little feet, big sky

Arrrgh – I can’t believe I’ve finished my first pair of socks!! *pauses and looks around* Umm.. now that I think about it, where did I put them?

They came out awesome. Perfect, size 8 fit! I’m so totally impressed with Charlene Schurch’s instructions on foot size, such that I’m asking all my family and friends what their shoe size is. My aunt explicitly told me not to bring her shoes for Christmas. :-)

I know Kitten deflated my belated pipe dreams of knitting up Christmas prezzies in time, but these socks took me about a day each. With a little more relaxed knitting, I could crank out a pair in a couple of days. I know that sounds overly ambitious, but hell, I didn’t even use markers for the short row heel on the second sock. I thought about it, but realized all that slipping them on and off would just slow me down.

I’m itching to start another pair, but have too many other projects to finish, including the cable scarf and the kitty pi.

I had whipped most of these up to donate over a year ago for a time-specific cause and had a batch left over that never got sent in. My mother recently started a new job in a hospital with a NICU that could use preemie items, so I pulled these out and made a few more.

I don’t really follow a pattern, since I want variable sizes to fit newborns and preemies of all sizes. I use random yarns and hooks and play with making a 10-stitch straight swatch until I get a gauge I like.

Chain 3, and work 12 dc in the first stitch. Join with a slip stitch. You can continue to work in rounds, or work in a spiral. Work 2 dc in each stitch around until you have 28 stitches. (How you play with that number, 28, is the key to a larger or smaller hat.) Work a single dc in each stitch around until the hat is as long as you want. Finish off the round with a slip stitch, or if you’re working in a spiral, work a sc, then a slip stitch to end the spiral. Add a picot or shell stitch border for a more frilly effect.

On a side note, the road trip went horribly. My sister got into a massive argument on the way back on Sunday over me being overprotective because I pulled the sunshade cover over Spice’s carseat just in case her son threw something. Mind you, he bit my sister just 6 hours before. I told her to drop me off at the next fast food stop and had the spouse come pick me up. ::shudder:: What a lunatic.

I agreed to drive up to Salinas this weekend with my sister adn my nephew to visit my mother. She’ll be here in in an hour to pick me and Spice up.

I’m nervous about this for all sorts of reasons. First of all, my sister and I have been at each other’s throats for the past year, in a civil kind of way. We (violently) disagree on parenting, and why her son often displays such atrocious behavior like hitting and kicking. I also think she’s gotten terribly defensive and in general, we’re not quite good friends. In fact, if we weren’t blood, and that I have no other siblings and that neither of us talk to my father either, I’d have written her off long ago. I also worry about her son tossing a sippy cup or something at my baby’s head… no hard objects in the backseat.

In spite of all this, I agreed to a five-hour drive this weekend. The main reason is that while the spouse will be here, I’ll be away for the holidays and would like to see my mother before I go. I could drive up separately during the week, but I have a huge list of things to get done in the next month, from passports to pediatrician appointments and will need that time to get sorted. And maybe, just perhaps, being stuck in a car with my sister for 10 hours round-trip would help us come to an easier truce of some sort.

The spouse is highly doubtful of this, but has promised not to say “I told you so”. What a gem.

I got the spouse this Mylar balloon when he was in the hospital and it came home with us. I tend to throw out balloons when they deflate, but this one is still going!

The same thing happened with the spouse’s birthday balloon. Kinda makes it less special when they last forever.

crumble topping:
1/3 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cinnamon

fruit base:
1/4 cup of water or milk (optional)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract (optional)
1-2 cups chopped fruits of your choice (apples, strawberries, etc.)

Preheat oven to 350 deg. If using milk/water and vanilla, add to fruit and mix well. Spread fruit in the bottom of a baking dish. Mix crumble topping ingredients together and scatter evenly on top of fruit. Bake for approx. 30 minutes.

This is a great way to use up slightly old or over-ripe fruit. I can clear through the many ancient apples in the fruit bowl by making this at least once a week. Since it’s so easy and fast, I can often ask the spouse if he’d like crumble for dessert while we’re serving dinner, and have it ready by the time dessert rolls around. He likes it with a little creme fraiche on top, but it’s equally good with vanilla ice cream.

