I was sewing up to the final minute, but when the time came, the boys looked great for trick-or-treating. They were so excited! Wee one, on the other hand, had been napping until it was time to go out and was still quite groggy when we were all dressed and ready to go. So let's start with some pics of her wearing her costume over the weekend at a kiddie Halloween party. She was the cutest viking ever!

And here she was as tired viking with mommy last night.

Hey, do you like my hat? Swedish Sockapalooza, Sandra, sent it to me all the way from Sweden to wear so I could match wee one. It was so fun being a viking mama - thanks so much Sandra!! And check out the shoes wee one wore with her costume. They were a baby shower gift from Johanna's mom (now we know how Johanna got so crafty!). They're Raggedy Ann booties and I just love 'em. They were perfect for the costume. And off we went...

Look, a viking with a binkie! Wee one stayed pretty sedate in the bjorn (hey, also from Sweden!) while we were out.

The boys got 52 and 58 pieces of candy each. Their Halloween night homework was to count their candy. Of course now that they know how much they got, that means I can't eat any of it. Darn!

Now for the crappy parts. We'd left a bowl of candy out for kids while we were out trick-or-treating. We do this every year and so do a lot of other folks who go out with their kids or don't want to come to the door all night long. S predicted that all the candy would be gone and B predicted that there would still be some candy left. Well, not only was all the candy gone but so was the bowl and my little "Happy Halloween - have some candy! :0)" sign. Grrrr.

And then to make it a really scary Halloween night, wee one decided to wake up at midnight and 2am and stay awake until 5am. She's great this morning, but I look like Hell. I haven't gotten a really good night's sleep in weeks since the Red Sox were in all those late night playoff games and I've been staying up to finish the Halloween costumes. I hope I can catch up on my sleep (not to mention my knitting, my emails, maybe clean the toilets) over the next few days. 365 days left until we do it all again!

PS - Ooooh, I've got one more happy Halloween story from this morning! At breakfast, S tells me that one of his classmates had his birthday yesterday. Apparently, when someone in class has a birthday, the teacher goes to the secret vending machine in the teacher's lounge and gets a piece of candy as a special treat for the child. But yesterday, the machine ate her dollar and so she couldn't get the 3 Musketeers bar for the birthday boy. (They were already having a Halloween party in class, so there were plenty of treats for all to eat anyway, so I think it was okay. Pretty sweet having your birthday on Halloween, huh?) Anyway, S tells me this story and then says, 'I got lots of 3 Musketeers bars last night, so I want to bring one in for him cause he didn't get his yesterday.' Isn't that sweet?! And it's a happy Halloween again!

I slept, I knit, I feel like I'm finally getting back on track!

To restart my knitting engines, I decided to start a quick, fun project for me. I had the pleasure of sitting next to Sharon Turner of Monkeysuits while doing the book signing at Rhinebeck and she was giving away a new Monkeysuits pattern to folks who knit a bit on some hats she'd started for Afghans for Afghans. Her daughter was also there modeling the delightful new pattern, Funky Monkey. The hat was just too darn cool, so I knit a bit and got me the pattern! It's actually knit with sock yarn held double. How brilliant! Brilliant because I love, love, love all of Dani's new colorways and dyes over at sunshine yarns, but I'm such a small needle wimp that I've had to be sensible and cut back on my sock yarn purchases. Now I had a reason to get one of her new stunning yarns and knit it up... on big needles!!

This is "Atlantis" (psst... I heard there'll be some more of this and similar colorways on sale in her store soon!). Isn't it fabulous?! Wait, it's even better knit up in the hat.

I'm holding three strands together to get the gauge (there's still plenty of yarn) and it brings out even more of that fabulous blue. I want to swim in this yarn!! And the pattern is written for smaller sizes too, so you know what that means....a matching hat for wee one!

