A Real, Honest-to-Goodness Blog Post

Hey! I’m knitting something! (No! Really!)

You see, up to this point all I’ve made for the twins is one sweater and one hat apiece. This is clearly insufficient for a pair of babies who are going to spend the first week of their lives in a fanatically air-conditioned environment and then immediately transition into a real winter (complete with mounds and mounds of snow). I really only made Max and Charlie one sweater each – I mean, we were living in Texas – and that was kind of just to do it. These little guys are going to need what I can make for them. (And that makes it so much more fun, doesn’t it?)

Now, this (these? I am making two of them) sweater is very special. In my frantic, last minute stash diving – trying to decide which yarn would do me the most good to pack in our limited space, what projects I would use them for, etc – I uncovered a long-buried wool cache. More than two years ago, if I recall, I went into a Jo-Ann’s to find that a lot of their house yarns were on clearance. To my delight, this included the soft, gorgeous, 100% wool and generally quite pricey Tesoro. I bought every ball they had (for the low, low price of $2.35 apiece) and tucked it away to use for baby things. Well, as you know, a lot has happened between then and now, and so the yarn hasn’t so much as seen the light of day for a long time.

At any rate, in this stash I discovered five balls of blue (and one of yellow, to use for contrast or extra yardage) and decided that now was the time for them to be put to use. Sadly, the Tesoro has now long been discontinued, so there’s not much chance of getting more…that means that I have 2.5 balls of blue to use for each sweater, plus another half-ball of yellow in case I run out and need to do the edgings in contrasting colors. I’ve done a lot of calculations, and I think it will be doable.  The pattern is Baby Sophisticate, available free and really quite cute. Now, I don’t think I have the buttons I want to use for these (although I did remember to bring buttons!) but that’s okay. 😀 Just today we stumbled across what appears to be the arts and crafts store on a nearby base, and it is HUGE. We couldn’t go today, but I am so psyched to visit next week. The seductive image my mind is painting me, of a large selection of American yarn, has me extremely hopeful that I’ll find something interesting there.