Socks for Max

I finished Max’s second sock, and he looooooves them.

I think he’s just been waiting for me to finish them. He liked trying them on while they were on the needles, and this morning when I asked him if he wanted to try on his new socks, he practically launched himself onto the sofa beside me.

They came out a little big for him - but that’s fine. His feet are obviously not done growing. It’s just as well, really, the bindoff is a little tight for the ribbing. I used a suspended bindoff because it claims to be elastic and therefore perfect for finishing off ribbing (according to the Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Needlework) but it’s still a bit tight. How do the cool kids finish off their ribbing?

Anyway, while attempting to photograph both of his feet together, I noticed a run (!) in the ribbing on one sock. Is it possible to drop a stitch after binding off?!?!? Logically, I assume that I missed a stitch while working the bindoff. I stole the sock from his foot (over his protests) and retrieved the stitch with my trusty F hook while Max stood by the sofa bouncing impatiently and repeating “Sock pleeeeeeeease!” (Technically, it was “oksh eeeeeeeee”) and tried to take it from me while I was retrieving said dropped stitch. -_- Anyway, I have no idea how to incorporate a dropped stitch into something I’ve already bound off and have no intention of un-binding and reworking, so I just sewed the loop (securely!) to the inside of the bound-off edge where it is now behaving itself.

He won’t give the socks back.

Happy, Happy Birthday!

Max’s birthday is this week, and we had a party for him over the weekend. Said party gave me the opportunity to exercise one of my other creative interests - cake decorating! (Yay!) Using nothing but common cooking pans, I created a three-dimensional train for my vehicle-loving little boy. Here you can see how pieces from loaf pans, and a cupcake went together to form the train:

And here you can see how I finished it up. Yay, creative cake decorating!

In yarny news, I’m knitting Max a pair of socks to match the striped baby socks. I just sized the pattern up, and it looks very nice (Max likes socks, so he’s excited. I think it might be hereditary, Greg loves new socks, as well).

The second sock is halfway finished, so we’ve got good odds to finish the pair before this baby gets here!

The hat is done!

And it’s ridiculously cute. See?

Hopefully it won’t be too long before I can post pictures of it encompassing the head of a baby. I had to make up my own pattern to get exactly what I wanted, and it wasn’t that hard to do! (As any accomplished knitter…could have told you.) I’m very proud of it, though, because it means that I’m getting better at the knitting, and the knitting patterns, and the knitting pattern writing. Which is fun.

Knit your own Magic Stripes Ribbed Newborn hat, using the pattern here!

Things you realize you shouldn’t have taught your child

Every now and then, you realize that you’ve accidentally given your child a skill you’d rather they didn’t have. You know, the day you catch them imitating Mommy and Daddy by turning on the tv, or ‘using’ the cell phone, or the computer, or something. This morning Max was crying because he was hungry and his oatmeal was still too hot to eat. He had already tried ‘blowing’ on it (so cute, but hardly any air comes out) and he still couldn’t eat it. So what do I do? I grab his sippy cup and shake enough milk out of the spout to cool it off a bit. Stir it in, and voila! Nice, warm oatmeal. I turn away for a few seconds, then turn back because he’s fussing again. His cup is on its side on the table, half-coated in oatmeal goo, he has oatmeal in his lap and on his hands (he hates that), and there’s a little puddle of milk on top of the oatmeal in his bowl.

That’s so cute! I thought. He tried to do what Mommy did. And wow, he picked that up really quickly. We cleaned things up and he got his breakfast without further incident. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of it. I set him up for his morning snack a few hours later, and when I came by to clean up, his mostly-empty sippy cup was standing neatly by half a plate of white and soggy goldfish crackers. Oh, dear. I have a feeling we’ll see this new skill again. I can’t believe he started doing that after seeing me do it once. I mean, Greg has spent days recently trying to get him to say “Uh oh! Hot dog!” (a la Bobby Lee) without success. And I’m just as glad.

In other news, I’m using the Magic Stripes to make a baby hat.

I’m flying without a pattern, here, as I couldn’t find one in the appropriate gauge that I wanted to do. For the first few rounds I was afraid that it wouldn’t stripe, at all, and I’d just get a vague pooling, but as you can see I am getting a thin stripe pattern. Nice! I’m not 100% sure it will be the right size, but I pulled Max’s little hospital cap out and it seems like it will work.

Baby socks. Baby socks!

Well, guess what? I really did go back and make the second sock. See?

I sewed up all the little holes (you can sort of tell) and they look so cute! I’m a bit concerned that they might be too big - how big are a baby’s feet, anyway? But as everyone (including myself) keeps reminding me, babies grow. Oh, here’s the pattern I used, by the way. Anyway, I’m getting the hang of the size 2s (my smallest needles) and I think I need to buy some smaller ones. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find any sock-type needles around here yet.

