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I've finally finished one of the first quilt tops I ever made, waaay back in October 2007. It's hard to believe I've been quilting that long, especially considering how few things I've finished. But the proof it is that there's a huge backlog of quilts waiting to be finished: eight to be exact! Since I'm determined to get the purple quilt and the neutral quilt done SOON, I thought it'd be a good idea to get over my fear of finishing, dive into that quilts-in-waiting stack and finish off a few. This "rulers quilt" only needed the binding, so it was first to the finish.

This quilt is the Easy Lap Throw from Amy Karol's Bend-the-Rules Sewing. This quilt design is perfectly suited to a very beginning quilter. If you're just starting out, I'd definitely recommend trying one!! The strips are simple to cut and piece, with no need to match up points or corners, and, because of its modest size (40" wide), the backing doesn't have to be pieced at all. The quilting is also super simple. (Amy Karol suggests repeated vertical lines of varying widths. I did stitch in the ditch of the seams but then kept the rest of the quilting horizontal, following the lines in the rulers.) This was a wonderful start to my quilting career; I'm only embarrassed that it took so long for me to finally finish it! But I got over that soon enough as I snuggled under it on the sofa for the first time last night.

me and wee cuddle with our blankies while playing Dora Saves the Snow Princess on the wii this morning

Yes, the neutral quilt and I are going steady now! The top is all pinned together with batting and backing and I've begun the quilting - just simple in-the-ditch stitching around the blocks and following the seam lines inside the blocks.

The neutral quilt and I will be spending every night together for the rest of the week. I'm determined to finish it up as quickly as I can, dedicating myself to it this week. But we all know I'm not a very monogamous crafter, so don't be surprised if cheat a bit with hubby's socks or wee's lucinda guy hat. And I can't help but flirt with doing the sew-along project for Sew Mama Sew's Fat Quarter Month.... I'm incorrigible!

Attempt number four for the Flower Toggle hat from Lucinda Guy's Handknits for Kids. After three other attempts at getting the size right (the pattern has the sizes WAAAY too small), I think we've finally got it right (80 stitches for my almost 2 yr old). Luckily, the Debbie Bliss pure cashmere is holding up to the repeated ripping and reknitting. And each time I say 'this is the last time!', sure that I'll give up if it doesn't work, I start knitting and find the pattern so charming and sweet that I remember why I wanted to make it in the first place. There's no denying it: that Lucinda Guy makes cool stuff.

What a busy weekend we've had! It all started with wee one's very first haircut.

She'd heard me telling the boys that it was time for them to get haircuts and at one point she just decided that she was going to get one too. After several days of her touching her head and saying "cut? cut?" I promised her we'd ask the stylist if it was too early to cut her hair. (Yes, she's almost two, but her hair is still very thin in spots and short around the front. The boys didn't get their first haircuts until after they were two!) The stylist agreed with wee one that it was indeed time for a little trim. She hopped up in the seat as if she'd gotten her hair done every week of her entire life and got a pretty little bob, a pretty little bow and was delighted.

Pitch Car

Then it was time for a little something special for the boys. On Saturday, I took them to a local board gaming convention (one we used to go to regularly before we had kids: no war games or miniatures or LARP or anything like that, just the German-style board games we play at home). The boys enjoyed playing Keltis, Incan Gold and No Thanks with our old gaming buddies, but their favorite games of the day were the flicking games.

Crokinole

On Sunday, it was time for my special treat, swap day at Knitsmiths!

I picked up some lovely mohair to use in a scarf (like in the Purl scarf from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts) and some Cotton Fleece that might become another Smockie for wee one.

And for hubby, I worked a little each night on finally finishing up his t-shirt quilt. I know I posted it as being done last Christmas (um, yeah, Christmas 2007), but I hadn't actually done the binding yet. When I pulled it out to put the binding on, I decided that it needed a whole mess more quilting as well. So I spent the last few nights quilting a large grid through the centers of the blocks and sewing on the binding.

