One time at the beginning of July it started POURING when we got home from picking Jakob up from daycare. The only way we could convince him to come inside to eat supper was to promise he could go back out and play before bed. He spent over a half hour swirling a long stick in the rushing puddles. They were both soaked down to the skin by the time they came in, but Jakob was so happy that it was worth it.
The above is a video I made quite a while ago. Some of you will recognize the project in my hands – it’s Kate Gilbert’s Papa Bunny that I had made to send to a friend’s daughter in 2008.
This video shows what to do when a pattern asks for a common technique – but you don’t have the right equipment with you. The last row of the directions said to “thread the live sts onto the working yarn with a tapestry needle and pull tight to gather”. The only problem was that I didn’t have a tapestry needle with me. I didn’t like the idea of pulling the stitches open with my fingers so I could get the yarn through easily, as it would distort them. I came up with this idea instead. It might be familiar to some of you, or it might be new to you. Either way, it helped me and I hope it helps you too! If you’d prefer a photo tutorial (vs the video above) let me know in the comments and I’ll make it happen. 🙂
The ever-observant Robyn* pointed out to me today how it has been 2 months since my last post. I don’t think this has happened since…ever?
It has been a hectic two months. Everyone is doing great in Casa del Handmade, the kids are good, the adults are good, even the cat is good. But a lot has been going on. Kids have been sick, adults have been sick (and whiny), weights have been lifted, oldies (and newbies) have been sweated to, knits have been begun, knits have been given away, knits have been published(!) and knits are being planned. Maternity leave is coming to an end, work is resuming and school is recommencing for the first time in 9 years (for me) and 13 years-or-so (for Yannick). Lotsa stuff.
I know once I go back to work I’ll be spending some time at the computer and here’s my plan: I’m going to upload all the photos I want to share. That way all I’ll need to do is get some posting time and can publish all I want. So expect a lot of mini-posts to come. A LOT. Some might be knitting, some might be the missing Henri weekly and monthly photos, some might just be cute stuff of the kids with a little recap of what was going on at that point. I do want to share and I do miss y’all. Where else in my life can I say “y’all”??
So expect a whack of stuff coming up. It’s my holiday gift to y’all.
🙂
*link button not working, so you can find Robyn here: Knit & Purl Mama http://www.knitpurlknitpearl.blogspot.com
Good: Henri is 9 months old, 30″ tall and 22 lbs. Very healthy (except for a bad cold and ear infection)
Bad: This means he has grown out of his carseat/bucket. Now I have to buy a real car seat.
Good: Zellers has the one I like on sale, this exact week, and I managed to snag one. I also managed to get an appointment today at the police station to have it professionally installed.
Bad: This means Henri is out of the bucket, making life harder when I do…almost everything. Grocery shopping, picking Jakob up at daycare, everything now has to be done with one hand since I can’t pick up/put down the bucket any more.
Good: Since Henri is of a certain weight/height/abilities, the car seat is forward facing even though he is under 12 months.
Bad: Um…none really. It was at his doctor’s recommendation, and the police Constable agreed.
Good: Turns out Henri will sleep in his car seat, unlike his bucket in which he hasn’t slept since forever.
Bad: Unlike the bucket, a sleeping baby in a car seat is not quite as portable.
Good: I knit and usually keep spare knitting with me. Guess what I did for 5 minutes in my driveway this morning? 🙂
1. Went to the hospital this am to get my stitches taken out. Anyone been to the (newly?) renovated Lakeshore Hospital? It was cool- one very large open waiting area with different reception areas along the wall…felt like I was at an airport. I think I was the only one happy to be there- I jokingly told the nurse to take her time calling my name as being there was my only baby-free break of the day! I ended up with almost 2 hours of wait time even though I had an appointment, which translated to 2 hours of listening to knitting podcasts while knitting away. Coffee by my side, window at my back…if it didn’t require stabbing myself in the hand first, I’d almost appreciate the experience!
The hand is coming along well, although it isn’t fully closed yet. 1 more week of no weight lifting or putting my weight on it (like push ups). 😦
2. Discovered something disturbing the other day- I was reading a library book on Polymer Clay crafts (not a habit I’m getting into, I just like learning different craft techniques) and couldn’t figure out one of the projects. The directions on facing pages just didn’t seem to flow together. It took me another minute or two to realize that someone had CUT OUT THE PAGES with a particular project. How horrible is that? It costs 5-15 cents per page for photocopies, and anyone with a digital camera had a ready-made scanner. And yet someone had to go deface this book and ruin it for everyone else. Really irks me that people would have no qualms about doing that.