We have a quilt top! I love that term. Sounds like blacktop or something. But it reminds you that all this piecing and patchwork is just one part of making a quilt. I've made 72 little four-patches, added frames to half of them, sewn all the finished blocks together and added two borders, one of which was pieced with the other 36 four-patches in the corners. I've still got one final brown border to add and then, in the last class, we'll learn how to quilt. Yeah, then we'll learn to quilt! "Quilting" is actually the process of sewing together the quilt top, batting and backing- who knew?! - so I may have made a quilt top or two (see below) but no quilting yet.

The top of my Bend-the-Rules lap quilt is also just about ready for quilting. I need to trim the top and bottom edges to square it off, but otherwise, I'm just awaiting further instructions.

Homework for this week's class is to make a mini-quilt top of four blocks to practice our machine quilting on. In case there are a few of you out there loving this process as much as me, I'll show you some step-by-step piecing in the next couple of days. In the meantime, I'm going to keep pulling out my quilt tops and admiring them.

A quick check on my knitting mojo project, frances, reveals that even though I'm busy quilting and even though wee one hasn't gotten the hang of regular old eastern standard time yet, I'm still knitting. Oh yeah!

The back of the sweater is done and I've got a good start on all that ribbing for the front. I'm going to have tons of extra yarn, because that Jaeger Luxury Tweed has like a mile of yarn per ball, so I'm considering lengthening the sleeves. What's your feeling on those medium short sleeves? How are you supposed to wear them? I mean, they're not short sleeves, where I feel like I could wear a long sleeve shirt underneath, but they're also not 3/4 sleeves, which are generally warm enough to wear on their own. I love the look of the original sleeves, but a wool sweater with half-sleeves, I'm not sure I "get" it. Any ideas?

This was wee S, almost five years ago in the little bear hat I made him from Zoe Mellor's Double Knits book, one of the first knitting books I ever got - in fact, hubby bought this for me the first Christmas after the boys were born. Awwww. Well, guess who's wearing the bear hat now?

Wee one! Who, by the way, is nowhere near as wee as S and B were - she's 8 months old and he was a year and a half when he wore this hat. Yes, our so-called wee one has simply outgrown all the little hats I've made for her, so until I get some new ones on the needles, if I want her ears to be covered, it's gotta be boys' hand-me-downs. I love this one on her though. Those little pink ears are so adorable! And on her grumpy days maybe she can wear B's tiger hat - hee hee.

And speaking of fun baby hats, have you heard that Susan B. Anderson of Itty-Bitty Hats and Itty-Bitty Nursery is coming to Black Sheep Knitting in Needham for a trunk show and book signing?! (She's doing a whole east coast book tour this week - you can check out this post on her blog to see if she's coming to your town and LYS.) Come on Boston-area knitmoms, you know that the cutest hats you've ever made for your kids are from Susan's book, so come on out Monday night to see her! See ya there!

Update: Susan Anderson's trunk show and book signing at Black Sheep Knitting is going to be on Monday from 1pm to 3pm, and NOT later in the evening as previously appeared on her blog.

Just because I find this quilting thing so much fun, I give you, the making of my quick mini-quilt!

I used leftovers from the big quilt to make a mini-quilt that I can bring to class to practice our actual quilting on. I started with a few extra four-patches I had made earlier. I precut frame strips to sew around the four-patches and made a stack for each four-patch and its frames.

I began by sewing one side of the frame to each four-patch. Working just one section of every four patch at a time allows me to run all four of them through the machine one after the other (this is called chain piecing) so I don't have to cut the thread at all.

Once all four have one side attached, I simply cut off the last four-patch from the chain, grab a second side and sew a second side to each patch.

Now, my favorite part! Each four-patch now has two sides which need to be pressed open. Look at it before.

And after!

This always reminds me of the "here's the church, here's the steeple" child's finger play rhyme: "open the door and here are all the people!" After pressing the first two sides open (and singing the little rhyme), I sew on the final two sides of the frame, chain piecing in the same manner. This is also when I like to raid the Halloween candy - hee hee.

And now it's time for the rhyme again.

Open the door and there are the people!

With my blocks done, I can sew all the blocks in each row together.

Then sew the rows to each other and voila!

I managed to sew this up in about an hour and a half while wee one took a nap. Later, I added a border and pieced together a mini-backing.

