Look at those halloween cuties! The boys were so excited about their costumes, they insisted on putting them on about three hours before trick or treating time and playing in the house with them on. They just couldn't wait!

B's costume came out awesome. It was a ton of bits and parts (mask, hood, belt, boot covers...), but, man, does it all come together.

He was the happiest bat you've ever seen. After about a half hour of trick or treating, he started giving me his basket to hold so he could run down the sidewalk flapping his big wings.

S's shark was a huge success in the neighborhood. We turned the first big corner and a young boy practically shouted, 'ohh, it's a shark!' Good review.

I love the side view too - it's a sort of kinder, gentler side of the shark.

And wee one loved her tutu. She was all ready to go out with the boys in just her orange shirt (yes, hubby, it did end up being part of her costume!). Then I told her she needed to put on her tutu. She looked up at it and smiled, did a little excited dance and said "ooo-ooo". So cute!

I topped off her pumpkin tutu with one of the pumpkin hats I knitted for the boys for their very first Halloween. She was greeted at every house with "awwwww"s. What more could a crafty mom ask for?!

After dropping off the boys at school, wee one and I got out our toys. Not that I can really get much knitting done while she's awake, but as she played with her dollhouse, I was able to get my Rebecca sweater out, see where I had left off, and refamiliarize myself with the pattern. The knitting is slow with so many stitches on the needle and, frankly, with my hands being so out of practice after so many weeks of sewing instead of knitting. But it's looking great and, best of all, it was fun.

I'm tweeting through election day. I just signed up on Twitter the other day and am taking this opportunity to see what all the fuss is about. And I need something to keep me busy today. Follow along....

Knitting in the round is all I seem to be doing these days!

Now that I've got my yarn, I'm slowly knitting around on the neck of my Rebecca sweater. And I've still got to close up the head of new dolly (I keep forgetting to search for those safety eyes!).

I've also started a new hat for me. I'm teaching a beginner knitting class where we make hats, so...

The yarn is some fabulous Jamie Harmon angora I got at Rhinebeck one year. I lerf it! I'm trying to make a sort of beret-style hat. We'll see what it looks like when we finish our hats next week.

Until then, I'll just keep knittin' around.

On Tuesday, I gave you a glimpse of some fabulous fabric from Alexander Henry (man, I love everything from that company! wee one's turtle top was also made from their fabric). The fabric made me think of the election, it made me think of America, and it made me think of my mother. So I made her a bag with it.

surprise mom! it's coming your way very soon...

The pattern is called The Un-Paper Bag (cool name!) and is a free tutorial from The Purl Bee. I hope all of you, knitters and sewists, follow the Purl Bee. They have amazing knitting and sewing projects every month. Beautiful stuff and never too difficult to make. Check it outl

And speaking of my mom and Purl in NYC, we're off to visit! Have a good weekend. Peace out.

Oh yes, the holiday music has arrived already. And we heard plenty of it this weekend.

The highlight of our trip to NYC was to see the big holiday show at Radio City Music Hall. The first weekend in November does seem a little early to start getting into the holiday spirit, but prices go up after next weekend, so Christmas just had to come early this year. The boys loved it!

They loved the 3-D sleigh ride and the wooden soldier Rockettes falling down in line, the snow falling in the theater and when confetti was shot out into the crowd from a toy canon. Wee one spent the show getting to know the ushers and sellers in the lobby with the other tots scared by the loud music. She enjoyed her official Radio City popcorn very much though!

Despite the fact that the holiday season seemed to start the day after Halloween this year, I haven't made any plans yet for holiday gifts. But I did make this advent calendar in a recent quilt class:

click the pic for the big version and click here to see the backing

Now I've got to figure out what to put in it! Hmmm... something else to add to my list.

So how far behind are you already?