I was so looking forwards to last night. The kids were both in bed and asleep by 7:30, I’d made a delicious supper (pork stuffed with bruschetta and feta, steamed broccoli and carrots, and honey/balsamic cherry tomatoes with pine nuts), and we had a DVR full of awesome shows to watch. I wasn’t sure if I was going to knit or finally put some photos into the kids’ albums, but I knew I was going to park myself on the couch with Yannick and just veg.
And then I decided I wanted some fresh coconut. I took the same paring knife I’ve been using for years to separate the meat from the shell, and after Yannick smashed it open for me, I started emptying the shell. I’ve done it for years, same knife, same technique. Last night…I dunno, I must have gotten distracted. All of a sudden I realize I’d cut myself. I was standing over the sink, so I opened the water, dropped the nut and the knife and went to rinse out the cut.
That’s when I realized it was over an inch long, over a centimeter deep, pumping out blood with every beat of my heart and showing some whiteish-yellow thick stuff inside the gaping hole. And THAT’S when I yelled for Yannick to come help me.
It was the first time I’ve ever had to call 911 for a medical emergency, although my mom came over to watch the boys so we were able to cancel the ambulance and Yannick took me to the hospital instead.
You know it’s serious when you’re in and out of the hospital in 2.5 hours including ER wait time and treatment!
Tara’s husband has the FrankenFinger, I’ve got the FrankenThumbPad. Luckily it’s my left hand and I’m a righty, but it’s still bad. In the fleshy pad under my thumb, palm side. Apparently the only reason the knife didn’t come straight out the back of my hand was because it hit the bone. All this time at the gym- guess I don’t know my own strength!
I’ve got stitches in for 2 weeks then I have to go back and they’ll evaluate if I’ll need physio. In the meantime I have to change the dressing every day and keep moving it, but it hurts like hell. By using only my right thumb for the spacebar I can still type but everything else hurts. If I do anything even slightly moving my left thumb I feel like the fresh wound is being torn open. What sucks most is that I can’t do my workouts for a while. I’d already just missed a week (story coming later) and now I have to miss a few more days. Ugh.
To complicate matters further, they didn’t offer me any pain killers at the hospital, and I didn’t think of asking for any (I think I was slightly in shock). Within 20 minutes of getting home the anesthetic they’d injected to do the stitches had worn off and it was just a raw wound. I could feel every stitch, every gash, every millimeter of the cut. The Tylenol I’d taken had done nothing for the pain, and the only thing stronger in the house was some leftover Demerol from when Yannick threw out his back last time.
I’m still nursing Henri, and I didn’t want to take anything without checking with InfoSante to make sure there were no risks. So at 2 am when I couldn’t sleep because the pain was excruciating, Yannick called 811 and asked about the Demerol risks. The nurse said that I couldn’t nurse for 24 hrs after taking the pills. Yannick and I had a long talk about it, and we decided I’d take the pills.
I’d been planning on weaning Henri next week on the 8th, when he turned 9 months old. 1 week early makes no difference, and when Yannick agreed to help me out by taking the Henri duties for the next few days (since I can’t lift him easily right now anyways) I decided it would just be easier all around to wean him now. Easier for Henri because it would be someone else giving him the bottles, so he won’t smell the milk on me. Easier for me because I’ll have Yannick to help instead of doing it alone like I’d been planning. Also easier for me becuase now I can take the Demerol for the pain. It sucks that I didn’t know last night was my last nursing, so I didn’t enjoy every last second of it, enjoy him cuddled in my arms and knowing I was feeding my boy. But I think it will work out for the best this way.
So if yesterday’s lesson was “don’t knit with the wrong size needle” then today’s lesson is “don’t use a sharp paring knife to get the meat out of a coconut”. While they say bad luck happens in threes, please forgive me if I say I hope I have NO lesson to give you tomorrow!
How many mistakes can one knitter make in one project? Let’s outline below.*
Remember Kayla’s Lace Cardigan? This is the project that my friend Julie picked as a birth gift for her daughter. Who will be turning 2 later this year. Anyhoo…
I’d started the cardi last year after translating it from Norwegian. Yeah. I got about 4″ into it when I found an error in the stitch counts that I couldn’t work out. I emailed the publisher and had to put it aside to work on something else. At some point I slipped it onto smaller needles so I could work other projects, and it languished in my knitting bin.