That was fun. And tonight, we quilt!

Nothing tragic, just annoying enough to warrant an emoticon's worth of sadness.

First, I had to rip back my funky Monkeysuits newsboy cap all the way to the first two inches. I was alllllmost done but when I tried it on, it seemed less big and slouchy than I'd hoped, so back it went to add more increases.

Because my (fabulous "atlantis") yarn was thinner than the yarn used in the pattern and I'm tripling it instead of doubling it, I'm a little off-gauge. It came out fine following the pattern as written and definitely had the right look, but I want it to just be that bit more funky. Frowny face.

And there's one more little knitting-related frowny face to share today. The info on Susan B. Anderson's book signing at Black Sheep Knitting in Needham was incorrect on her website. Correction: Susan B. Anderson will be at Black Sheep Knitting in Needham on Monday from 1pm to 3pm. Since it's a school holiday, that leaves us knitting moms with schlepping the kids along. Frowny face. Make that three more frowny faces. At least until we get to the ice cream shop next door!

After getting a crash course in machine quilting in our last class, I jumped right in and quilted my four-block practice quilt this weekend. Look at how much texture it adds to the piece. Wow, what a difference!

And who would have thought that stitching in the ditch would be so intense? It is completely crazy with the paying attention and staring at those seams. I found a piece of advice online that was very helpful though, suggesting that you don't stare directly at the needle while stitching. It said something like 'it's going to go up and down, just like it always does'. The idea was to keep your gaze a couple of centimeters in front of the needle to keep things on track and not go totally blind. It's actually just like knitting. Do you ever find yourself just staring at those needles clicking away for no good reason? It happens to me all the time and man, does it ever make my eyes tired! Stitching in the ditch also has that same quality that seaming up a sweater does - it's a lot of precise work and if you do it right, you shouldn't be able to see it at all! Don't you love/hate things like that? You can, of course, still see the stitching on the back. See, I went around each large block and then each four-patch inside.

It totally looks like a quilt, doesn't it?! I even stitched the binding onto the front and folded it over to the back, ready for the final step, hand-stitching it into place.

Like weaving in the ends on a big knitting project, I can see that this is the point where projects are going get put on hold. Because you want to jump right on into the next project, you know. Uh, like my rulers quilt.

Yeah, I did all the stitching in the ditch on that one too this weekend. It's still all pinned together because I need to add some more quilting. The quilting needs to be done every 5 or 6 inches so that the batting doesn't shift around with wear and washing (this number varies based on the batting you use). For this quilt pattern, Amy Karol recommends stitching in the ditch along the long vertical seam lines between the strips and then adding more vertical quilting lines between them. The rulers in my fabric however go horizontally, so I decided not to add more vertical lines to the quilt. Instead, I quilted along the horizontal seams where the flower fabric was set into the ruler strips. Next, I'm going to do some more quilting following some of the lines in the actual design on the fabric. This whole process of thinking up ways to quilt your quilt is so fun. It's a whole 'nother design element that you don't even realize is there until you do it yourself.

I hate to sound like a McDonalds' commercial, but I'm lovin' it!

The boys, the baby and I trekked out to Black Sheep Knitting yesterday to meet the amazingly creative and talented, Susan B. Anderson of Itty-Bitty Hats and Itty Bitty Nursery. She was soooo nice.

I was not at all surprised to find that she was just as sweet as the adorable little knits in her books. She brought along a whole trunk show of her knits and, let me tell you, all those itty bitties were even cuter in person! Can you see the teensy knitted teacups and that wonderfully stripey elefant. Chubby bunny was also there. I looooove him!

And the giant over-sized chenille peas and carrots were even funnier in real life. I don't know what you'd do with them, but when you see them in person, they are so outrageously huge and stuffed like something Claes Oldenburg would knit, that they're suddenly so cool, you want to make them. They're a riot!

Finally, the one thing I was most interested in seeing in person, besides Susan of course, was that incredible mouse mobile. Wee one touched some of the mice tentatively, but the boys really liked it. They came by and kind of mauled it after I took this picture.