You might have seen me tweet about doing some car knitting on the road down to NYC. Here's my first project of the trip:

The pink angora hat that I started knitting with my beginning knitting class last week has gone through some serious changes. Right as we began the trip, I decided that it was too big. Out of laziness, I started knitting a new hat from the other end of the skein and what a difference! I love how the colors striped! The old hat was starting with the light pink and after almost 2 inches I hadn't seen any of that fab red yet. Now, the wide pink band is right in the center of the hat, separating the darker bands. Cool! I also changed patterns. I had been sort of winging the numbers, but since it was already coming out too big and I'd be redoing it in the car, I thought I'd go ahead and follow someone else's pattern, Knit and Tonic's Le Slouch pattern, to be specific. A beret-style hat really looks best on me, so it was a no-brainer to use Wendy's awesome pattern. I kept it in stockinette though to let the colors really shine through.

After about an hour on the road, the boys asked how they were supposed to read or do their puzzle books now that it was dark. The sun sure sets early these days! Thank goodness I can knit in the dark. The kiddos slept while my hat got bigger and bigger and the skein got smaller and smaller. I've stopped right at the crown so I can show the beginners how to use dpn's and close up the top of their hats. Maybe I can even wear my hat home from class like my students!

I haven't been knitting very much recently. Working on those Halloween costumes got me into the habit of sitting down most nights to sew. So I took last week's road trip down to NYC as an opportunity to leave my sewing behind and knit something - heck, a couple of somethings! I knit the pink slouch hat quickly and then thought briefly about working on my Rebecca sweater, but it was way too big and unwieldy to work on in the car. So I started another slouch hat:

I find myself these days always grabbing the same hat when I go out on chilly days, my blue beret. All the others are either too warm or too snug or too itchy.... let's face it, they're just not my blue beret. My goal this weekend was to get two new favorite berets started, so I have at least some hat choices when going out this fall. The pink angora hat is going to be a dream to wear! And this orange slouch hat (also from Knit & Tonic's Le Slouch pattern and knit in Debbie Bliss cashmerino aran) will match the lining of my winter coat.

I may not be knitting that much, but I'm slowly slouching my way to warm-headedness. And I'm pretty sure that there'll be a slouch in wee one's future too!

Jamie Harmon Angora. Le Slouch pattern by Knit & Tonic.

One happy hatter.

I did some new knitting book browsing while at knitting group this week. We meet in a bookstore and I don't get much time to shop normally, so I grabbed a handful of new craft books and brought them down to the knitting table for us all to check out. We loved the patterns in Wendy Bernard's new book Custom Knits!

The cover has this gorgeous fair-isle detailed sweater with a unique laced v-neck. It's a beautiful sweater and a beautiful picture. But then it dawns on you that she's wearing that sweater with a swimsuit. That pure alpaca sweater. With a swimsuit. Why? It's pretty and all, but I'm kind of confused. The incongruity, the inappropriateness of the knitting in this scene is kind of irritating. (Like winter hand knits against bare skin can be irritating.) What does a hand-knitted winter sweater have to do with a half-naked girl on the beach?

And it's not just this girl. Apparently there are lots of girls who also only get chilly on top after a day at the beach.

Or maybe it's morning and this girl hasn't been to the beach yet. I don't know. Whatever time it is, she doesn't seem to need pants. Ever.

In fact, very few of these women need pants. Upon first opening the book, we meet this girl, who's taking photos of herself in a knitted sweater and underwear.

This is starting to weird me out a little. Kinda like those American Apparel ads that are way too provocative. Taken out of context, simply lying around in the magazine rack in the bathroom, they totally look like porn. Is this how we sell knitting books now?

My inner prude is finally reassured when, a ways into the book, we find a woman appropriately dressed.

What a relief! And what a pretty sweater. Look at the rib... wait, what's that naked guy doing in the background?!

And omg, I don't even want to know what these two in the next picture were up to right before she got dressed for work from the waist up.

The placement of that bowl. The glistening flesh beside her. The naughty little grin. Yes, yes, you're very cute, you're very sexy. Can I just see the knitting please? And how about you give the guy his shirt back now. And try "custom knitting" yourself some pants.

Seriously, I LOVE all these sweaters, but this isn't a "naughty knitting" book or "sexy knitted lingere" book. There aren't any patterns like that in here. So why are all the same kinds of pictures in here?

At first, the book reminded us of another recent knitting book full of girls in skimpy outfits, It Girl Knits: 30 Fresh Styles for the Young and Fabulous.

