Wee's Oliver & S bedtime story pajamas were finished in time for her to wear to bed last night, making them not only her offical new year's pajamas but the cutest pjs she's ever worn!

These sewed up quickly (it certainly seemed quick after making the bubble dress!). The pants were super fast, even with the contrast cuffs, and the kimono-style top was way easier than I had feared.

Wee, who hates trying anything on, was like a different kid when I was finishing these, coming to watch me sew the final seams and jumping for joy when it was time to put them on. She loves the tiny little Olivias all over the fabric and will spend whole minutes staring at her top to find Olivia on her scooter or Olivia wearing her tutu.

The size 4 fits her perfectly: an elastic waistband and pant legs you can cut to the right length make them easy to sew to fit; and while the top is a little roomy, the length is just right for my little giant.

click for the big picture

And so that completes my holiday crafting. Only one week late (although I'm not sure my in-laws have even received theirs yet). Here's wishing everyone a happy new year full of health, happiness, and successful projects, both crafty and otherwise!

Another year and the lego love is still going strong here at Hansel house!

Christmas afternoon found us ladies (me, wee and grandma) deserted by the boy/menfolk while they were busy building their new legos.

Santa brought the boys the Star Wars lego sets they had on their wish lists.

And hubby got the Lego Mindstorms robotics set.

"What's that, honey?" "Oh, just a generic robotic arm." That is totally what he said. Tomorrow it'll be something completely different and equally impressive. In fact, within the first few hours of opening the box, he'd built a lego version of the hexbugs the boys got for Christmas!

And it won't be long before the boys are building robots too. Recently, they've been working on lego marble runs. Oh yes, the apple doesn't fall far from the lego tree! Here's a video of B explaining his coolest creation so far, a lego elevator he built entirely by himself:

(some highlights: 16 sec. in, wee laughs at B's explanation; at about 1:20 he's stoped explaining and it's off and running!)

For me, all this continued lego-mania means that my husband is most likely to be found silently building or programming in the dining room and I'm most likely to be found on my way to the Container Store to buy more storage boxes. I am the queen of lego storage now though. Here's how the lego bookcase looks these days:

Each set is in a Container Store shoe box with a label either cut from the original box or printed out from the internet (if we threw the box away too soon). Lost & found bits are in a box of their own. And the big improvement in 2009: all instruction books are now kept in plastic sheet protectors and sorted (by theme then number) in 3-ring binders!

Oh I'm getting the hang of this now.

That's what I keep telling myself.

And although it's not really that bad when I'm knitting this little Mandarin Petit sweater for wee and I find I can somehow manage to have seven balls of yarn hanging off the thing and still knit without losing my mind, as soon as I take a break from it, it is so hard for me to get myself to pick it up again. Because it's slow. Reorganizing all those balls after every one or two rounds is so painfully, motivation-killingly slow. In two knitting sessions, I've only made it about halfway up the first sleeve (which I have started calling the second-to-last sleeve in an effort to convince myself that this is almost over!). But it's so pretty when it's all done. I can't stop now, right? Especially when this sweater has already sat around waiting three years to be finished. Ugh, I fear I am going to have to say something New Year's-y like "this is the year that I finish this sweater!" to get me to actually do it.

At least I am encouraged by seeing how much wee likes the sweater. She laid down next to it while I was taking the picture and started to rub the edge like she does with her blankie. (Can you see blankie and dolly in the picture? And her carrot tattoo too!) She's so cute. For her, I can make more stripes. For her, I will try to have more fun.

I now pronounce the second-to-last sleeve of wee's Mandarin Petit stripy sweater done! (Well, up to the armholes at least, as this is a raglan sweater knit in the round with a yoke.) And now on to the last sleeve...

Thank goodness American Idol starts tonight. I need hours of mindless tv viewing to keep me from getting frustrated with all the balls of yarn and the tangling and the untwisting and the slowness. Return to Cranford (shown twice back-to-back) got me through the end of that first sleeve. Let's see how far the first two nights of Idol (3 1/2 hours!) can get me.

+ 1 hour of even worse tv*
__________________________

6 inches of stripy sleeve

More Idol and more knitting tonight!

* - namely, Chelsea Lately and a random half hour somewhere in the middle of Bride Wars

Can't knit. Can't sew. Must read more...

How fabulous is Lily Chin? I remember being impressed when I caught her Knitty Gritty episode back in like 2005, called "Tips & Tricks." Well those tips & tricks are all here - plus all the knitting basics - in Lily Chin's Knitting Tips & Tricks: Shortcuts and Techniques Every Knitter Should Know. You will find brilliant tips here, like exactly how much yarn you need for the long tail cast-on (three times the width of your piece plus 10%), the best way to work with ribbon yarn (hang it up like toilet paper so it won't twist while you knit with it), how to make the perfect left-slanting decrease (twist the stitches on the row before by wrapping like Combined knitters do then k2togtbl on the decrease row), and a foolproof way to space buttonholes evenly (evenly mark dots on a strip of waistband elastic and stretch it to fit the buttonband). These little bits of genius are interspersed in what is on it's own already an excellent overall guide to knitting.

