Knit nap

While C has slowly been recovering from the flu, the flu slowly found its way into the rest of the family. Poor J's been miserably uncomfortable for the past few days. I've managed to squeeze some knitting time into his many naps.

It's fun seeing the Hermoine Hearts Ron hat slowly come into shape. The pattern is available as a free Ravelry download.

Playground knitting

We spent the afternoon at our favorite park. C got to burn off some energy and J napped for a few minutes. I got to squeeze in a little bit of time on a variation of the free Rocky ribbed beanie from Ravelry... And then Jordan was up for some people watching at the park when he woke up.

The hat is far from perfect.. I usually end up knitting it in the dark or in an awkward post-breastfeeding position, so it has definitely been a challenge to make. Especially since it uses fingering weight yarn. I'm happy with its progress so far, but the next hat will need to be made with yarn that's at least worsted weight. ^^;

Loooooom

Ah, knitting looms. Over a year ago, I gave up knitting because C had too much fun trying to find my projects and gleefully unravel them... But last November my post,partum self decided, on a whim, to buy one of those plastic knitting looms, and I've been hooked since.

Since then, I've acquired several additional knitting boards AND have picked up my knitting needles again, and I'm practically addicted.

My parents gave me a 28" adjustable knitting board, and I've been using it to slowly make baby blankets using a pattern from American Knitting Boards. I'm impressed with the project so far. Cabling became so much easier-- It's practically effortless. :)

I highly suggest knitting looms in all their shapes and forms for busy knitters who want to work on projects they want to be able to walk away from for periods of time and can eadily pick up and start again without losing their place. The bigger ones like the knifty knitter may even be great for people with arthritis or low vision problems.

Update

Yes! It's been a long stretch between posts... and since the baby's been born, it's been a long time since I've had ANY time to make much of anything. In fact, I tried picking up a knitting project a few weeks ago, only to discover that the more I wanted to knit, the more my little boy wanted to be held by mommy and given her full, undivided attention. ;)

I figured I'd put some of the projects I worked on with links just for reference... and to get myself motivated to work on more once Caleb can entertain himself for an extended period of time.

During the latter half of my pregnancy I decided to pick up sewing because it was too painful watching everyone have fun on the surf while I sat on the beach with my crochet and knitting projects. As beautiful as the beach was, I couldn't help but wish I was in the water surfing with my husband and our friends.

One of the big projects I worked on while I was in the final months of my pregnancy was creating homemade cloth diapers. Wow... that was a nice crash course in Sewing 101. I wish my mom showed me how to sew when I was a teenager, but looking back at how I was back then (more focused on school and sports than on anything else), it probably wouldn't have worked out if she tried. Sewing cloth diapers is a great, simple project, though... especially since you get to sew (dun-dun-dun) elastic with casing! Here's the original model I tried: the Rita Rump Pocket, available (graciously) free online!


A diaper I made-- note the soft microfleece inner and the cute flannel print outer layers!


An early picture of my diaper stash... complete with homemade microfleece/flannel wipes from the scraps. :)

I first tried them on the baby when he was only a few weeks old (I believe about 6 weeks old... after his circumcision looked fairly healed), and they fit nicely with a small diaper cover (Thirsties Duos-- a very good and affordable PUL diaper cover for babies with skinny legs!) which allowed me to avoid using safety pins (yeowch!).

One fun thing I got to try was using the Wonderwash, a neat little hand-powered pressure-washing device that allowed me to wash the diapers a couple of times while using minimal power (basically Karm-powered!), water, and soap. I would dry it with a small countertop spin dryer, and then hang dry the rest.

I normally sun dry the diapers on our tiny little apartment... porch (for lack of a better word, since we live on the first floor, so it technically isn't a balcony) whenever I can. Unfortunately, given the design of the apartment complex we live in, we get very little sun during the day (normally in the early, early hours of the morning), so I end up doing some of the drying indoors in the bathroom... haha!


Drying diapers with my $1.50 contraption from Marukai Daiso. Woohoo!

We've been house-hunting, though, and hopefully we'll get (at the very least) a nice condo or townhouse in Encinitas or Carlsbad with ample sunlight for sunning diapers. You'd be amazed at how well a little lemon and a lot of sunlight can get rid of baby poop stains on a cloth diaper.