I was inspired by Kitten’s awesome knee-high socks to finally try knitting a sock. I crocheted a pair a long time ago that turned out okay – neat, but a little strange. I really wanted to knit them for a little more drape. I have oodles of sock yarns and Charlene Schurch’s Sensational Knitted Socks, but was a little daunted to casually start a pair.

Turns out that worsted weight knitted socks are super fast. I was working on another pair of longies, using #6 dpns and as I quickly knitted up a leg, I realized it was almost sock-size. I had some merino superwash sock yarn in worsted weight, gifted to me two Christmases (sp?) ago by the spouse, so I gave it a whirl – fun!

I chose the 5-stitch toes-up pattern, since I was scared of running out of yarn. 100yds seems like soooo little. :-) The 5-stitch patterns in the book were a little bland, but the yarn-over cable pattern looked pretty.

I cast on late Tuesday night and finished up late last night, which was awesome and I used the EZ stretchy bind off, which worked great. I’m so happy with the results, and can’t wait to start the second one. I wound the skein last night and it’s ready to go today.

After watching this CHOW OBSESSIVES on pizza, I really wanted to make homemade pizza from scratch. We have plenty of basil in the garden and are always hacking it down to make pesto. We picked up some buffalo mozzarella ($8) and heirloom tomatoes ($2) from the Hollywood Farmers’ market. I really wanted to make my own pizza dough, but time was running out and I ended up buying some from the prepared foods guy at Whole Foods ($4) and froze it as soon as I got home.

Of course, I didn’t get it out of the freezer to thaw three hours in advance, so I found a nifty quick way to do it. Get a gallon ziploc bag and spray the inside with cooking spray, then toss the lump of frozen dough in and seal tightly. Then fill your sink or a large bowl with hot water from the tap and let the bag sit in it. I came back to mine about an hour & a half later to find it completely thawed. :-)

The spouse rolled out the dough, and we spread down some olive oil with crushed garlic, then the basil and tomatoes and the mozzarella last. A light sprinkle of sea salt and into the oven it went. In hindsight, I figure we could have rolled out the pizza a bit more thinly, and also maybe put the mozzarella down first. Perhaps a super-thin layer of tomato sauce would have been nice, too. But the end result was fabulous anyway.

It’s the middle of October and I’m in a bit of a knitting panic. I had wanted to gift hand knitted items for the holidays to many, many friends and family and I just don’t think I’m going to be able to do as many as I’d like. :-(

The weather turned here suddenly over the weekend. I was up in the middle of the night and the winds were howling around and I realized it was fall already. It was chilly and I shivered a bit that night, being too lazy to go downstairs to get another comforter. The next day, some conversation with the spouse yielded the discovery that the heating isn’t turning on. Joy.

I’ve been bundling up myself and Spice and am feeling the need for warmer clothing for her. Yes, we live in sunny, warm Hollywood, CA. But our house is in the hills and shaded by lots of trees and is older and badly insulated. The downstairs living room, kitchen and guest room are all quite cold and when it’s windy outside, you can actually feel the draft like a whisper of a breeze indoors! All of this is just to point out why thick woolen soakers on Spice is not such a crazy idea…

Since I crochet faster than I knit, against rationality, I bought Victoria Schiffen’s Dragonfly Longie pattern to whip up some longies. I did because I had started a pair of knitted longies off the top of my head in super bulky Burly Spun, learned how to do short rows on fly only to realize that I didn’t understand the general butt shape I needed. For some reason, crochet just makes so much more structural sense to my brain, so anything I crochet first makes more sense when knitted later. So I bought the pattern and felt instantly foolish because if I’d just sat down with a cup of tea and a sketch book, I could have figured it out myself and saved myself $12. *sigh*

(Hmm.. Harley is leaning against my cold feet. Warm cat. Maybe I could make cat bed slippers somehow, to always keep a warm cat on my feet…)

Anyhow, the longies turned out pretty nice. She suggests a #7 hook, which I do not have. I have three G/6’s and four H/8’s, but not a single #7? Odd. I used the #8 and it’s a little ‘holey’ for my liking, but that could be because I used Lion Brand Fisherman, which always runs a little thin for worsted weight. I’ll be trying the next one with Cascade 220 and a G/6. I also strayed from the pattern in a very impatient-me type of way. The bulk of the pattern is worked in the round by joining each round with a slip stitch, chaining one and starting the next round. For some reason, I hate doing this and prefer to work in one long spiral, so I did that for the legs and the hips/waist. You can only really tell from the back, where the spiral starts near the center butt piece, and at the “end” where the fpdc/bpdc ribbing starts. I can’t tell at all on the legs. I haven’t decided yet if the convenience is worth the look; from other people’s pictures, the joined rounds result in what looks like a seam running up from the middle of the butt, which I think I find equally unappealing. I haven’t quite decided yet. :-)

These longies are super fast, but it’s still pushing my other on-the-needles projects out..