To celebrate the occasion, I made wee one the bunny ears hat from Itty-Bitty Hats. Because of my bad math skills (I recalculated incorrectly after choosing a larger-gauge yarn and ended up at first with a hat that would fit my head!), I didn't get it done in time for wee one to wear to meet Susan (she wore her daisy hat instead), but it's all done today!

Such a fun pattern! I really appreciate how all of the hats in Susan's book are very simply constructed, so they're easy (if you don't goof your times tables like me) to resize for different gauges and larger sizes. I wanted to make this bunny hat out of some of the handspun angora I got from Jamie Harmon at Rhinebeck one year. I made myself a hat with her handspun and it's so cozy, wee one likes to take it off my head and snuggle with it. She especially likes the funny pompom on the top. Which is why I knew she'd love this bunny hat, because on the back it has a little pompom cottontail! (You don't see this in any of the book pictures, but it is in the instructions.)

Thanks to Susan from moms of now-even-cuter babies everywhere for sharing all your wonderful itty bitty patterns with us! I can't wait to see what you have in store for us to knit next!!

This Monkeysuits Funky Monkey newsboy cap by Sharon Turner is so cool! I saw Sharon's daughter wearing the original pattern at Rhinebeck and immediately knew that I wanted to make one of these for me. It also seemed like a perfect way to use some of my favorite hand-dyed sock yarn, since the pattern calls for sock yarn held double. This beautiful teal-blue-white colorway is called "Atlantis", making my funky monkey hat a funky sea-monkey hat! Remember those silly sea-monkey packets you could buy that never worked? Well, true to it's namesake, my funky sea-monkey hat was also a dud the first time out due to my not making an adequate gauge swatch (doh!), but this time it came out great! The pattern is excellent. I was amazed at how easy it was to do that brim. I was always afraid of doing a newsboy cap because I thought that part would be too tricky, but Sharon has come up with a very clever way to create it that looks awesome!

Speaking of tricks, I've got one more hat still on the needles, so I'm going for a "hat trick" this week. Can I complete three hats in one week?!

(Oh and yes, that is still the crappy old camera that has been bringing you crappy blog photos since wee one broke the good camera last month. We'll probably have to wait until after Santa brings a new camera for the return of really decent pictures. Ugh!)

Hey, I'm a day behind! How did that happen? Guess we'll just have to post twice today. Our first stop will be a brief interlude in what has become hat week to show you wee one's mittens, finally with ends woven in and an attached crochet chain so they don't go missing.

The pattern is my fave baby mitten pattern: bold banded mitts from Adorable Knits for Tots and the yarn is Knitpicks Swish leftover from wee one's pinwheel sweater.

Wee discovered them yesterday. She crawled over to where her car seat and going-out stuff sits and found them. Hey Mikey, she likes them!

See ya later today as the hat train keeps on chugging along....

Well, no hat trick for me. I didn't manage to finish my third hat this week, but I did make it through all the colorwork on said hat.

Ron's animal crackers hat, one of my favorite projects from Charmed Knits

Isn't that blue awesome?! I think it'll be a good color for me. And yes, I'm doing the bow and the braids. Oooooh, is this hat going to be fun!

Are you ahead or are you behind? It's that time of year again - time to start freaking out about all the holiday gifts I haven't started making yet! My list this year includes one lap quilt, one minkee baby blanket (both from Bend-the-Rules Sewing), and a softie toy for a little cousin of the boys. Yes, sewing is in this year at the Hansel Christmas worshop. The elves feel that we can get more done if we don't try to knit everything. (There's still plenty of knitting to be done though - more on that tomorrow!)

First up is the softie toy for 2 yr-old cousin. I searched around for an easy-ish pattern and found pointy kitty, a free pattern from the amazing Hillary Lang of wee wonderfuls (she also did the wee elephant softie in Last-Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts). I pulled out some pretty red floral fabric I had bought to make a dress for wee one, along with some leftover blue ribbon fabric from my rulers quilt and got started cutting out pieces. Look, they look like kitties already!