The socks were so fast and easy that an idea crept into my head, and once it was there, I couldn’t resist making these:

These striped rib sox were made with the Magic Stripes I picked up a couple of weeks ago. This is my first knitting project ever made with yarn that is neither white nor cream-colored. Seriously. Check the gallery. And look! Look how the stripes match up! Using a tip picked up from someone’s blog (sorry! I don’t remember whose) I paid attention and began each sock at the same point in the color repeat, thus resulting in similarly striped socks. They are SO cute that I was forced to forgive Lion Brand for some of their shortcomings (for instance, the recommended needle size for this yarn is a 4. A 4? Are you serious? I worked it with 2s and I’m pretty sure the yarn would have been happier on 1s. Have I mentioned I need smaller needles?). However, given that the little stripey socks are SO UNBELIEVABLY CUTE, the fact that they provide no patterns for baby socks in this yarn is an inexplicable as it is inexcuseable. Listen, Lion Brand. I realize that your primary goal is to sell more yarn (I mean, or so I assume. How else do you explain boxy, oversized garments made of Fun Fur? How?) but given that a ball of Magic Stripes makes a full pair of adult socks, you will make the same sale of 1 ball of yarn whether you convince consumers to make adult socks or baby socks. (I think you’re more likely to convince them to make the baby socks, btw. Way, way cuter.)

Anyway, I did a much, much better job of the short-row wraps on the stripey socks, thus eliminating almost all of the holes. On the second stripe sock, I tried a wrap when I went back to all three needles, and guess what?!? No holes at all! Yay!

I still think many knitters are way too obsessed with socks, but their position is beginning to make an eerie amount of socks. I mean, sense.

Working hard, or hardly working?

Oh dear, it’s been a while since I last posted, hasn’t it? Well, the eventful day of rain was followed by several more days of rain, clouds, and sprinkles (we had a lovely rainstorm during fireworks, and right before our barbeque so everything was nice and freshly muddied) but the rain has gone. Now it’s just hot and dry.

At any rate, in the past week and a half, I started, completed, wrote up, typed up, photographed, and submitted a pattern to Crochetme. Yay! I haven’t published a pattern with them since - what? - February? ‘Bout time. And guess what? It’s made entirely of stash yarn! Woo hoo! So that’s going well. The real story here is that since I finished crocheting said project several days ago, I did not allow myself to start on anything new. This was intended to serve as motivation to work on the pattern-finishing end of what I do: the transcribing from my notepad to the computer, checking numbers, formatting, photographing, arranging, blurbing, and diagramming is not always as fun as the whole creative process.

Even with the Crochetme pattern out of the way, though, I still have another pattern to type up aside from Chaco, who still requires a little typing. Then I have to make about 10 assembly diagrams for Chaco, photograph Chaco, make the Chaco pattern look all pretty, get testers for Chaco….it’s all about Chaco, Chaco, CHACO! What about my desire to surround myself in a shoulder-high pile of yarn and just make stuff? *sigh*

Well, last night when I finished typing the pattern, I decided that I deserved a teeny, tiny knitting project to deal with the withdrawal (hands shaking for a fix type more slowly). It had to be a knitting project, of course, because I so rarely crochet something from a pattern, and designing something new would be rather adding to the problem. By midmorning today, I had this:

Awwww. A baby sock. I was impressed how little yarn it really took - I used a ball of scrap yarn that I didn’t actually believe would make a whole baby sock, and lo! There was some left over. This was my first sock working toe-up, and I also did short-row shaping for the first time ever. Go me! As you can see in the picture, I have some lovely gaping holes, which I’m not terribly fond of - I’ll be closing those discreetly with a needle and some yarn. And as long as we’re being honest here:

Whoopsie. I definitely messed up on the toe increases. The pattern made a transition with instructions that were insufficient for a knitting n00b like me, and, I have a suspicion, may just be unclear. I understand what to do on the second sock, but it doesn’t tell you to…oh, well. Some of the toe distortion will also be mended with gentle needle correction (I was raised in the “fudge it ’til it fits” school of home crafting) but I didn’t want to pretend that this project went perfectly. It went all right, which is fine for a learning project.