But this girl - the author, the designer, and often, the model - is an actual teenager, a real "It Girl", writing a book for other teens who want to be hip, fabulous it-girl knitters. There's an innocent sexiness here.

She's a diva. Not a cougar. And look how natural she looks getting ready to surf in her handknits!

She's not making some man clean her pool in his boxer briefs. Her companion is much more wholesome (not to mention, much more clothed!).

So, here's the deal. I'm not anywhere near 17 and even when I was, I never looked like any of these girls, nor could I have ever worn any of those fab little outfits. But the It Girl Knits book is not meant for me. (If I knew a fun, fashion-conscious teenie, I'd totally get her this book. Like Custom Knits, the patterns are super stylish and are constructed very simply with a lot of top-down, knit-in-the-round techniques.) However, I do feel like I should be part of the intended audience of the Custom Knits book. I've read Wendy's blog and admired her patterns for a long time. Heck, I'm knitting one of her patterns right now! Her knits are really fashionable and flirty (I'm not against a little flirting!) and the patterns are constructed, as advertised in the subtitle "Unleash Your Inner Designer with Top-Down and Improvisational Techniques", in a way that makes them very customizable for different styles (more in at the waist, more room in the bust, longer sleeves, shorter sleeves) and different sizes. But here's my question: is the style of this book customizable to someone like me, who does not prance around in her underwear or roll around in the hay all day long? It's cold where I live. I've got three kids. Is that who I'm supposed to be? Is that who I should want to be? Is that supposed to make me buy this book?

I get similarly annoyed by some of the layouts in the Rowan magazines: fancy old estate homes filled with iron bed frames, silk bedding and lacy cushions. It makes total sense that the model is wearing a Kid Silk Haze dress in that home, but not so much in mine. Who are these women and who am I supposed to be when I buy that magazine or knit that garment? Are the knits costumes? If it's not Halloween, I don't have time to make or wear a costume.

Now, before you get the wrong idea of me, I'm not a totally hopeless frump. I can be encouraged by Tim Gunn telling some woman on tv that she should wear cashmere sweaters for running errands. I can even be inspired by the sort of "be a fabulous mom in heels and a cocktail dress" ideology of someone like Laura Bennett from Project Runway. But this sort of "The Knits of Sex Games Cancun" theme isn't really speaking to me. Let's put it this way, you had me at fair-isle sweater. You didn't have to go and get naked.

Don't get me wrong, the book's on my wish list. I'll certainly buy it. But if I make that alpaca sweater, I'll just be wearing it to school, to the grocery store, or around the house. Wearing it dowdily but proudly.

That's the sound my daughter makes every time she sees blue kitty (sewn from this pattern) on my dresser. Poor blue kitty has been sitting on our dresser with pins holding its head closed and attached to its body for a year. In fact, I posted the picture of blue kitty in that state exactly a year ago today!

"Meeeeeoooooow," says wee one. I'd say, "Sorry, sweetie, you can't have blue kitty. She's has pins in her. Ouchies. Mommy has to finish making her." And then I'd forget. Bad mommy! Until Monday....

I had the blue thread out to work on a little dress I'm making for wee one right now and thought, now's the time to sew up blue kitty and give her to wee one. She has been meeoow-ing around the house ever since!

a favorite JCrew cashmere sweater of mine, which evidently was a favorite of the moths as well

When I pulled this sweater out of storage this Fall, I was horrified to find the holes! Whatever sort of nasties I had in the closet (we've since had a giant clean up!) had very particular tastes, since they ignored all the wool sweaters and feasted only on the cashmere. After grieving a little for my favorite sweater, it occurred to me that there was plenty of good fabric still left there which I might be able to turn into a dress for wee one. I'm in the process of felting the sweater down a bit and am looking for information and inspiration from the book, Sweater Renewal: Felting Knits into New Sweaters and Accessories. The book has some useful info about different felting methods and different fibers and then a ton of projects that you can make from old sweaters. I'm a little nervous about cutting up the sweater, but I've got nothing to lose, right?

And wee one likes the sweater already!

