Handmade Christmas 2018

I didn't make very many Christmas gifts in 2018 - I had a 7-month-old, I'd been back at work for a rather overwhelming fall semester, and we were flying cross-country to visit family for the holiday.  In the end, I made two gifts, both from kits I bought from Connecting Threads.  The first one was a Santa Claus apron for my husband, who cooks and bakes a lot (since our son was born in May 2018, he's made dinner almost every night and baked bread and desserts at least two or three times a week, as I've struggled to keep my weight up while breastfeeding).  He also gets really into the Christmas spirit, so when I saw the kit for the apron I really wanted to make it for him.  The kit was really well done and pretty easy to sew up - you can't quite see it in the picture above, but the apron has two large patch pockets on the front, so it's quite functional!

The other gift I made in 2018 was an advent calendar for my son.  This kit is for a quilted advent calendar with small pockets, which are topstitched onto the quilted background so they are almost invisible.  This is really adorable, and hopefully he will enjoy it as he gets older.  This year, we put little dove chocolates in the pockets, and he really enjoyed eating them when we remembered to let him (and he learned to say "please" for his chocolate!).  For next year, we need to figure out a location and method for hanging the advent calendar where we can see it and where toddler hands and dog mouths can't reach it easily.

Lambie slippers for Easter

On Tuesday, I saw that the Yarn Harlot had made little lambie slippers for her niece and nephew for Easter.  My niece is Greek Orthodox, so she celebrates Easter today, and l decided that she needed adorable lambie slippers for Easter, too.  Never mind that the Yarn Harlot lives in Canada and here it is already eighty degrees and humid.   These were quick and fun to knit and l think they came out pretty cute.

Handmade Christmas

My dad and his wife collect paintings of the mountains that are the view from their kitchen window by local artists they've met.  The walls of their house are overflowing with gorgeous landscapes.  They are also really difficult to shop for.  If there's something one of them wants, they buy it, and they don't like to have too much stuff lying around.  So for my dad's Christmas gift this year, Robert made a maple candleholder with the mountains carved into the front.  My dad has always really liked light natural wood, and this past summer he had the kitchen re-done with maple cabinets.  Robert and I think it turned out beautifully, and we hope my dad enjoys it!  We gave my dad's wife this shawl, and it seemed like she likes it a lot.

My mom made these hot beverage cozies for Robert and me.  The coffee press cozy is made from her handspun yarn that she and I dyed with coffee last August.  The bottle cozy matches one of my favorite pair of socks (which my mom knitted for me when I was in college).

Last but not least, Huck got this awesome bandanna from my cousin, who has recently started a business making these and doggie bow ties.  He looks so dapper in it!  He also seems to like (or at least not notice) wearing it.  It's cleverly constructed to fit on the collar, so he doesn't have something else tied around his neck.  I've tried to make him wear stuff before, and he's never been willing to put up with it, so I'm impressed that he is so happy to wear this!

30 hour baby quilt ... and a knitted dog

Two weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon, I checked the mail and found a birth announcement.  This baby's parents are college friends of Robert's, and on Saturday morning at breakfast I decided to make a quilt for him.  He is already 6 weeks old or so, and I really didn't want to add another long- or even medium-term project to my list, so I decided to make a strip quilt using fabric from the Hawthorne Threads scrap packs I got several months ago.  I started at about 11am, and in a few hours I had the fabrics and layout chosen and the strips cut.

I didn't have much of a plan on the strip widths.  I decided to make the quilt 45" long, so I figured out that with 15 fabrics, I needed their unfinished width to average 3.5".  I knew I wanted the fish and penguin fabrics to be pretty wide so the animals would feature prominently, so I made those quite a bit wider and the others narrower in varying widths, and kept track of the total length as I went along to make sure I was on track to hit the target.  I think it worked wonderfully!

I pieced together two pieces of Warm and Natural batting leftover from other projects, trimmed the top so it was about 32" wide, and quilted a line on each side of each seam.  It was super easy and fast!  I had all the quilting done and the quilt trimmed on Saturday evening.  Sunday morning I cut and pressed the binding before church, and when I got home I machine stitched it to the front and back.  I had one very ugly corner on the back, but I covered it up with the label.  Then it got a trip through the washer and dryer, and Huck helped me photograph it!  It was finished before dinner on Sunday afternoon.

This baby has a big sister, who is about a year and a half old.  When we moved in March, we sent our friends and family a postcard with our new address and a picture of Huck.  This little girl's dad told us that she really liked the picture of the dog an got excited about seeing it hanging on their fridge, so I decided to knit her a dog of her own as a big sister gift.  This is the labrador pattern from the book Knit Your Own Dog.  I knit it in a heavy worsted superwash merino that I've had in my stash for at least 5 years.  The yarn was a lot heavier than the recommended yarn, and I used up pretty much exactly the whole skein for the body, head, legs, ears, and tail.  Luckily I had a skein of grey, too, so I could give the doggie a belly that still pretty much matched.  I sewed up the seams (and there were many, for some reason I don't understand the legs and head are knit flat and then seamed) with black sewing thread.

I think the dog and the quilt turned out well, and I hope their recipients will enjoy them!

CMS/Colloquium - a mini sock!

This project was an impulse buy from my most recent Webs order.  It's a miniature sock blocker keychain, and it came with a pattern for a sock to fit it. 

I knitted the sock using some leftover yarn from a full-sized pair of socks that I knitted for my mom a few years ago.  It only took about an hour, and it's super cute!  Next time, I'll make the leg a bit longer.  I'm going to make a bunch of mini socks for it, so it can wear different socks on different days!

Here is where the second sock was at the beginning of CMS on Thursday - very nearly done! I just had a few more rows. I unfortunately discovered that either the second skein of yarn was a yard or two shorter than the first, or my knitting tension wasn't quite the same as it was on the first sock, so before I could graft the cuffs, I had to "tink" a few rows of the first sock so they would match. Then I grafted the tops, and I managed to weave in the ends on one of them before the end of colloquium. Now I just have to weave in the ends on the other one, and then tonight I'll get to start a new project!! Here's where they were at the end of colloquium:
I was at Target last night, and they've started to put Easter stuff on sale. They had a bunch of really adorable Easter baskets, but these adorable buckets were less expensive. I got one large one and one small, and I'm planning to use them to store projects around the apartment.