Spending the Afternoon with Old Friends

Squid went out to play with some friends and a babysitter yesterday. The Mole made the best of the opportunity to sleep without someone pulling on his toes or folding his ears inside themselves by taking a three hour nap. Whee! Did i knit? I did not. But I did photograph one shelf of the stash for input into Ravelry.

Let's peruse some highlights, shall we?



Ok, though lovely, it's not the most exciting yarn to look at. Peace Fleece Hemlock. It was going to be an Everyday Cardigan from the Peace Fleece pattern line. But then I remembered this blog post about the most beautiful bog jacket i've ever seen, and I decided to abandon the Everyday Cardigan for now and make the bog jacket from this yarn. So the photo is nothing to speak of, but the thought of making myself a beautiful tweedy green bpg jacket is exciting. And I've remembered how much I adore Peace Fleece and how I want to knit about a thousand things from Peace Fleece.



I also found this tweed - from my former LYS near my apartment in Milan. Yum. Merino with a touch of Rayon. Soft, fluffy, and tweedy good. I know exactly what I want to knit with this yarn, but it's not nursing friendly so I think it'll wait one more year.



Blackberry Ridge Grapes on the Vine. Delicious felted merino. Stretchy, soft, barely pills. Ever. I have 4 skeins of this. I think it should be a long cardi for the Squid. Or maybe a dress.



Last but not least, this Rowan Wool Cotton. I have fifteen skeins of this, in the most extraordinary color. I need to make myself something stunning out of this yarn. Not sure what.

I also found my stash of Blue Sky Alpacas organic cotton. Slated for a Top Secret Project. And a couple of other handpainted merinos that have no project in their future. I'm enjoying photographing and cataloging all of my yarns. Since I've got little time for knitting with it, dreaming about it is keeping me pretty happy right about now.

Speaking of knitting, blue chenille bunny is nearly complete. I ordered some plastic eyes and even a plastic bunny nose to see if it makes the toy seem less offensively hand-made to the Squid. We shall see.

Monday in the Park with Mole

The Mole got his first ride on a swing. I had to prop him up with all manner of things, but he loved it. The angle is actually perfect for his little mole-eyes to peer down at his sister. She pushed him on the swing and they were both in heaven. I was snipping "ok, now, gentle..." every 2.5 seconds but they were conspiring against me, and every time she pushed him until I thought his wee head would snap off, I would repeat "ok now, gentle..." and she would say "but he liiiiiiiiikes it!" And indeed, he would chortle and gaze lovingly at her. As his head lolled about.

I have not, I am saddened to report, yet mastered knitting in the park with two kids. I don't remember at what point I was able to knit with the Squid. I may have to cast on some socks (gasp) and give it a shot one of these days.

My Blue Period

I tend to shy away from the color blue. Years of school uniforms with their powder blue peter pan collars and navy jumpers and kilts have put me off of it. Yet these days I find myself surrounded by blue.

The coffee shop (more about that later, I promise) is largely blue. I don't know why I was drawn to it - but it's all shades of blues and greens. Of course there's also the blue chenille. And now that I have a son, I've been wading through boxes of hand-me-down clothes - no one likes to throw away baby clothes, but we Manhattanites have no room to store anything so at the first possible occasion we dump our 37 thousand boxes of outgrown clothing onto the next victim. I literally have hand me downs from over a dozen people. And all of them are filled with baby blue. Lots and lots of baby blue.

And then something possessed me to do this:



I've covered my natural light red-brown with black, blue, and purple. Excuse the cell-phone photo cutting me off at the nose.

I'm actually a pretty conservative person. I have no idea what brought this on. I'm chalking it up to post-partum hormones and an utter lack of "me time". In any event, my biggest concern is the coming autumn and the sheer number of green and brown tweed yarns I have saved up to knit for myself. I was feeling all wild and planned to break out of my normal blacks and charcoals with shocking colors like chocolate brown and pine green. Now I'm going to have to re-color my hair to match my yarn.

Chenille, How I Loathe Thee

So I've had these 2 skeins of cotton chenille forEVer (actually i had 4 but I just gave 2 away). The Squid wanted a sweater. No, a blanket. No, a bunny. No, a blanket. No, a bunny.

