alchemy scarf about halfway done!

"love" by shel silverstein

"How many nights will I be able to keep myself from starting" the vintage baby knits baby shrug?

Let's find out: one, two, three...

Thrrrreeee.

click for a trip down memory lane!

Wise old owl. He knows just how to make you feel better about not being able to wait. And I certainly couldn't wait any longer to get started on this sweet baby shrug. Isn't the first piece really cool?! The construction of the shrug is so neat. The center back is this hourglass shape, then sides will be knit off of each side of that circularly and then sleeves and an edging will be added to those.

 
from Vintage Baby Knits

And the stitch patterns are charming. This first piece was done in a broken rib. After all the brioche stitch of my alchemy scarf, I found the broken rib so refreshing. And it looks lovely in the tiny gauge. The sleeves and edging will be done with elongated yarnovers and should be lots of fun as well. I am loving the Koigu too. Its twisted texture and pale, slightly uneven color really look vintage to me. I hope you like it so far, Robin!

Wee one came up to me in the library yesterday with a picture book she'd picked out, yelling "read this! read this! read this!" Usually I'm happy to satisfy her, but this time there was a problem.

I don't know Spanish! She was very insistent though and as the book was merely a picture book, I hoped I could guess or make up something to go along with the images.

I think, Hey, that's got to say princess, so I say "Princess".

Alright! Another easy one. "Daddy."

"Witch." Oh, I got this. I'm even learning a few words here.

"Mama." Child's play. Of course, it's a kid's book!

Whooops, no idea. Make something up. "Then mommy and daddy talk to baby Raul." Why are they suddenly talking to him? And what was with all the other people before? "And then..."

"Uh, baby Raul goes potty." What??!! This is the last page. Why the hell is he suddenly on the potty?! There were like ten words total that I couldn't figure out and you're telling me they were about the potty?!

Turns out, as I'm sure all you Spanish-speakers could have guessed all along, Todo El Mundo Va! means something like "everybody goes" and this book, much like the classic Everyone Poops, is a cute little potty training picture book. Mommy and daddy were explaining to baby Raul that everybody, even princesses and witches, have to run off to the potty sometimes. So Raul figures he could too.

I almost felt super lame about the fact that I, never in a million years, would have been able to guess that that's what this book was about. Almost. Until I looked up the book on Amazon. There it was Todo El Mundo Va! (Spanish Edition) with a picture and even a little pricing bundle with another Spanish-language potty book and a Spanish Dora book. BUT then this description follows: "Makes a great addition to bilingual and Spanish classrooms, as well as a resource for South American culture and history." Now, I may have missed the potty connotations as I was reading it, but I'm pretty sure I would have noticed if it had been about, as they say, "the giant Nazca Lines in Peru and the woman who revealed them to the world."

Hmmmm... since wee one liked this book so much, perhaps I should take Amazon's suggestion and also get her Markings: Aerial Views of Sacred Landscapes. I can't wait to see what Raul will do in that one!

Lookie, lookie, the wee pearl shrug (from Vintage Baby Knits) is starting to look shruggy! A few dozen rounds of broken rib on the sides and that funny little hourglass piece I started with has magically transformed into a half-finished shrug. I am so loving how this tiny thing is constructed - too cool!

drop stitch sleeves and border still to come!

I can't get over how texturally and technically complex, yet adorably small, it is. There is so much fun knitting in this teensy little project.

take us here!

Thursday night we packed up, got ourselves to the airport and flew to Germany!

The flight didn't take off until 10pm, so the kids had to relax a little with their blankies in the waiting area at the gate. Amazing how necessary those three little pieces of wool have become to those kids.

B was lucky enough to have an empty seat beside him and fell asleep first

B & S, who are practically professionals at flying across the Atlantic, had no trouble nodding off within an hour or so of take-off. Wee, however, held out for a good three hours before she succumbed at around 1am.

I am not sleepy and I will not go to bed

It was the first time I didn't bring any knitting with me on a plane trip. I felt almost guilty about it, but I knew there'd be no chance I'd get to knit. We all, very sensibly, slept as much as we could, although I must admit to staying up a bit longer than I should have watching the new Star Trek. And everyone was rested enough for a happy landing.

But now we must battle our old foe, jetlag.

Pardon us while we sleep now.....

We're having beautiful weather here in Germany! This is pretty unusual for us (often our visits have had to include emergency trips to the store to buy more long pants and long-sleeved shirts) so we are trying to soak in as much sun as we can. It's almost like a vacation!

B diving at the local Freibad

And in this lovely weather, the landscape here is certainly to be admired. I'm pretty much a city girl, but the view of the hills from the local outdoor swimming complex just about took my breath away.

viking chess in the backyard

We've had hours of fun in the backyard, including playing something the Germans call "Viking Chess" (Kubb), where you have large wooden king and several pawn pieces and throw sticks at them. Cool!

genuine farm baseball (see the cows in the back?)

