Yes, I do still knit...

Well, what do you know? It's a non-Simon-centered post! (Don't worry, he does appear in a photo, so you grandparents can just skip to the bottom of the post for your Simon-photo-fix!) I just thought I should update my knitting friends, since I hardly see them in person anymore, on what I've been up to.

The build-up to Christmas consisted of making a pinwheel sweater for my sister. It was mostly finished by Christmas, completely done by the time Simon was born. I knit it with KnitPick's Swish Superwash, which is really soft and I pretty much want to make everything with now that my life involves spit up and occasionally being peed upon, and hand washing anything is just laughable (not that I was really into handwashing things before...but then I would have at least considered it, for a hand-knit garment). Doesn't she look great in it?

Liz in her pinwheel sweater

I decided to add a couple toggles so it could either close or hang open in the front--the loopy edge (which I love, though it was rather tedious) worked well as ready-made button holes.

Here's how the whole thing looks spread out--its kind of a funky sweater...which is probably why I thought of my funky sister when I saw the pattern :)

Once I finished that, I had a much smaller sweater to make, for my friend Jen's baby who is due in March. This was blissfully quick after making a grown-up sweater (and even that one went pretty quick!). It's called "Baby Cable Cardigan" and I knit it in KnitPick's Shine Worsted, so its washable and all that jazz. When I picked out the yarn I didn't know that they knew they were having a girl, so I thought a bright blue/turquoise would be a nice spring-sweater color for either a boy or girl...and now, having seen just a smattering of the pink she received at a recent baby shower, I'm glad I didn't know it was a girl, so I wasn't even tempted to go down the its-a-girl-she-must-wear-pink road!

I finished this in a rush to finish in time for Jen's baby shower, so I forgot to take a picture of the sweater itself...but I did try it on Simon to check out the sizing--so here he is modeling what claims to be a 0-6 month sweater, filling it out at 6 weeks old!

Full Term

Well, here we are: full term. I would say that now we start waiting...except that we've already been waiting for nine months! So maybe now we start the anxious, "it could happen any day" waiting. I think we're pretty ready. Sure there are more work things to get done, so every extra day/week will get us closer to fulfilling all the teaching/research/preaching obligations we have made for the month of December...but the bulk of everything is done, or at least "done enough," should Pickle decide to arrive ahead of schedule.

The belly this morning: day 1 of week 38. Just think, this could be the last belly photo!

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that a Pickle soon would be there...
Here we have our stockings, two of which I knit last year, and Pickle's which I just finished a couple weeks ago. No name yet--we have to wait and see if Pickle is a he or a she!

Pickle & Knitting Update

Here it is, the baby sleeping bag/blanket! I never did find quite the buttons I had imagined, but these wooden ones worked out just fine. I tried to find our dear friend Furious George to model using the blanket for us, since he did such a fine job with the diaper wrap, but it appears he has not been unpacked and I really have no idea where he is. Anyhow, the blanket is knit with two strands of KnitPicks Crayon--it is the softest yarn I have ever worked with, and machine washable--perfect for a baby blanket. [If you are having trouble envisioning how it works, I'll clue you in by mentioning that the top (right, in this photo) is actually sewn together like a hood, and then the rest is just a long blanket folded in half and buttoned up the sides so that the baby can't kick it off.]


Meanwhile, Andy's formerly hulk-like sweater-ish thing has now graduated to "hey look--its a sweater!" recognizability. This will, in fact, be a cardigan, but is currently sans zipper (hence Andy is holding it together in the front). And when will it be a cardigan? Well, sometime after I buy a zipper :).


I am now in week 26, i.e. trimester #3--where did the time go? I am also, as you can see, getting HUGE. At least I feel huge. I do occasionally see women who are 8 and 9 months pregnant, and am reminded that this is not, in fact, HUGE, this is just BIG...I still have a ways to go. I have already (several times) had the unfortunate experience of trying to fit through a doorway when I had not opened the door widely enough to let my new-size self fit through...oops. My apologies to Pickle for the random bumps into doors and doorways!