This year, once some health issues and timing and sleep and such were worked out, I knew that I needed to regain my focus and get back to work. It’s not fair that Kayla is almost 2. (Although lucky that I was always going to knit the size 2 size).
I’ve been working on it steadily for the last 3 weeks. The pattern is written by dimensions, not rows, as in “when the work reaches 10 cm work a decrease”, or “when work reaches 25 cm BO 2 sts at markers” and so on. I’d already worked out that my gauge gave me X rows per 2cm, so I had gone through my working copy and written down the row I should be at for each of the length notations.
Tuesday night I’d knew I’d have the whole body finished by the end of the night. The body is worked in one piece up to the armpits, then the right front, left front and back are worked separately. Early on in the evening I’d finished the right front, my first of the fronts. I eagerly laid it flat on my couch to measure to ensure I’d reached the required 44 cm.
It was 38 cm long. I couldn’t believe it. I measured from the bottom up to the first button hole which should have been 20 cm – it was. I remeasured the length – still 38 cm. What? Ok, I thought, it was my fault for measuring on a couch. I went and got a foam tile and my pins, laid it out and remeasured. Even with SEVERE blocking, there was no way it would reach 44 cm. I realized maybe I’d counted my gauge on the couch last year. Stupid me for not pinning it out! That will teach me. I patiently wrote out my current (supposed) gauge, then remeasured a section down towards the cast on and wrote down the number of rows per 10 cm that I got.
They were exactly the same. WTF??? How could I have the same gauge but not have it work out? I remeasured a 3rd time – spot on. Ok, enough of this. I’d had enough trying to figure out where I’d screwed up.
I would have to rip. I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong, but I assumed I must have fudged a row count somewhere.
The easiest spot to rip back to and know what row I was on was the armpit row, since it had the easy-to-find bind offs. (Remember, it’s an allover lace pattern). I yanked out the needle, ripped back to the armpits (over 60 rows) and painstakingly reinserted the needle into 197 tiny lace sts, decs and YOs. I worked one row to reorient my stitches properly on the needle and pick up any accidentally dropped stitches, and had enough. My eyes were going squinty, my head hurt, and it was late. I went to bed.
Wednesday I kept picking it up to work on, but suddenly something new was bothering me. The bottom of the cardigan, from the cast on upwards, is worked in an allover eyelet lace pattern. Then after about 4″ of work, you insert markers where the armpits will eventually be, and a few times over another 8″ you decrease at the markers “keeping pattern going across”. Well apparently I’d interpreted that rather loosely. On rows where the pattern fit into the remaining number of sts on either side of the markers, I’d worked lace. On rows where they didn’t quite fit, I’d worked stockinette stitch. For some reason it never occurred to me to work the lace across the markers. Anyhow, looking down at my work I now had these unsightly panels under each armpit, with a mix of half-formed lace and stocking stitch. Not pretty, and not what I wanted for Kayla when she finally got her sweater.
It was staring me in the face- I had to rip back. I called Maaike and told her of my plans to rip. She convinced me to wait until I saw her later that night and not to rip in the heat of the moment. I managed to wait, but she agreed with me- it just didn’t look good.
Yesterday I brought the knitting down to my ball winder. I knew I’d be ripping back the better part of a ball and a half of sock yarn, and wanted it properly wound, not just wrapped around the ball band. I ripped, and ripped, originally intending on stopping just before the first set of bind offs. That way I could at least salvage my original 4″ of work.
In the end I just ripped the whole thing out. I figured that I must have made some mistake somewhere to wind up with such a difference in total height, so I would be better off just starting over from scratch at this point.
This afternoon I put Henri down for his nap and made a glass of tea and settled down with recordings of So You Think You Can Dance (both US and Canada) and my knitting. I cleared my mind and glanced at the pattern to see how many hundreds of stitches I needed to re-cast on.
My translated notes read: CO 197 sts w/3mm needle
I grabbed the needle I’d been working with (an Aero) and started to cast on. Then I thought “hmm…I don’t remember owning a 3 mm Aero needle”. I pulled out the needle slip bags from my larger knitting bag. There were 3 in there from way back when I’d been in the swatching stages. There was an empty 2.75mm Aero bag, an empty 3mm Addi Turbo bag, and a full 3.25mm Addi Turbo bag.
Oh crap.