The boys have even managed to play some baseball. (Baseball in Germany!) Oma & Opa spotted some neighbor kids playing baseball in the field behind their backyard and discovered that their dad is American. We immediately arranged for the boys to play a game with them. Apparently, if you pack your wiffle bat (which we did) they will come. And we had perfect baseball weather!

girl meets world again

And I managed to snap wee one at the hedge again this year. One year later, almost a head taller. (Here's last years pic.) I'm hoping to make this an annual photo. Maybe get the boys in there too. If the weather stays good....

Just before we left for Germany, I packed up mom's Alchemy scarf and sent it off to her for her birthday. Happy birthday, mom! It was a treat for me to make this: what more could a knitter wish for than that someone says, hey, would you maybe make me this gorgeous scarf in this fabulous yarn? Yes, yes, yes!

that is so my book!

I'm trying to get the kids a slew of German books on this trip, so we can come home and be German readers. There's a Charlie & Lola book for wee one and a couple of cool non-fiction books for the boys, like this one that explains how all kinds of things (like bubble gum) are made.

 
How does the sole get on the sneaker?

For fun, the boys and I are reading some vampire books.

 
The Little Vampire and Twilight

The boys are big fans of Joann Sfar. They love the Sardine in Outer Space series and had just started reading the Little Vampire series this summer. I was psyched to find the first of the vampire books in German (with the cool name Desmodus). And I picked up the first of the Twilight series for me. The series is known here as the "Bite" series and the titles are all something like Until Dawn or Until Sunset, but the word for "bite" is the same as the word for "until", just with one more "s". Clever Germans.

Wee one got the best book of all though, which she will now share with you....

Anton and the Girls

Here comes Anton.

Anton is cool.

Anton has a giant car. But the girls don't look.

Anton can jump high. Anton is strong.

But the girls still don't look.

Anton tries a couple more things, then when they don't work out, he starts to cry.

Now the girls look. Anton gets a cookie.

Anton can play with them. Anton is happy.

Here comes Lukas.

Just look at Anton's face!! Perfect. Says everything about boys and girls. All in a child's book. And all in German.

So, exactly one day after we arrive in Germany - exactly one day after we travel thousands of miles away from my yarn stash - wee one holds up the edge of her blankie and declares, "here's a rip". I've got the red yarn at home to mend the tear in the worn edging. Heck, at home I could crochet an entire new edge on! But all I have here is some orangey-red scrap yarn I keep stashed in my notions bag. I hadn't planned on doing too much knitting here, but thankfully I did bring the bare necessities! I pulled out my scrap yarn and crochet hook and did my best to work some single crochet over the worn bit of edging.

She couldn't care less that it doesn't match. She quickly felt her way along the edge, was satisfied that there was "no more rip" and toddled off happily with her blankie. Phew.

Adenauer's old train in Bonn's German History Museum

Last week, hubby and I treated ourselves (well, Oma and Opa treated us) to a kid-free couple of days - a mini-vacation within our vacation. We decided to visit Bonn, the former capital of Germany, because neither of us had ever visited it, because it was fairly small (we've seen a lot of the big cities before and wanted to have a quieter vacation) and because it was close (in case wee one decided that she wasn't quite ready to spend three days without mommy & daddy).

there's a bird on your head!

Bonn is a lovely little city, with a bright and pretty city center. It's not too big, it's not too small, it's just right. In addition to housing the West German government while Germany was divided, Bonn is also well known for being the birthplace of Ludwig van Beethoven. You can tour the town house his family lived in when he was born, which is right in a busy little street in the city center. (The Beethoven house has an excellent website including a fabulous page just for kids - check it out!) Or you can find him in front of the big post office building in the middle of one of the town squares. Whichever way we walked in the pedestrian zone, we kept coming back to this square and the big Beethoven statue.

And to funny Chinese restaurants. The names of these two cracked me up!

A family friend who lives in Bonn happened to mention that "there is a yarn store directly across from my apartment." Oh really?!

Wolle Rödel is an excellent chain I've visited before in both Munich and Frankfurt. This one was a little smaller but still chock full of modern yarns and patterns. You know what they had there?

I heart Ron

Opal's Harry Potter yarn! I don't know how I managed not to run into this in stores before now. (We'd even gone to see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince the night before in Bonn. In German, of course. Weird listening to those kids with funny German accents instead of funny British accents.) The Wolle Rödel also sold Knitpicks needles! I recognized the harmony needles from all the way across the store. Way to go Knitpicks!

nice spot for a fortress, no?

After sight-seeing and shopping, we took a boat tour down the Rhine. There are dozens of picturesque little towns scattered along the Rhine and almost as many intriguing castles nestled up in the surrounding mountains. This is the Drachenfels (the Dragon cliff) with Roman ruins at the very top. The name of the cliff comes from the old Germanic legend of the Nibelung. This is supposedly the spot where Siegfried battled the dragon. Now that's cool.