"miiiiiiine"

I loved that SNL skit from a few weeks ago where the financial guy keeps yelling "Fix it!" ("fix it" starts at about 4:30). Too funny! What's not so funny is the fact that the better my sewing gets, the more our clothes start to rip, tear, and fall apart, requiring me to fix it!

Last month, I sewed patches on six pairs of the boys pants and stitched up a huge rip hubby had in his favorite sweatpants. Last week, I secured a tear developing in the underarm of a t-shirt of mine and closed up three holes in some new store-bought gloves of the boys (the machine-made thumb gusset was a real weak spot!). Then I tackled this pretty little dress of wee one's.

This Splendid dress had been hanging in her closet for a couple of months waiting for her to be big enough for it (it's a 2T). Even though she's only 20 months now, she's plenty tall for a 2T these days, so I pulled the dress off the rack for its debut. As I tried to pull it over her, it quickly became clear that they had goofed up the sizing, because there was no way that neck was ever going to fit over her head. Trust me, I tried. (Poor girl.) The neck opening is simply too small, and while the fabric has a lot of stretch, unfortunately, the contrast trim along the neck has none. And there were no buttons to open the back or neck either. With no way to get it over a toddler head, the dress would be not only useless to us, but to anyone I might try to donate it to. Grrrr!

I decided that with nothing to lose, I would take apart one of the shoulder seams and attempt to sew on a few teeny tiny snaps. (I love this sort of 'nothing to lose' starting point. Just like in the case of my old sweater to dress project, is a great start for a sewing experiment!) There was about 1/8" of a seam allowance for me to place the snaps and I had to stitch them on to the thinnest cotton you can imagine. Ever have one of these Splendid garments? The cotton knit is the thinnest, softest, loveliest you've ever worn. Fabulous to put on, hell to secure something to. Somehow I got them on there. (I should mention that I am like completely snap retarded. I always, ALWAYS, sew the snap on upside down or put two prong sides across from each other. Doh!) I'm not sure it looks completely seamless, but since they are so small, I think we'll get away with it.

The dress fits her perfectly now. And I'm on to the next fix-it job....

Who's there?

Orange.

Orange who?

Orange slouch.

It's my orange version of Knit & Tonic's Le Slouch hat! The Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran is soft and drapey at this gauge, giving this beret a lot more slouch than my last one. This hat is so cool, it makes me want to read French philosophy again.

And it's so orange, it makes me want to tell knock knock jokes.

This Thanksgiving I'm thankful that I can knit with pink yarn til my heart's content! Currently, I'm knitting up pink and pastel leftovers into what I'm calling the "i heart fair-isle" hat. I was teaching a fair-isle (or more correctly, color stranding) class at my lys and needed a little colorwork project to work on while my students swatched checkerboard and Norwegian stars and what not. I looked through all my pattern books and came upon an old fave, Small Sweaters: Colorful Knits for Kids. I remember thinking to myself, when I got this book about six years ago, that I would make this sweater if I ever had a girl. Oops, better get on that! (I also remembered loving this classic kid-in-a-handknit picture from the book!) For now, however, I needed a hat pattern - not too complicated, something I could maybe resize for a larger gauge to accommodate the short class time and the yarns I had on hand. I found this set, with a sweater, tights (yikes, imagine knitting a whole pair of color-stranded tights!) and, hooray, a hat.

With the large hearts being a neat multiple of 12 and the rows of small hearts filling out the top, I could easily adjust this pattern for width and length at my very different gauge. It knit up quickly in an evening (plus a little extra time for the usual gaffes like knitting the first 7 rows of pattern with the background and foreground colors reversed - doh!). Only a couple more rows of hearts left to do and my daughter will have another new hat and I will have another new obsession: adding fair-isle projects to the when-I-have-a-girl knit list!

Wishing you all a happy Thanksgiving filled with delicious treats and inspired knits.

The advent calendar that I sewed up a couple of weeks ago is up and ready to go! The boys have divided up the days (B gets to pull out presents on the odd-numbered days, S gets the evens) and they can't wait to get their first little giftie in the morning. They could barely get to sleep!