Anyway, she finally insisted it needed to be a blanket. Not a biki mind you, a BLANKET. What's the difference you might ask? I did. A biki is a small blanket which one cuddles. A blanket is big enough to cover one whilst one sleeps. Hooray for me.



So I got to work on the blanket. Just in time for her to insist it be a bunny. So I didn't frog the blanket but started in on the next skein for the bunny. Just to see how long it lasts. Remember how I said I would never make the kid another toy? I'm making it anyway. Now I have two kids. If she hates it I'll give it to the other one. He'll drool on anything, he's not picky.



I did finish the pixie, by the way, kind of mostly. It's neither stuffed nor seamed but that's intentional. I need to make more pixies, of different varieties, so I can print up the pattern. And I need step by step photos of some of the stuffing and sculpting parts. So I'm saving all of the carcasses to seam up at the same time during one big photo shoot. I've started another one in the meantime.

Back To Work

A nearly-finished pixie carcass that's taken me over a week. It's progress, right?

I have all of these beautiful Mosaic Moon yarn odds and ends begging to become toys. And I have all of these toy patterns begging to be typed up.

So little by little I'm trying to chip away at it all.

Everything else is going well. The Squid's out of school until September 10 and we've been all going insane... I mean, having a wonderful time together. Trips to the Connecticut suburbs on a weekly basis with the Squid's wee friend - his heavily tattooed mom and me with my blue and purple hair (did I mention that my hair is now blue and purple?) are turning heads in the sleepy suburbs. We take the train in and out and I think the entire neighborhood heaves a sigh of relief when we leave them.

But the summer was made for the suburbs, I think. Backyards and sprinklers and swingsets and the beach.... The Squid is beside herself and I get to kick up my feet with the tiny Mole without someone saying "what are we going to do now, Mamma?"

Photos

Since I've got no knitting to show, I figure I can show some kids.



Here we see wee man being his usual jovial self. He has that little half-grin most of the time. Watching his wild sister fly about the room is is favorite pasttime and generally elicits a little chortle to go along with the grin.

And speaking of the wild sister...



Here's my little daydreamer.

Still notsomuch with the knitting

I want to knit. Every day I have some new plan for what I'm going to knit next. And yet.

On the actually getting things accomplished side of the coin wee man is growing well and healthy, though we have discovered that his mole-like qualities come from bilateral ptosis - meaning that the muscles of both eyelids don't fuction properly, so his eyes don't open fully. He'll have surgery in a yearish. They generally wait until the kid is 4 or 5 but his doctor says that this is a "pretty good case of it" and it'll probably make things hard when it comes time to walk. Though given that he's rolling over like a mad fool at 4 months, I'm thinking to dress him in velcro and stick him to the carpet. With a 4 year old and all of her teenytiny toy bits lying around, I really am not very interested in a mobile baby right now.

What else? I have successfully opened a coffee shop in Manhattan, that's pretty cool. I love it and it's air conditioned. Pretty good coffee, too. And deeeeelicious cupcakes.

Another interesting tidbit: my husband scared the pants off of me last week when I found that his pulse was in the 40s and his temperature was 95. Huh? I looked it up and found all kinds of things about poor oxygenation and heart disease. After 2 trips to the cardiologist and a 24-hour EKG (that made the Squid laugh like crazy) it turns out he's fine. has some insane heart murmur that is, they say, perfectly alright, but it's impossible to read his pulse accurately without an EKG and his body temp is just weirdly low. Who knows.

The Squid is perfect in every way. I cannot get over how much I love that kid. And when I say to her "I cannot get over how much I love you, kid," she replies: "I cannot get over how much you kiss me, mom." Oh well. By the way, she intends to be either an astronaut or a stretchy toy maker when she grows up. She says we can have stores next to each other where I can sell not-stretchy toys and she can sell stretchy toys. So if someone goes into my shop and asks for something stretchy, I can send them her way. And if someone goes into her shop and asks for something not stretchy she can sell them on the virtues of stretchy toys and convince them to buy things from her store.

Anything else? Oh yes, the raffles for my friend's family went well. I wish I could say with great enthusiasm that we raised over $2000. I just can't say it with great enthusiasm because it went to buying a headstone for a kid who will forever be three. I hung out with his family this past week. There was a hole in the summer. Natty was sorely, sorely missed.