When I started knitting, a friend gave me a copy of the old Harmony Guide of Knitting Techniques: Volume 1. It was a slim volume that touched on all the major stages of the knitting process with large, helpful pictures. It was my go-to guide when I was learning, since it was not encyclopedic or chatty, but a bare-bones, just-the-facts-ma'am reference. That volume is now out of print, but if I were starting now, I could totally see myself using Lily Chin's book to the same end. It's much more thorough with a lot more explanation (hooray!), but Lily Chin is no-nonsense: she gets right down to it and tells you all you need to know, no bullshit. And it's in a super handy little format. It's no bigger than your Vicki Square Knitter's Companion but there's so much more in here than in that book! (And - bonus! - for crocheters, she's even put out a companion book of Crochet Tips & Tricks. It'll be a must-have for any future crocheting projects of mine, I can tell you!)

Thanks to all my sewing for wee one (with Pink Fig and Oliver & S patterns), I am proud to say that I skipped Wendy Mullin's first book, Sew U: The Built by Wendy Guide to Making Your Own Wardrobe. It's a great intro to home sewing and approaches the topic with the same sort of demystifying, you-can-do-it attitude that was in Amy Karol's awesome book, Bend-the-Rules Sewing: The Essential Guide to a Whole New Way to Sew. And whenever I feel ready to make something like pants for myself, I'll be sure to try out some Built by Wendy patterns (maybe then I'll get the Sew U book), but for now, what really mystifies me, what I'd really like a course on, is sewing with knit fabrics and using my mega-intimidating serger.

Enter Sew U Home Stretch: The Built by Wendy Guide to Sewing Knit Fabrics, Wendy Mullin's second book all about sewing those scary-seeming knits. She says making projects with knits is easy, easier in fact than making things in woven fabrics, in part because stretchy fabric means there's no closures like buttons and zippers to deal with. Yes! I hate putting in closures. They're like seaming a knitting project: that last step that is totally fiddly, seems to take nearly as much time as the rest of the project, and has a disproportional impact on how good the final piece looks - no pressure! The only difference is that I'm good at seaming knitting projects; sewing in zippers and making buttonholes, not so much. So none of that sounds good to me! The book starts by going through the most important stitches the serger makes and tells you when you'll need to use each one. This is precisely what my owner's manual does not do. It's all super technical, giving me just as much detail about the never used stitches as the two or three I'll be using and putting everything in a multi-page chart translated into four languages. Uh, not so handy actually, thanks (danke, gracias, and merci). Wendy also explains how to sew knit fabrics with a standard machine for the majority of sewers out there who don't have sergers (well, I could have used that info before I got a serger!). Then she offers a quick and easy guide to the different sorts of treatments knit fabrics will need, in particular different hems and different neck finishings like ribbing, and finally there's patterns, like a t-shirt. A what?! I can make a t-shirt?!?! Well, sign me up for that! I'll be keeping this book right by my serger and - alert: new year's resolution, right here - together we will make a t-shirt!

I've just started Iceland: Land of the Sagas co-authored by Jon Krakauer (the Into Thin Air Everest Disaster book dude). It's a beautiful book about Iceland and the authors' tours of its unique and spectacular landscapes. I've kinda had a little crush on Iceland ever since we started taking our yearly trip to visit the in-laws in Germany via Iceland Air. It's pretty neat what with geysers, lava fields, glaciers and freaking fabulous knitted sweaters. So when hubby and I started thinking about taking a trip - just the two of us - for our tenth wedding anniversary (coming up in just a few weeks!), the first place we thought of was Iceland. We never had a honeymoon and we never travel anywhere without the kids. (We go out to dinner, alone, on our anniversary and the in-laws have often given us two days in Germany for a kid-free mini-vacation, but that's it for us until the next year.) So this year, for our tenth, we're getting greedy and planning a week-long trip to Iceland! We won't go until the summer - the in-laws will be doing the kid-sitting in Germany - so we haven't made any plans just yet. We're still in the exciting, we're-really-going-to-do-this stage. Any suggestions??

Oh, it's all so thrilling it makes me want to do crazy things like read sagas. Or make a t-shirt. Or seam my cardigan while knitting it. Or learn Icelandic.

When wee turned one (almost two years ago now), I knit her a doll from Clare Garland's Knitted Babes. I named her Sally and made her two dresses and little pair of undies.

Sally in her underwear two years ago

No idea where Sally is now (toy chest, maybe?) but now that wee is almost three and is potty training, underwear is a big deal in our house. Wee wears her underwear all day while at home and only changes into a diaper for sleeptime or when we're off somewhere where I'm not sure of reliable facilities. And when wee one puts on her underwear, dolly, wee's constant companion, has to put on hers. Um, well, Sally's.

(this week, wee's sporting a flute tattoo!)

It took two weeks and considerably more television than I'd expected, but wee's stripey Mandarin Petit sweater is now together, with two sleeves and incipient raglan shaping. I'm nearing the end!

Very slowly.

It's time for a breaky-break from all those stripes! I wouldn't want to knit anything too easy, however. Soooo....

A little stranded colorwork hat - the snowflake hat from Newton's Knitting - is like a mini vacation after dealing with all those balls of yarn in wee's stripy sweater. This hat will be a sample for a stranded colorwork class I'm teaching in March. It's such a lovely, simple pattern, perfect for beginners trying out stranding for the first time. And it makes a gorgeous hat!

I'm right up to the point where the background color changes and will be switching from "Deep Blue Sea" to "Maine Coast Blue". Awesome names, right? The yarn is Julia (from Nashua Handknits), which I totally love. In a perfect world, they'd give you more yardage on the ball, but otherwise the yarn is a dream.

Dream yarn. Fabulous colors. Easy to knit. This project just makes me smile.