just finished custom

I am in love with these woolies...they are my latest custom. So they don't belong to me, and they're a bit too boyish for us. But I love them anyway.

The colorway is "Woodland in Spring" by Mosaic Moon. The yarn is Cestari Superfine merino. After a quick soak in some wool wash, these longies are super soft.

The owl pocket is a free pattern from Wooly Wonder. I offered to add them to these longies because the colorway just seemed to call for a little owl.

i shouldn't have asked, although i'm glad i did

Tonight I read my girls "The Cat in the Hat" before bedtime. As you probably know, the Cat in the Hat and Things 1 and 2 make a huge mess of Sally and her brother's house while their mother is out. The Cat in the Hat manages to clean up the house before their mother comes home, and he leaves no trace that he was there. The book ends:

Then our mother came in
And she said to us two,
"Did you have any fun?
Tell me. What did you do?"

And Sally and I did not know
What to say.
Should we tell her
The things that went on there that day?

Should we tell her about it?
Now, what SHOULD we do?
Well...
What would YOU do
If your mother asked YOU?

Every time we read this story, my girls answer the same way. The wouldn't tell me what had happened.

But tonight my oldest said, "I would probably tell her that the tissue box fell into the toilet and we got it out, dried it off, and put it back on top of the toilet."

And since I wasn't fully paying attention to what they were saying (because they give me the same answer every time), it took me a minute to catch on.

So yes, the tissue box fell into the toilet, my girls wiped it off, and then returned it without telling anyone.

I guess this is why they recommend reading to your children for 20 minutes each day. Had I not read to them tonight, I would never have known.

a late Happy New Year (and a coupon code)!

I'm always running late...but here's a sincere wish for a happy new year!

As a thank you to all of my customers, and to those who read my blog, please use code "blog5" (but without the quotation marks) for $5 off any order at Pumpkin Pie Baby. This will even work on sale items. The code will be good through 2010.

if only i could knit and read at the same time

There are people who can knit and read at the same time. I'm not one of them.

I signed up for a book group through my library that starts this Thursday. I've known about it for weeks, but given that I'm almost always scatterbrained, I didn't pick up the book until yesterday. So now I'm faced with reading A Passage to India by E. M. Forster by Thursday. It's 362 pages long, and I have three children ages 5 and under who won't tolerate listening to a book read aloud this long without pictures. I don't know how I'm going to make this happen. I've been reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck since November and I'm only on page 280.

Now I'm an adult, and this is just a reading group. I won't be graded on this. But it's being led by a professor. And I imagine myself and how I felt 15 years ago when I used to sit in my undergrad English classes and hope that the professor wouldn't call on me because I hadn't managed to read the book. I can remember this anxiety so well that this morning I briefly entertained the idea of taking No Doz and staying up all night Wednesday.

I only did this once by the way, taking No Doz that is, and while I managed to read an entire book on Anais Nin in one night, by the next morning I couldn't remember a thing I had read, and I felt like a tape running in fast forward. This was also a time period where I indulged in making mix tape upon mix tape...but that's another post.

So I wish I could read and knit at the same time, because I have this compulsive need to knit something new right now. And I get itchy reading--wishing I could be knitting--and I get itchy knitting--wishing I could be reading.

So I looked up a pattern for a bookmark and found this lovely pattern. I don't have any sock yarn that isn't being used right now, so I cast on in worsted weight cotton and figure I'll make my mother a dishcloth out of it. And since the library gave me a perfectly fine paper bookmark, I figure I've got that base covered for now.

Now I don't know what to do with myself--finish the book or the dishcloth--but I'm planning an all-nighter tomorrow.

I almost kept this one.

One of the things I love about knitting for others is that I get sent all kinds of beautiful yarn to knit. Last month a customer sent me a large bag full of wool scraps to be knit into pants and a hat for her son. I had made my husband a stocking cap a couple of years ago so I offered to make her one, scaled down to size for her son.

This is the resulting hat:

I absolutely love this hat. I'm not entirely sure why, but I wanted to keep it for my own children. I have girls, and the older girls are into be "girly," so neither of them would have worn it. But it's got the sweetest shape and I love the mixture of colors. I wish I had taken a photo after I had attached the pom pom, but I forgot.

These are the pants I posted about last month. They are now on their way to their new home, and I did send the hat along too.

a custom in progress

I'm currently working on a pair of custom mixed longies. The mama sent me over 10 colorways and the challenge is to blend them together so that there aren't any big blocks of one colorway. I sent her progress pictures last night and she loves them! Her reaction is such a relief to me because there are a hundred different ways these longies could turn out, and I hoped my vision matched hers.

Here they are so far:

I'm hoping to have them done by this weekend. 12" inseams here I come!

reverse rice stitch cowl

Here's the back story for my cowl. This past August, something happened that made my husband feel badly for me. I honestly cannot remember what that something was. I'm going to guess he felt badly that I was sleep deprived and overwhelmed as a new mother of 3 because that was how I felt just about every day last summer (and now).

So, my husband came home from work with a beautiful skein of hand dyed alpaca yarn from a local farm. He had stopped at a farmer's market during the day and had bought me a little treat to make me feel better. If I'm remembering correctly, I believe he also brought me home some lobster, and at the time I was too embarrassed by his generosity to tell him that my parents had already taken me out for lobster earlier in the day. But I got over my embarrassment quickly and enjoyed the dinner he brought me.

On to the cowl: I wanted to make sure that I knit the yarn he gave me into something special. I spent some time looking online at different stitch patterns and came across the rice stitch. What I liked about rice stitch is that the right and wrong sides of the fabric are different but equally beautiful. I designed the cowl to be worn with either the right or wrong sides facing out. Either way will work. In all honesty, though, I find myself liking the "wrong" side of the cowl more.

This is one of the first knit items I've ever designed myself, and I'm really happy with the results. The picot edge was a last minute decision as I was binding off and I think it adds another layer of texture to the cowl.

The "wrong" side first:

The rice stitch:

I will post a pattern for the cowl as soon as I get it written up.