• Tan cable scarf in Cascade 220. about 70% done and holding.
• Kitty Pi in orange varigated Bernat Felting. For Irix, and also about 70%. Needs felting.
• Wristwarmers in Brown Sheep’s Handpaint Originals. %80. Not sure why I’m just not finishing these yet!
• Grey dog sweater in Lion Brand’s Jiffy. Just needs to be seamed and a neckline added… note my use of the word “just”. Again.

What’s awful is that this pushed out the other projects I wanted to do by Christmas.

• Kitty Pi in grey for Harley. Using Brown Sheep Burly Spun.
• A shawl for my mother’s friend Dorathy.
• Socks for me in Colinette’s Jitterbug.
• Red hat for the spouse. I’ve been promising this for, like 3 years.
• Scarf for the spouse. I picked up the yarn for it, Garnstudio’s DROPS Alapaca in Goteborg maybe 2 years ago. *sigh* See a pattern here?
• A cute hat/scarf/mitten set for my nephew.
• A red and black scarf for my cousin.

This on top of Spice and household-y things and trying to get sorted for traveling over Christmas. Eek!

Our local farmers’ market, the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, has oysters. *drool* They started selling there while I was pregnant and I would walk by and sigh a little. (I happily ate sushi while I was pregnant, but got sick once from raw oysters, so I thought it best to wait.) Last Sunday, I bought a dozen Luna for $10 and sampled one right at the stall – delish!

I had picked up some from Whole Foods the week before, but the farmers’ market ones were so much better. I was practically purring with each one. :-) I know they’re an acquired taste for most, but I love, love, love oysters. I either eat them unadulterated or with a little concoction of rice vinegar and finely minced shallots. The spouse made me a martini and I was just in heaven! I have decided that Sundays evenings shall be now known as Martini & Oyster night!

I’m still using cloth diapers on Spice, but only at home and during the day. I was getting frustrated with lugging a small suitcase with me when we would go out and felt she slept more soundly at night in disposables. (Though lately, she can nap for hours in a cloth diaper, so I might go back to using them at night, too.)

The recent challenge is that she’s starting to outgrow her current cloth prefolds. I usually do a bikini twist or newspaper fold and secure it with a Thirsties wrap-style cover. I’ve started knitting my own covers, though, and I’d need to snappi the prefold in place.. but Spice is a little too big to snappi them on anymore. I went online to look up the next size prefold and got a little distracted by the pretty fitted diapers. I think I could appreciate them more now, considering all the runny breastmilk poop. The downside is that they’re so expensive at about $13/each, compared to prefolds at $1-2/each. Thankfully, they’re fun and easy to make and are an excellent way to use up the tons of cheap flannel receiving blankets we had lying around.

DiaperJungle has an excellent page of free and $$ diaper and cover patterns, including Ottobre’s PDF pattern. I mainly followed Dianna’s How to Sew a Fitted Cloth diaper post, which was perfect since my sewing skills generally suck. :-)

I used old flannel receiving blankets for the outside. Most of ours were Target Dwell Studio ones, which make for cute modern-ish diapers. I used old flannel pillowcases and sheets for the against-the-skin fabric, and old Ikea cotton ones for the inside fabric that you stitch the soaker pad onto. For soaker pads, I used these Gerber prefolds I had picked up at Target before I knew any better. They were lousy as diapers for so many reasons. I used them as burp cloths at first and after the fishy breastmilk incident, I promptly forgot about them in a drawer. I trifolded them and cut them to fit, then stitched the trifold lengthwise to the right width. Oh, and SewShoppe sells diapering Aplix.

The end result was pretty neat – simple aplix-closing fitted diapers. I can leave off the wrap for more breathability, use a wool wrap for a little wetness protection, or use a Thirsties for completely dry. They’re on the generous side, so I imagine they’ll last a few months. And considering the first few have used up fabric around the house, they’re practically free.