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homework

I’d hoped to have more photos to show off from yesterday, but sometimes knitting takes longer then you think.

Since I have no time to play catch-up right now, I’ll leave you with a photo of some swatches for a workshop I’m taking on Sunday with Lucy Neatby. Yes, Lucy Neatby. She’ll be in Montreal, and I’ll be one of 25 people in the workshop, held by the Montreal Knitting Guild. I’m rediculously excited.

(Note- the one with the blue squiggles is going to be folded on the center line and I imagine the blue parts will be removed and it will be a kind of buttonhole. I have no idea what the others will be- I was just told knit “this” for pre-homework, so that’s what I did. The pink/blue one is Patons Decor, the other 4 are 3 shades of Sirdar Snuggly DK.)


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FO: Alphabet Blankie

Stats:
Pattern: Alphabet Blanket
Source: Baby Knits by Debbie Bliss
Yarn: Bernat Softee Baby, just under 3 full balls
Needles: 4mm for blanket, 3.5mm for triangles. The pattern called for thinner yarn and smaller needles, so I adapted for the weight yarn I used.
Cast-on to Bind-off: about 2 months, although I spent 2 weeks working on the JCA project and only worked on this when I was home because of the whole chart-following thing. If I add up actual knitting time I’m sure it’s well under a month.
Summary: A surprisingly fast and easy knit! The 4 page chart is daunting at first but you quickly fall into a rhythm. There are sections or rows that repeat throughout so you can get through those rows quickly, and it is easy to keep track of where you are. I never even needed a stitch marker. Most (but not all) wrong-side rows are straight purl rows which gives you a break if you get frustrated reading charts.


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i’m getting kicked!

Edited to add: Whoops- it would probably help if I mention this is MY belly eh? Baby was jumping like crazy while I was knitting but each time I took out the camera the kicking would stop. There are two kicks during the video, even I miss the first one but the second one is pretty visible. There have been a LOT more acrobatics at night so I’m going to try to get a better video one of these days.


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i’m getting kicked!

Edited to add: Whoops- it would probably help if I mention this is MY belly eh? Baby was jumping like crazy while I was knitting but each time I took out the camera the kicking would stop. There are two kicks during the video, even I miss the first one but the second one is pretty visible. There have been a LOT more acrobatics at night so I’m going to try to get a better video one of these days.


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ask and ye shall receive

Karine wanted to see what Yannick’s knitting has been up to. Well, he has only worked on it sporadically over the last few months, maybe a total of 3 or 4 times. But he’s almost finished the first ball and since it is of a decent size for a little blankie I might just give him the option of working the border now to close it off, or repeating what he has with a second ball. We’ll let him decide. 🙂

Dianne wanted to see a belly shot- so here it is. My 29 wk bowling-ball-looking belly. Holy crap only 11 weeks left? Please ignore my greasy, pulled-back hair. I was running late for work and didn’t have time to do much but throw it back in the tightest ponytail I could manage. Trust me that it looks much nicer in real life.


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on comments

Don’t have time for a long post right now as a) have no pics to show off and b) just got home from prenatal classes and am feeling a little squeamish and hungry since I didn’t have time for supper before hand. I’m off to go eat but just wanted to thank Robyn, Dianne and JayJay for the nice words on the latest batch of knits (and food).

Dianne, I can’t reply to your email directly, but if you check back here the Alphabet Blankie is from Baby Knits by Debbie Bliss. It’s available from both Amazon and Chapters.


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sugar high

Early this afternoon my sister Laura called me up and asked what I was doing. When I told her I was staying home she asked if she could come over to decorate cupcakes.

Ok.

It seems she’d seen some decorated cupcakes in a magazine and wanted to try it out. First she had to go to the store and buy the ingredients (and mix up the “baked goods” and “baking goods” aisles). Then she came over with her loot. She was very proud.
Yes, this is how she brought everything over. The ingredients she’d bought were in the grocery bags. The 3 eggs she’d stolen from her boyfriend’s house were…
…in a bag. She actually asked me at one point if they still looked ok because the bag had fallen on the floor in her car. Luckily no eggs were broken in transport, and we quickly mixed up the cake batter.