Anyone want to guess what screwed up my knitting? Did you pick it up already? I mentioned it way up there…
I’d started the cardi last year after translating it from Norwegian. Yeah. I got about 4″ into it when I found an error in the stitch counts that I couldn’t work out. I emailed the publisher and had to put it aside to work on something else. At some point I slipped it onto smaller needles so I could work other projects, and it languished in my knitting bin.I can’t believe it. I never put it back on the proper needles. My gauge, that I’d remeasured in the bottom 5″, was from my original knitting. So it was spot-on. Everything after that, everything I’d knit in the last 3 weeks had all been done on the 2.75mm Aero that I’d used as a stitch holder so I could use my 3mm for other projects. Had I left myself a note, had I even looked at my needle properly, I would have switched and by now had been done the entire body and be at least halfway through the sleeves. Had I even looked before ripping I could have ripped back to that 4″ point to at least save that much reknitting.
Sigh. I didn’t look. I didn’t notice. And now I’ve got an entire project to start over. At least I can restart my “start date” in Ravelry.
….grumble grumble….
*Yes, I’m ignoring the loooong delay in posts, and all the missing posts on the boys and knitting in the last 2? months. They’ll come when they come- if I didn’t get this post up I would just not bother. To make up for it, here’s a mosiac of my boys, both at 8 months. Can you tell who is who?
I’m taking the night off from life. I was going to post about how I’ll try to post more, maybe start uploading photos for the missing weekly Henri shots or the 7 month (!) chair photos. But I’m not.
I just did my first-ever yoga class, and am feeling seriously mellow and looooose. Before the buzz wears off I’m going to eat a light supper then crawl under the covers. I don’t even care that it’s only 9pm. I’m going to bring my Palm with some fun puzzle games, my iPod with old knitting podcasts (still back in 2006, boy I’m behind on EVERYTHING), turn on the kids’ monitors, and just do my own thing.
Ohhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Ever since he’s been in his big bed, Jakob has been asking for pillows. I won’t let him use our regular pillows because I find them too thick or fluffy for him, and my searches at local stores for “safe” pillows found only one- a pillow marketed for infants, of all things, that is just as fluffy as our pillows, and has a tag, inside the packaging only, stating that it is for decorative purposes only. Sheesh!
I decided to make my own pillows for him. I had some white fabric already, and bought a bag of quilt batting for flat stuffing. I wanted to make pillowcases and looked for fabric with fish on it, ‘cus that is his favorite thing.
I found a cute panel that had some fish, and planned to cut it up. I went back and found a nice rainbow print for the back of the pillows. I prewashed all the fabrics in case they would bias or shrink, and I was good to go.
Before Henri was born I had brought my old sewing machine (like, 40-50 years old) to be repaired and cleaned, and this past weekend I had the woman who had done the embroidery on Jakob’s blanket (remember?) come over and do a mini lesson with me, teaching me the basics of making a pillow case.
These are the pillows I made. They are completely sealed and while the finishing isn’t my best, it was a learning experience and they will get the job done.
My only regret is that they are slightly smaller than I’d wanted, as I’d forgotten to include a seam allowance in the measurements. I’d only realized this after cutting the pillowcase fabric, so they are a little too small for the pillowcases. Not a big deal, and they still fit Jakob’s head perfectly.
This is the first pillowcase, using the section of the panel with the duck in the boat.
…and the back with the rainbow lining.
This is the second, using the area with the worm, fish, clam and shrimp.
…and the back of the second pillow. Did you notice I made them each open on opposite sides?
When I was done I had quite a bit of fabric left over. There were 2 cute areas of the original panel left (the sun and the fish with glasses), as well as all the cute checkerboard trim (that I had wanted to use for backing but they don’t make that as an all-over print). I decided to take advantage of being in a sewing mood, dust off my memories of vague quilt-making from high school, and make 2 little quilted panels as mini throw pillows. I used some scrap black for the corner squares.
These are the throws before quilting.
These are the throws after. I had planned on hand-quilting them to get the stitching perfectly outlining the graphics. Then I remembered I still want to knit sometime, ever, and not carry around a little quilt square to hand quilt when I could find spare time. So I zipped through it on the machine instead. My lines don’t line up, but I like the free-form look.
I quilted the sun block by going around the spokes and center of the sun, and then for the border I quilted the black squares only.
For this one I quilted (very haphazardly!) around the fish, and for the border I did the checkered areas instead of the black squares like before.
Ok, so they look more like hot-pads then throw pillows. Whatever- he can use them for whatever he wants. I just didn’t want to waste the cute images.
At least the pillows were successful- he’s been sleeping with them for the last few nights, and in the morning his head is still on them. Yay! I like seeing my handmade stuff actually being used!
jeloca.com 