Baby Knitting

Andy spent much of the past week up in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, having a marvelous time. Meanwhile, I kept myself busy knitting and putz-ing around the house. Not the most productive week, work-wise, but I now have two completed pairs of baby pants to show for it!

These are "Baby Bell Bottoms" and I love them--elastic + drawstring waist + super-soft Shine Sport Yarn + fully washable = awesome baby clothes. Now, if you take a moment to check out the photos in the actual pattern, you'll notice that mine don't quite look proportional...this is because I cannot get gauge no matter how hard I try (and I generally don't try that hard). I don't know why, my stitches are just weird. So as I finished my pants--particularly the blue pair--I thought "is this possibly going to fit OVER a diaper? It looks like I need another 3 inches of waist!" and indeed, I do--but I had reached the full measurement for the pants, and didn't have the picture from the pattern nearby to compare, so I thought "oh well, must be close to right" and stopped anyway. Turns out my baby's pants will be long in the legs, and low-riders, thanks to my abnormally tall stitches that made the crotch about 2 or 3 inches higher than it should have been. ...sigh. Its a good thing I have a few years to practice before my child notices such oddities in the clothes I make for him/her.

Here we have a knitting creation I finally finished a few weeks ago, at the end of June. It's a wool diaper wrap, to go over a cloth diaper, also known as a "wool soaker". I knit it because 1) I stumbled across the pattern online, 2) had recently learned we were pregnant and wanted to make anything baby, and QUICK, and 3) I had random scraps of Wool of the Andes lying around the house. Now, this isn't the right gauge either--its supposed to be the newborn size, but I'm guessing is more the 3-6 month range. (I'm learning that anything I knit never looks quite as cute or proportional or fitted as it is supposed to...luckily, I don't really care.) It was easy to knit, but then sat around for weeks waiting for me to buy and sew-in the velcro closures. Once it was finished, I wanted to try it out to see how well it might actually approximate the size and shape of a baby's diaper-covered butt--George the Gorilla, below, is the closest I could find to a baby-sized object around the house...and he's been wearing it ever since:

I don't know how great it will actually be in real life, seeing as my messed up gauge means its not a very tight knit, which makes me think it won't actually have all of those great leak-containing benefits of wool soakers...but I have more random half-skeins of Wool of the Andes lying around, so now that I also have extra velcro, I might try again with some smaller needles and see if I can't make a true newborn-sized one.

For those of you who don't give a darn about knitting and were only checking my blog to see more pictures of the pregnant belly...I do have a belly photo we just took, and I will add it below...but I do so hesitantly, because it truly looks identical to the week 15 shot we posted two weeks ago. So those of you who are just dying to see my growing belly will have to patient, it can only grow so much at a time!

Jess & the baby belly: week 17.