We've both been enjoying snuggling under it on the sofa. Hubby is very pleased to have his special quilt finally and I'm loving how soft, warm and cozy the flannel is.

So a little something fun for everyone. Not a bad four days at all.

click to see the WHOLE blankie!

Here it is, the second thing I ever knit, eight years old now and undeniably approaching the end of its days. B isn't quite ready to accept this fact so our conversations about blankie tend to go like the Monty Python dead parrot sketch:

"It's time to give up your blankie."
"Why, what's wrong with it?!"
"It's falling apart. Look at all the holes."
"No, I can put my arms through the holes and wear it like a cape. Zooooom. Plus it's softer with all these strings."
"The plumage don't enter in to it. This blanket has ceased to be. It is an ex-blanket!"

The not-quite-dead-yet blanket is recovering now from its first wash in a long time. B wouldn't let me wash it before, as both of us feared it might not survive the washing. But in the night after our exciting weekend, B ended up with a little tummy ache and his bed ended up with a lot of yuck in it. Blankie took a serious hit and has had to be washed. It's held together so far and is almost dry, but I still think it's time for B to move on.

Poor guy. Poor me, giving him the blankie and now having to tell him that he'll have to give it up someday. Listen, I didn't want to be a knitter...

I wanted to be... a Lumberjack....

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A little later than I'd planned, but I've finished the quilting on the neutral quilt. It's all ready for the final step: binding! I can't decide whether to bind it in a beige, brown or maybe one of the blues. More decisions!

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Rather than choose last night, I jumped ahead and pinned the purple-lovers quilt top and its batting and backing together. B came over while I was working on things and thought how clever it was that it's called a quilt sandwich: "it's got a top, something in the middle and a bottom." Yum!

A belated Valentine's present for my man...

Hubby's second pair of warm winter socks are done! The Rowan Magpie is thick and cozy, just right for the socks that hubby likes to wear around the house. Hubby washes all his socks in the machine(!) and the previous pair of Magpie socks I made him felted up ever so slightly, making them even thicker and warmer. The slight felting also strengthened the heel, making those the socks that lasted the longest. Here's hoping that these turn out to be as snuggly and as sturdy as the last pair!

don't you love the hair clippie things that hold the binding in place?

I'm determined to get these two quilts (the neutral quilt and the purple-lovers quilt) done by the end of the month! The neutral quilt merely needs to have a binding attached, and when I say merely attach the binding, I mean that about 250 inches of binding need to be sewn down by hand. To that end, I flouted all the rules of knitting group and brought the quilt with me to work on at Knitsmiths! Thanks to my work there and in the last two nights, I'm just a corner away from being done. It will be the first large quilt project I've seen straight through to the end. I can't wait!

I couldn't help myself and signed up for Sew Mama Sew's Fat Quarter Swap! I picked out some of my favorite fabrics from my lqs and will send one fat quarter out to eight different people. I should get eight fat quarters back and then we'll see what I can do with them.

I was explaining the swap to the boys (they had asked me why I needed eight little plastic baggies) and it reminded me of how they exchanged Valentines in school last Friday. B was very dubious about the whole exchanging thing - the math just didn't seem to work out for him: "But what if I bring a Valentine for everyone and someone doesn't bring in Valentines at all? I've given out 20 Valentines, but I'll only get 19 back. And do I get one from myself because if not, then they have one of mine but I don't and that's not fair." (Fairness is a BIG issue in a twin household, let me tell you.) I managed to talk him into handing out Valentines despite the obvious inequality of the whole swapping thing. The lure of candy helped balance things out a little.

Maybe I should toss in a Valentines lollipop with each of the fat quarters to make up for the possibly unfair results of a such an exchange? But if the others don't put candy in mine....