I decided to start by making a practice pointy kitty for wee one with the blue fabric. Hillary's pattern really is wonderful. There's a good deal of easing and pinning that you have to do, but it was okay once I took the time to do it right. She warns you that pointy kitty is tricky to turn right side out and to get all pointy again after sewing, but after dealing with some of those teeny limbs on the sock creatures, I wasn't too worried. And actually, it was only that tail that gave me any real problems. By the end of the night, I had practice pointy kitty parts ready for attaching and final touches.

Cute, cute, cute. And I love that it stands up on it's own. The boys immediately recognized that it was supposed to be a kitty. I always find that reassuring when they have a positive reaction to my stuffed toys and can identify what they were supposed to be. But this is more than a kitty. It's a head-start on my holiday projects!

The big knitting project for this holiday season is.... well, it's the same big knitting project as last season, only that I'm going to actually try to knit it this year... the mitered square manos afghan for my in-laws.

This is where I was last March: twenty squares. After a 20 month pause (I did write a book and have a baby during that time!), I've finally picked up the yarn again. Two more squares completed and I hope I'm back in the rhythm.

I had originally planned on making 80 (yes, eighty!) squares. They're only 6 inches square, so that makes a good 4 x 5 ft. blanket, not humongous or anything. Still, given my total lack of progress and the remaning time until Christmas, I've revised my goal a little. Now I'm shooting for a minimum of 48 squares, which would make a 3 x 4 ft. blanket. I'd be thrilled to get 64 done, making a 4 x 4 ft. blanket. And I get a gold star if I manage 72 or, unthinkable, the originally planned 80. You see, we're actually going to visit the in-laws this year for Christmas, so if I get it done, that means I can bring it with us on the plane. No expensive shipping, no worries about it getting lost in the mail, no worries about the in-laws paying any customs fees, blah, blah, blah. Nope, this is THE YEAR.

Twenty-two and counting....

Since I've started making mitered squares again, I've been able to get about 1 1/2 squares done each day. No matter how hard I've tried, somehow I just can't make it through that second square at the end of the night without falling asleep. Now, I know I said 'one square at a time', BUT then I crunched the numbers. If I have 22 squares and I'm going for, let's say, 64, I need 42 more. At 1 1/2 squares per day, that's one full month until I'm done knitting. Aaaaack, we're flying in a month and I sure can't do all the sewing at my in-laws! Even two squares a day would take me 3 weeks, leaving only one week for seaming. Prooooobably not enough.

So my new plan is to crunch out like 20 squares over this long Thanksgiving weekend. Then I can slow back down to the more reasonable pace of 1 1/2 squares a day and still give myself a couple of weeks for seaming. I've already gotten started on my mitre-mania weekend.

Two and a half squares in cream. This is the last of the eight colors I chose for the blanket. Once I have a few of every color, I can start laying them out and thinking about a pattern. But first things first, knitting.

For now, I'm at twenty-four and counting....

My mitre mania weekend was a huge success! Here was the stack of afghan squares as it stood at the beginning of last week: 20 squares.

Here it was this Saturday: 42 squares.

And here it is this morning: 50 squares!

"TAKE US TO YOUR SEAMER"

I was a mitre making machine! I made 30 squares in the last 6 days, 28 in the last 5! It turns out they go much faster if you don't start them off incorrectly every time. I got about a quarter of the way into the first three before I realized I was working in stockinette and not garter stitch. Doh, double doh, and doh doh doh! How do you do that three times in a row?! Once I convinced my hands that we didn't need to purl that first row, I found myself cranking out squares and winding new skeins of yarn at a record pace. And now I only have 14 squares left to knit. Time to start worrying about how to put them all together. Did you see all those ends?!

Fifty and counting....

While I'm working this week on finishing up these mitered squares for the afghan for my in-laws, I thought I'd focus on some of my favorite (and not so favorite) squares of the bunch. Today, one of my faves.