When I was about 34 weeks along the way, my OB-Gyn told me during one of the weekly checkups (they become weekly once you're in that window of opportunity) that I had a small baby. At first it seemed like a relief to me-- I mean, I gained about 40+ lbs (I started out at 98lbs) during my pregnancy, so I was certain the baby was going to be big... but then I realized that I bought (one-size-fits-most) cloth diapers that were good for 8+ lb babies, and a tiny baby was going to need smaller diapers. Thus, I started making newborn-sized diapers for a newborn-sized baby... and knitting wool newborn-sized soakers (that I found on a nifty little site called Ravelry)to hold them up.



Needless to say, I popped out a 7lb5oz baby who wouldn't even fit into the newborn-sized diapers when he could finally wear them (after his circumcision site healed and we didn't have to use aquaphore on it anymore). =P

....annnnnnd I hear someone yawning. Baby's awake! I'll put up more of my crafting projects soon. In the meantime, that's it for now. :)

Slowly but surely making progress...

...with an emphasis on "SLOWLY" because progress has been slow!

I'm kind of, sort of in the middle of two projects that I picked up over the past few weeks... the first of which is almost done, the second of which is almost past beginning, and the third of which is... a major learning experience.

Project #1 is a free project I found on my favorite website these days (Ravelry) called the Lacy Crochet Kerchief. After completing my attempt at making a very basic baby blanket, I decided I needed a new challenge that would force me to learn how to read a crochet pattern... and this was a very good challenge for me. The first try came out... so-so. It was a bit asymmetrical (due to some confusion with the wording), but it still looked okay. I took a picture of it on my head, just to show how it (somewhat ideally) should fit on my (irregularly-shaped) head:



I took a quick look at it and hen took a quick look at what it should *REALLY* look like... and realized that my approach wasn't the most effective one I could have taken... which took me back to the drawing board. I mean, come on.. I was an engineer, and I used to design communication networks for the military... this couldn't be THAT difficult to decipher compared to complex network charts, right?!?!

Right. So I sat down at my desk-turned-temporary kitchen table (at least, until we own a nice enough place of our own to justify getting nice furniture) and started mapping out the design into a visual diagram. From there, I made some adjustments to (my interpretation of) the pattern and tried once again, starting from leftover blue yarn, which I realized wasn't enough to complete the project... so, once again, I had to improvise:



Ah, much nicer... and the contrasting colors added a great added touch to the "aesthetics" (for lack of a better term) of the kerchief! These are just about finished, but I wanted to add a little embellishments to them before I sent them off to my sisters (who probably won't wear them).

Project #2 is an attempt at making an amigurumi-based mini acorn purse/bag. Kinda totoro-esque, in a way, in anticipation of our baby boy arriving in July. I was hoping to go with a forest/animal theme for his room, with hopes of figuring out how to decorate it Totoro-style. Unfortunately, Totoro didn't reach much popularity in the US, so it's difficult to find Totoro-themed baby items. *sigh*

Project #3 is my attempt at self-teaching myself knitting: a very basic cabled scarf, which combines the basic knit and purl stitches with a little cabling. I was planning to take a knitting class, but I haven't been able to schedule one since my schedule is up in the air for the next month. I'm switching from being a NOCS-shift nurse on my floor to a day-shift nurse, which means that I finally get to enjoy a semi-normal sleep cycle and the comfort of being able to sleep with my warm (and cuddly) husband every night of the week. :)

One thing I'm definitely learning is the fact that while being a self-taught crochet-er (mom taught me how to make a chain when I was tiny, but I never really got far past that) is pretty difficult, being a self-taught knitter is INSANELY DIFFICULT!!! Wow. Thank goodness that youtube has free how-to videos on each of the stitches because it's almost impossible to learn it while reading from a book. ><

Maybe I'll update this with a recipe next week... I've been cooking without giving much thought to posting recipes on the blog (which kind of sucks because this is partially my way of saving/bookmarking my recipes as a backup to them being saved on my computer), but I'll try to find some time to put up another one. :)