A brief lull in our otherwise brutal winter has gotten all us Bostonians hoping for Spring, saying ridiculous things like "Spring's got to be just around the corner" even though we know we'll be punished for such displays of weakness by not seeing a nice, warm day until May. But we do it all the same. I, too, found myself dreaming of better weather this week and was inspired to pull out the fabulous orange yarn that Dani (of Sunshine Yarns) dyed for me last year. Mmmmmm.... so bright and pretty and spring-y. Can't you just feel the sunshine and hear the birds singing? I can. And I can totally see wee one finally wearing the bright orange Buttercup Baby jacket (from Interweave Crochet Fall 2006) that I'd planned to make for her so long ago. I've finished the knitted skirt section on the back and so far I love it. It reminds me of the line in Love Actually (which I caught on cable last weekend on Valentine's Day) when Emma Thompson greets her child after he was a lobster in the school Christmas show: "Oh, you were sooo... what's that word... ORANGE!"

Mother Nature punished me soundly for all these happy thoughts of brighter days by making it snow last night. Grrrrrr.

When wee one is finished listening to a story or playing with a toy, she always says "duh!" for done. Now, it's my turn.

Mommy duh!

With the knitting done on the back of the buttercup baby jacket, it's time to start crocheting!

The pattern is, after all, from the Interweave CROCHET magazine and not Interweave Knits so you know there's going to be a good deal of crochet to come and since it's rated for "experienced" crocheters, I'm pretty sure I'm way out of my league here. I've never seen the stitch patterns called for in the pattern before and I can't really read a crochet diagram (without the grid structure of a knitting chart I feel a bit lost!), therefore it seemed like a good idea to try out the crochet section in some scrap yarn before mucking up the lovely orange piece I've knit so far.

I think these V-shells are nearly right. (I must admit that find this crochet terminology so unfamiliar that my first thought when I read the term v-shell was of some sort of pasta.) There's one little bit of the instructions I read incorrectly until the last two v-shells, but it was a minor thing and now I feel like I've got it. I'm at least pleased that it seems to have the sort of shape that the name would imply. I really don't have any general crochet knowledge (like how to do increases or decreases or what happens at the beginning/ends of rows, or how to measure gauge) so all I can do is blindly follow the pattern, make the stitches as instructed and hope for the best. It's a little terrifying but at the same time It's kind of exciting feeling like a beginner again, watching a lovely pattern emerge without your really understanding how or what you're doing to create it.

When wee one noticed me working on my crochet swatch (since I was only trying stuff out with a little scrap yarn, I thought I could risk working on it while she was still awake), she immediately came up to me, looked at what I was making and said "hat!" I guess I HAVE knit her a lot of hats! But this one will be something else entirely.

This is a silly hat.

Flower Toggle Hat from Lucinda Guy's Handknits for Kids

It looks super sweet in the pattern picture in the book, but in real life that flower on top is a little strange. Sometimes it looks like a flower to me. Sometimes like a periscope. Or a cyclops eye. Or sometimes like some sort of weird underworld creature, all mouth and tongues.

No, no, don't be silly, it's a flower. It's a flower. The hat itself is certainly pretty enough. The textured garter stitch/rib pattern is lovely and the Debbie Bliss pure cashmere is so soft in delicate shades of purple and pink. I like it. I do.

what are you looking at?
can I have some more cookies, please?

After patting myself on the back for successfully mastering the crochet pattern on the bodice of the buttercup baby jacket, I realized that I don't own a crochet hook in the right size for this project! Naturally, the yarn store was closed by the time I'd had my epiphany (I don't crochet, so why would I have the proper hook?) and was closed on Monday. What could I work on while I waited for the yarn store to open again?

So I knit a sleeve. The sleeves are entirely knit, with only a feather & fan style crochet edging added afterwards (the same edging that's on the bottom of the body in the pattern picture). I don't like leaving all the crochet to the end (it's going to be hell on my hands, which always start to cramp after I crochet for a while) but it's great to feel like I'm making some real progress on this sweater. I just might get it done in time for light jacket weather!

Wee one's been feverish for the last two days and as of yesterday afternoon has taken up semi-permanent residence on the sofa, attended by dolly, blankie and her four humble servants, mommy, daddy, S and B.