The End...and Beginning Again

 And so, that's the end of that.
The project that started months ago, the mighty SO MANY BABIES project, is finally at an end.
The final project, for Sister-in-Law H's twin girls, is finally done.
The original pattern was the Christmas Babies, but as discussed before I didn't want to do set-in sleeves that small. So instead we ended up with Hundreds, which is only one size, but it all worked out fine. It seems to be a proper newborn size, so there you go.

And here they are!

Blocking on my living room floor.

As a reminder, we did the Snowman and the Christmas Tree. I took many pictures of the finishing up process. First, the easier of the two:

The basic white sweater for the Snowman.

The custom red-and-white scarf, complete with terrible pom poms.

The basic white cap and carrot nose.

Figuring out the placement of the little snowman hat.

The final look of the Snowman hat.

Basic black buttons finishes up the Snowman attire.

We don't know which twin will be which, Niece K or Niece B. We saw them over Thanksgiving and were planning on doing a little photo shoot, but babies don't understand posing and have already shown a disinterest in any position that doesn't involve being held by another human. That's their prerogative right now, I suppose, for now. I'll try to post more pictures when available. 

Anyway, the Christmas Tree:

The full monty: white buttons for contrast.

 I was originally thinking about light bulb buttons, but I was told Sister-in-Law H was glad for sweaters they could wear on a daily basis, rather than just for special and Christmas. So I decided to go for the less thematic but more user-friendly white buttons.

The base of the hat.

This hat was obnoxious. The ridges are a few rows of stockinette and picot edging - cast on 2 and cast off 4. Endless. But cute in the end.
Decorating the hat:

The materials.

My mother-in-law gave me these beautiful hand-painted metal buttons.

Can't be a Christmas tree without lights, right?

For application, I put all the buttons in my broken knitting bowl and had my Tall Hubby pull random buttons for each row.

It turned out so cute!

And so, that's the sets. I'm really happy with how they turned out, and really happy to be able to move onto other things.
...Even though other thing will likely continue to involve small sweaters for my two little nieces. There are worse things :)

Progress!...mostly

Well, there's been some progress while traveling an awful lot.
First there was a train, where I found the different ways to wind yarn in a terrible chair...

This ended up being the more comfortable of my options. 

Also, if you're keen eyed, you'll have noticed the feet in the front of the compartment...

This is my Tall Hubby, fast asleep after a 12 hour night shift prior to departure.

Then there was a couple of airports and planes...

Casting on.

We also did a lot of last minute planning in my favorite style. 

And then we were in England!

Yay!

We spent three days slamming our way around London, hitting as much as humanly possible in the time given. I even managed to get some knitting done. 

Queuing in front of...

Westminster Abbey

It was a great time. After three exhausting days, we took another train to Southampton to continue our journey on a very large boat.

She is, in fact, very large.

She is stunningly beautiful.

We took a seven day cruise across the Atlantic Ocean. It was great fun, surrounded by nothing but water and being in the lap of luxury. 

Again, gorgeous.

Our dining room, which was technically in the lowest level of finery. 

There was lots of time to read.

There was lots of time and space to knit and read and nap and just relax. There also was a knitting group on board that I only made it to once. 

There were quite a lot of people that showed up.

And I did in the end get quite a lot of knitting done on the trip as a whole, what with long hours on the planes and trains and ships. 

I was working on my Sister-in-Law H's baby sets. 

About halfway through the voyage. 

The snowman's scarf

I will admit to feeling weird about knitting some things so obviously Christmas-sy in the early fall. But it helped a lot. It gave me a nice jump on the project. 

I also worked on it prior to the ArtPrize Adventure Race. 

Handy that baby things are small and portable. 

Adventure races are my way around proper, straight running. There was a biking section, including an offroad portion that was entirely terrifying. 

It doesn't look so bad,but on a bike with skinny tires...

The other half was a running section through the streets of Grand Rapids towards the end of ArtPrize, the gigantic city-wide art festival that takes over the city in the mid to late fall. The adventure race is like a scavenger hunt for adults. You get a map, a compass, and a time limit to find as many markers as possible. 

The marker, which is easily hidden in plain sight. 

We've been having a lot of adventures recently :)

Now for Something Completely Different

I explained in my last post about all the knitting that is going on surrounding my siste-in-law and her gestating twin baby girls, right? Right. And how I gave up on the idea of christening blankets, which turned out to be a good idea as I guess my mother-in-law had been wanting to do that anyway. So I guess everyone wins...?

