulge) update:



Thanksgiving, 31 weeks

Crazy or Brilliant?

Now I am sure we all have those projects that need to spend some time alone and think about what they have done to us. They get put away in a bag, a drawer, or shoved into the back of a closet. I recently pulled out one of these such projects. This guy had been on "time out" for about a year (not really sure, because for some reason I never entered it on ravelry...so not like me). Here is the project that had to think long and hard about what he did:



They are sideways socks. The pattern wasn't particularly hard, just a different way of constructing socks, which I thought would be fun when I started them. I also thought it would be cool to have sock with vertical stripes instead of horizontal ones. Turns out I was wrong. These socks were not fun at all for me. If I was dreading working on the first sock, what made me think I would ever do the second sock? It might have been my first case for Second Sock Syndrome (SSS).

So the sock was shoved in a bag and then smashed into the bottom of my knitting basket. I pulled it out the other day and didn't want it sitting there unfinished any longer (maybe pregnancy is causing finishitis). I hated to rip it out because I spent so much time on it already, but after realizing that I would have to keep knitting this sock plus the second one in order to finish the pair, I finally decide to frog it (something that is sometimes very painful for me as I watch hours and hours of work be undone in minutes).

In these situations, all you can do is slip the needle out and RIP IT!



It actually ended up looking like really colorful top ramen, which is kind of fun. Plus once it was all ripped out I immediately cast on a pair of basic toe up socks. I finished one sock in about two days and have already cast on number 2.

I felt a little crazy at first when I frogged all my hard work, but felt brilliant once I had finished that first sock.