Things to do with the lights off

Our neighbors used to live in North Dakota. They often join us (since we also came from a place where ’snow’ is more than a spelling word) in mocking the inability of Texans to deal with temperature dips. Like last winter, when it hit the freeze point and Target selling out of space heaters was on the news? Hilarious. Less amusing is the general reaction to something we call “rain.” Rain brings car accidents (a good thunderstorm a few months ago filled repair shops in town to capacity), the streets flood, and we get something else fun - power outages! Yesterday brought intermittent rain showers and - literally - as many power outages. We lost power for two hours during the shower in the morning, half an hour for sprinkles around mid-day, and then it went off again during some rain at 3. And didn’t come back on for five hours. It wasn’t even raining for the last three hours of the outage, I assume repair crews were simply overwhelmed by emergencies caused by the ’severe weather.’ (Please. It didn’t even get dark outside while it was raining, never even offered thunder or lightning, and while you would have gotten wet if you went out during the showers, my neighbors took their dog out multiple times during the day without getting anything like soaked. Argh.)

So, what is there to do in a gradually warming/humidifying house, with my husband and my son sleeping and no electricity? I did work on the babyghan for a while - but as it turns out, without background music /television/ conversation, working on wide swaths of double-crochet is fabulously boring. Who knew? I did take the opportunity to take those yarn pictures I promised (and compose this blog entry in my head. Turns out I was VERY bored.) so I can show you the yarn overload.

I went to Garden Ridge a few weeks ago, and found a bunch of Lion Brand Magic Stripes sock yarn for $3 a ball. Not being familiar with its usual retail price, I was not sure if it or much of the other yarn there was a good deal, plus I wasn’t terribly interested in making socks, didn’t need more yarn, etc. So I left, with no yarn purchased. I went back the other day and found the yarn aisle almost exactly as I had left it - half-filled, disarranged, several ball bands ripped or removed, skeins tangled and mixed together randomly (this is not the best Garden Ridge I’ve ever seen). It seemed, in fact, as though no one had touched the yarn in the weeks I had been gone. (Weird…) Anyway, as you can see, this time I bought every ball that was there that still had its ball band (I could have had 2 more bandless balls of the blue, but they seemed a little violated) which included 2 blue-ish, 3 purple-ish, and one brown-ish. (I’m still not too crazy on the colors for socks, but I found this pattern for a self-striping baby sweater which I am absolutely going to make with the blue skeins.)

Next up is the cotton:

I bought 12 (Yes. 12. I told you, I went a little crazy) skeins of Lily Sugar ‘n Cream in that lovely blue ombre, and another 8 in navy for $1 a skein, which is a reasonably good buy. In fact, I bought all I could find there in those two colors. I blame this on my long and fruitless search for large amounts of locally available cotton yarn in two particular shades of blue (um, not these shades. Won’t work). I like them, though, and while I have plans for the navy, does anyone have non-kitchen suggestions for 24 oz. of worsted weight blue ombre cotton?

As if that weren’t bad enough, I recently bought and have not yet touched over a pound of white cotton, and four 12-oz skeins of simply soft brites in a lovely blue. Yeah, four. It’s for a sweater I’m planning but won’t start for months, and rather than have too little, I certainly bought too much. At least it’s a nice color, right?

So anyway, that is why I’ve begun stashbusting. As far as that goes, I’ve got a bit of a problem. I ran out of the blue Soft Baby - see?

The blanket is not as big as I would like, which raises the question: use another color, buy more, or keep it smallish? Buying more yarn is pretty much the opposite of stashbusting, but we like to do things right, right? I’ve just about decided to buy another skein and put it all into the blanket: each sucessive round takes more and more yarn, and I had nearly a full skein of blue when I started, so I think that a whole other skein will bring it out to the size I’d like and still leave me with that nice empty spot in the drawer. For now, though, I need another project.

That reminds me - one other thing I did during the power outages yesterday - I finished Chaco, shown here on a recliner for size comparison.

I sewed the eyes on (poor Chaco has been waiting blind for days, that was all that had to be done), but you’ll have to wait a few days for my usual ‘wildlife outdoors’ photo, everything outside is gloomy and wet. Chaco is a puppet, inspired by the fabulous toys at Folkmanis, where they make the most amazing puppets I’ve ever seen. Chaco sits approximately 11″ tall, not including the tail, and covers most of the forearm when worn. His mouth is moveable, although that’s all that is, and he’s stuffed and lined, which means he can do double-duty as a stuffed animal when not in use as a puppet. Here are some more shots:

For those of you still reading (wait, there are people still reading?) the Chaco were a tribe of Native Americans indigenous to Paraguay. They built complex stone edifices with solar and lunar significance, even though they had no written language and relied on oral histories to pass on the knowledge needed to build such complex structures - for more than 25 generations. (Wow!) Probably no one else cares, but it seems like a good name for a talking parrot, and I wanted people to know where the name came from.

That was ridiculously long. Thank you for investing the time to read it.