Did you ever listen to Winter Wonderland and wonder exactly what shade of brown "parson brown" was? Uh, I did. Never really asked myself why we would want to pretend that the snowman was brown or what that had to do with him marrying us, but I was a kid, you know, and when you're a kid you let those little inconsistencies go. I think I'd imagined that a parson was like a bird or something, maybe like a partridge ("hey, they're both in Christmas songs, so it must be right!" went my kid logic). Yeah, parson brown like cardinal red, that makes total sense. At some point I managed to escape my kid logic, put the two lines together and have that moment where you realize you've been thinking of something wrong your whole life, but I have to admit that when I listen to that song, I still hear "parson" as an adjective at first. It makes me smile to catch myself thinking about the brown snowman.

And because it's Christmas-time and I just love love love the brown in this afghan (Manos color "M"), it sort of tickles me to think of it as the elusive parson brown.

Parson Brown and his brethren

Almost forgot to report my progress: fifty-one and counting...

I'm no mathematical genuis and I haven't checked with my protractor or anything, but something tells me that middle mitre ain't 45 degrees! After about 48 squares, I sort of lost my mitre mojo and knit a dud. I was cruising along and then got near the end and realized that I had waaaaay more stitches on one side of the "center" line than the other. Whooops. I did some serious fudging on this one. And it shows. There'll be no keeping that one if I want lovely little matching mitre lines in my squares.

cream (Manos color #14) and multi (Manos color #113)

Adding the one measly mitre I finished last night and minus this one mangled mitre, I'm still at fifty-one and counting....

This one starts with some sewing. As a Christmas present for the boys' newest little cousin (another baby L born in August!), I wanted to make a little cuddly blankie with minkee, a super soft chenille-y fabric that makes me wish I were a baby again just so I could have a minkee lovey. I saw a few cute patterns on an episode of Simply Quilts that made me think, yeah, I can do this, and went off to JoAnn's armed with a 50% off coupon to see what I could find (is there any other way to go to JoAnn's?!). I found this kit to make a cuddle quilt with a cute flannel print, some satin and lace and minkee.

I wasn't really planning on doing patchwork and using a bunch of different fabrics, but I simply couldn't resist those funny floating bunnies! I watched the Simply Quilts episode again, spent an eternity cutting those squares to size (aaaaack, cutting those satin squares was like trying to cut water!), and took a close look at several of original patterns from the designer on Simply Quilts to decide how to turn the JoAnn's kit (oh, only $9.99 with my coupon!) into exactly what I wanted. I really wanted to put the minkee on the back instead of using it as a border so ended up having just enough minkee to make the quilt 18" x 24". Perfect size for a lovey: not to big for a little one to drag around and still not too small to keep little one warm in the stroller on a chilly day.

So glad that this was not my first quilting project! It sure was helpful having a little practice when it came time to sew those squares together. And my walking foot, looooooove my walking foot! Anyhoo, the minkee lovey came out great and I gotta wrap it up or I'm going to rub it raw, it feels so good!

Sooooo (this is where we get back to the afghan) after all this sewing, when I finally decided that the manos afghan needed one more color, I naturally thought, pink!

Manos color #24 joining the pile

I'm at 52 squares (and one Christmas gift!) and counting....

How to arrange 64 blocks of 8 colors plus one variegated in an afghan in an interesting pattern such that the same color doesn't ever meet up with itself? It's afghan sudoku!

With this afghan, I decided that I want it to be made up of four-patches, that is, larger blocks combining two squares each of two different colors (see my earlier posts this week to see some of the four-patches). This lets the diagonal mitre lines come together to form an "x" through the center of each four-patch. Since the entire afghan is also a square (8 squares by 8 squares), I've also been toying with the idea of having 16 variegated squares form a larger "x" through the middle of the afghan. With eight colors, that means each color will appear once in a four-patch with the variegated colorway along the diagonal. The trick is to figure out how to arrange the other colors so the same color doesn't end up being repeated in the same row or column and so that the overall look is pleasing. I can try to solve the first problem on paper, but for the second, there's no other way but to lay them all out and see how they look.

This is going to take a while. I'm up to fifty-four squares and counting....