Her friend Arianne joined us and we played Clue: The Simpsons version while waiting for the cupcakes to bake and then cool. Once cooled we opened up all the bags of candy, mixed up some icing colors and got to work:

This was my kitchen during the process. Even though you can’t see her, Arianne was there. Even though you can’t see me, I was there too.
And here are our spectacular results. 23 hand-decorated cupcakes (we shared one to make sure they came out well). Aren’t they cute? I made (from the top) the white face with the macaroni-looking hair, the purple bunny with buck teeth, the green cupcake with berry flower, the twins, the M&M mushroom, the landscape with sun and rose, the green one with colored sprinkles, the multicolored one with brown sprinkles, and the one near the bottom with M&Ms covered with icing. Whew, I decorated 10 out of 23. (Can you tell I ran out of ideas by the end?) They were all decorated with some combination of icing, sprinkles, Twizzlers, Swedish Berries, Jelly Bellys, Sour Watermelons and M&Ms.

Now I’m going to wait out my sugar high by knitting for a bit before I decide what, if anything, I feel like doing about supper. Yannick is spending the evening at my parents’ house as my dad is holding a poker game while my mom is in Florida. I don’t want to play and don’t feel like sitting there so I’m going to relax and veg at home.


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close knits

I’m so excited to be nearly finished the chart for the Debbie Bliss Alphabet Blankie (although why I can’t just call it the Alphabet Blankie is beyond me). The light wasn’t great today, but what you can barely see in this photo is me about to start the last block of letters, and the DEFGH, IJKLM, NOPQR, STUVW and XYZ rows already completed. All that comes next is the (probably really long) border and then I’ll be finished!

The next close knit is so close its embarassing. It is a cabled hoodie from this book:

and in the book it looks like this (sorry I couldn’t get it to turn in the image editor I was using):

For my version I decided to use some Patons Decor I had lying around as leftovers from other projects. I didn’t have quite enough of the cream color to do the whole sweater so I used a dark brown with it. All that is left is to seam the sides, sleeves and the hood, weave in all ends and sew in the zipper. I had put it aside when it was blocking and regretfully never picked it up again. It bugs me because it was a fast knit but I don’t record the item completion date for my projects until it is really COMPLETE so what should show a 2 week or so start-to-finish time lags for months and months just waiting for little stuff like seaming. ARG.

Last I have a horrible photo of the Mitered Square Blankie. It is close only in the sense that I finished its width and will now be working my way upwards to get it to the proper length. I told myself that once it was wide enough I would start weaving in all the ends, so as soon as I finish the block that is still on the needles I will be weaving, so the next time you see it it should look a lot better than this! (And I’ll find better lighting).


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adventures in pregnancy

Well it’s been an eventful week.

Last Tuesday I received a package in the mail. Excuse me, I just got kicked. Sorry- our little one got a package in the mail. Silly me. See, it was addressed to me, but the contents were purely for this little squirming bundle in my belly. I took the photos right away and was going to post but other stuff came up that I’ll get into later.

The mysterious box that I wasn’t expecting in the mail.

Wha….?

I’m sorry to say that even though it’s not for me, my first thought was “how perfect for knitting!”.

In the back pocket of the bag was this really cool changing pad.

If you can’t read the writing, this package came courtesy of the nice folks at Nestle!

Inside was (from top left) a magazine, an Avent bottle (yay!), some samples, a can of formula, a gel ice pack, a “baby on board” sign, a pack of Carnation Instant Breakfast for the busy mom, and some coupons.

Thanks Nestle!