Pickle seems to be doing just fine--kicking more than ever. S/he particularly seems to enjoy mid-morning and late afternoon, then late evening as times to try poking all of my internal organs. This means that our child will already not sit still through church, even when daddy is preaching (as he was last Sunday)!

Week one: Done.

I am happy to say that I survived my first week of full-time teaching. It was kind of a doozy--three classes is a lot of work, even if I am co-teaching one and the other two are two sections of the same course. All said, there were no disastrous results--in fact, students seemed generally receptive, cooperative, and patient, if not overly excited to be back in school sitting through lectures again.


My sweetie surprised me by leaving these in my classroom just before my first lecture on Thursday--aren't they lovely? I half expected students to be asking where the flowers came from and whose they were, but they didn't. I think they were too full of pregnancy-related questions for me (is it your first one? do you know if its a boy or a girl? when are you due?).


Knitting Notes:

I currently have two works-in-progress: Pickle's blanket/sleeping bag and Andy's sweater. The blanket is done except for buttons--I have no buttons. Luckily, I took advantage of stopping by the St. Olaf Knitter's booth at the student activity fair this past week to ask about a local yarn store, and there is one! We went today--its a lovely gift shop with all kinds of fun things, and yarn and fabric in the basement.

(Here I am outside my new LYS)

So the good news I have a LYS! They even had an assortment of buttons, but not the kind I need. So the baby blanket/sleeping bag is still on hold. Andy's sweater, however, has been getting all kinds of attention as we continue to feed our Netflix addiction voraciously, giving me lots of knitting time. Its my first raglan sweater, and so far I like it--we'll have to see how looks on him of course...

Here Andy is, trying on the sweater just after I attached sleeves to the main body--due to its still being on the needles we couldn't stretch it up and around him to get both arms in sleeves, so instead we have this lovely shot in which I think he kind of looks like a very friendly Incredible Hulk, who just accidentally burst out of his sweater!

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.

Easter Eggs & Knitted Mice

Well dear friends, with all that has happened in the past few weeks--semester ending, job interview, Jess' birthday...we never really got around to posting our pictures from Easter. Here are a few of my personal favorites.

Mom rescued this deformed egg from the trash and gave him a personality--you'd think he would be less grumpy and more grateful, wouldn't you?


My favorite egg of the year.


Alex to Andy: "No really, these teethers taste pretty good--try it!"


You mean they wouldn't all sit still, facing forward, smiling politely, while we photographed them in their lovely Easter outfits?

And, unrelated to Easter aside from the timing--my latest finished knitting creation. Ellie & Ben have had a supply of slippers coming from Aunt Jessica, and hadn't received replacements in a while--these have several exciting new features over past pairs: 1) soft and thinner yarn, so they won't bake in the Cambodian heat (hopefully won't need to wear socks under them due to scratchiness, either), 2) they match (for Ellie's benefit), 3) they're mice. And really, who doesn't want to wear little creatures on their feet? (Okay, I don't want to wear little creatures on my feet...but I did back when I was five, when I bought bear slippers and thought they were the coolest things EVER.)

Knitting Update

In the past month, I've finished two knitting projects--one that I've been working on since about August (my first post-prelims project):




...and the other that was actually created to fill an immediate need--it was no longer cold enough for my heavy-duty mittens, but also not warm enough for my thin stretchy gloves, so I needed something in between:

(not the best picture lighting-wise)

Brrrr...

You know its cold when you hear the weatherman warn that any skin exposed for 10 minutes outside will be at risk for frostbite. I think I'll be staying in this weekend.

In keeping with the "keep warm" theme, I've been meaning to post a photo of the mittens I knit to match my purple hat:



Many thanks, by the way, to P who sewed the felt lining into my hat for me one knit-night when she was sans knitting project. It's great! I'm convinced she did a much better job than me, and my head has been toasty-warm thanks to her.

Also, because she's adorable, here are a few photos of our dear friend Abbie, who visited us last week with her Mom. She's learning how to survive in a Minnesota winter, too.