In other news, I haven’t been posting for a week because I’ve been pretty much in bed for the last week. On Wednesday the innocent little Braxton-Hicks contractions I’d been getting randomly decided to start coming more regularly- in fact one every hour. When this happened from 9:30am through to 2:30pm, I called the case room of the hospital where I will be delivering, and they asked me to go in right away. I went in and wound up being there until 9pm. With the monitor hooked up it showed contractions every 20 minutes or so. They made me drink a pitcher of water to try and stop them, and instead they increased to every 10 minutes, then every 4 minutes (but eventually stayed at around every 6-10 minutes). Finally around 7:30pm they gave me an IV with a huge rush of fluids, and that stopped them for about 45 minutes. The last 15 minutes I was there I did have 3 strong ones, but by that point they had checked me twice and I still wasn’t dilated- meaning I was having contractions but not in labour. At that point they said I could go home but to stay home from work until next week (I should have returned yesterday). (By the way, the reason that labour would not be a good thing right now is because I was only 27 weeks pregnant! They would have had to give me a shot to try and boost the development of the baby’s lungs and so on, and/or medications to forcibly stop the contractions).

The contractions continued about every 40 minutes on Thursday, and randomly but regularly on Friday (10 minutes, 20 minutes, 7 minutes, 15 minutes, 11 minutes, etc…) When they hadn’t let up by Saturday we decided to call the case room again and they asked us to come back. Luckily I was only there for about 2 hours this time, as the same doctor checked me out as had on Wed and I still wasn’t dilated so he wasn’t worried that I would start labour. He pulled me off of work for another week, then I got to go home and vegged the rest of the weekend with Yannick.

On Sunday we had an open house here to try and sell our place, so I took Sam and went to hang at my parents’ house for the two hours it took. I’d been doing a LOT of knitting to get the project done in time for JCA and it was nice to take a little break and just sit and talk to people, since I’d been home alone since Thursday morning.

I did the same old bunch of nothing but knitting on Monday, but yesterday was a big running around day. As luck would have it I had my monthly ob-gyn appointment on Tuesday, so I knew I could ask her about the contractions (which were now stuck at every 20-30 minutes since Monday morning). Yannick was already in CSL so I drove down to meet him at my dad’s store. We gave his friend Kevin my car to drive home, and Yannick and I went to the appointment. After all the stress of the last few days it was great to hear that she’s not worried about them at all. She checked again and still no dilation, so she said she’s not concerned at all that I won’t carry fully to term. Everything else looks good, although I did lose another pound since the last time I saw her.

From there we went to my optometrist as he wanted to check out my eyes during pregnancy, what with all the hormones and the Impaired Glucose Tolerance, both things that can affect your prescription and/or your vision. Everything was fine there too, but he’d had to dilate my eyes completely so I spent the next 2 hours with sunglasses on even though it was after 5:30pm in Winter when it was already dark out, and had Yannick laughing that my eyes looked like black marbles. I was going to try to take a photo but decided that the flash would be a horrible idea so just picture my eyes with no colored area, just the entire circle part black. (Yes, I’m a bad optician’s daughter who doesn’t know the names for all the parts of the eye).

Lastly last night we had our 2nd prenatal class. It was a lot of fun and was all about breastfeeding. I learned so much stuff! So many myths and misconceptions were cleared up, plus we all got to sign up for breastfeeding “buddies” from a volunteer program who will be like mentors if there are any problems. There was an amazing video that showed a newborn(!) baby placed on its mother’s belly immediately after birth and left there, skin-to-skin for 2 hours. After 2 hours the baby CRAWLED(!!!!) directly to the mother’s breast and latched properly and began nursing. Amazing the instincts we are all born with! It was a super-informative class and I’m so glad that Yannick is coming with me to them! (It was also really funny when one of the dads-to-be had to pin on a cloth boob and demonstrate how to hold and approach the baby to get a good latch. He was a great sport!).

So now I’m home until Tuesday. I still have work to do on the JCA knit but it’s blocking right now and pretty wet so I will take advantage of the time to get some baby knits done, and veg my little butt off.

Oh- and I’m officially starting my Third Trimester today! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!


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celebrity mail

How cool is it to open your mailbox and see a letter with a return address like that? In case the name isn’t clear, that’s a letter to me from Debbie Stoller (although it was most probably sent by her assistant Jennifer). It’s official confirmation and payment for my very own design appearing in the 2008 Stitch ‘n Bitch Calendar. I can’t wait!