Either way, I still needed something to knit. I wanted it simple after that monstrosity of a lace-weight lace blanket, but still in theme. This is kind of the idea the nursery is going: 

And it just so happened I had gray yarn in my stash from my master plan of knitting for babies. So I went rooting through my Ravelry and found this pattern which seemed appropriate: Radiating Star Blanket. I figured they would need actually warm blankets, this being Michigan, and the star pattern would fit in with the theme of the nursery, color- and shape-wise. It's knit in a circle, which is great for me, and it's mostly knit stich and yarn overs, with a few decreases to keep it even. I started in and everything was going swimmingly:

Isn't the star pretty? The problem came when I left the pattern at home for a day. I figured I knew more or less what was going on with the pattern of yarn overs and decreases, I wanted to knit, so I just kept going. Whoops. 

Not a bad whoops at all. See the pattern is supposed to cut out almost rectangular sections at regular intervals, like so:

From Ravelry user jackik71's Big Star

I got the first iteration started, but missed the turn off to start the one after that. Do you follow me? So there's the little star with 8 points, then a secondary bigger star off of that, then a third after that going out, with each section getting bigger but in the same general shape. Around the 3rd iteration they stop looking like petals or points and start looking more like rectangles. I missed that bit. So now I have the central star and the first points coming out from that:

See the star in the middle and the big points coming out from each pair?

All well and good, but now I'm off pattern. Do I try to get back on pattern, just with larger and larger sections each time? NO. Man that sounds like a lot of work. What I did instead was finish up the secondary points, then continue outward with the spiraling increases that actually increase the blanket's circumference. Don't worry, all will be clear by the time I knit a few more rounds. 

Look, it makes sense to me, it keeps life very very simple for this project, and I think it will make the star(s) in the middle more distinct anyway. Until I'm proved otherwise, we're going with this. 

I also need to get started on the project I'm actually SUPPOSED to be making as part of the mother/daughter-in-law swap. In lieu of blankets, they picked out these Christmas sweaters:

Modeled by the ugliest collection of baby dolls I have ever seen.

The twins are going to be November babies, so the Christmas sweaters will be their outfits for the first Christmas cards of their lives. Sister-in-Law H picked out the Christmas tree one:

With Sad Baby Doll model

and the snowman one: 

With Sleeping Baby Doll model

These were in an attempt to be gender neutral, as at the time she didn't know what they would be. The only alteration she wanted made was a red and white striped scarf, rather than gray. Whatever. 

Since I bought all the yarn and patterns for the blankets, my mother-in-law got the materials for the sweaters:

The Christmas tree yarn. Oddly named "Army Green", which doesn't seem quite right.

And the variety for the snowman. 

The hats, scarf, and booties I have no problem with. The problem I have is with the sweaters themselves. I think they're ugly. Seriously, set-in dropped shoulders on infants? Cardigans: great idea. Larger sizing so clothes go on easier: perfect. But sewing together and seaming up a sweater that small? Come on, give me a break. I am occasionally about challenges, but as we already found out, knitting is often something I want to be easy. There's enough stress and complication in my life without my knitting being irritating. So I'm scouting around for a different pattern that has sensible raglan shaping in the right gauge. 

No one will know the difference :)

The Point of It All...

So, here on this side of the world, there's been a bit of a knitting slump.
Remember this sweater?

I was worried about not having enough of the baby blue to finish the sleeves. I tried to be smart and before starting the sleeves I split the remaining blue yarn into two balls so at least the sleeves would be more or less even lengths. Good in theory...until my house became a mess and I now cannot find the 2nd ball of blue yarn to do the second sleeve. I am currently trying to decide if I should pitch the darn thing or just put it on scrap yarn and hope the other ball turns up eventually. 

Also, remember this one?

This was the start of one of two heirloom christening blankets for my soon-to-be nieces. I foolishly picked the harder of the two to start, figuring that it would take more time. Soon after this my mother-in-law, who is a highly accomplished lace knitter, approached me and asked if I would be willing to split projects with her. She was going to make two Christmas sweaters for the babies, but lace is more her thing. We agreed to each do one blanket and one sweater, which seemed a more doable division of later. I got to the end of the border, a few rows past the picture above and was at the start of the lace pattern. We had a long road trip coming up, so I decided to wait until I had hours of free time in the car to figure out the pattern. There were many trials and travails that I won't go into, but long story short I got 5 rows into the lace pattern, of the right side lace rows, after 5 or 6 hours of work, and Every. Single. One. Of. Them. had gone wrong. Every one. Each requiring much 'tinking' back or correction in farther rows. I was heartily sick of the damn thing, and I was only 10 rows in to the 44 row lace section, of which there needed to be 3-4 repetitions for length. Crap. 

I approached my long-suffering and ever-helpful mother-in-law and gave her my options. I was contemplating ripping the whole thing out and starting over, or just giving it to her. Seriously, I hated every stitch, which is not good when knitting something for people you love. She very graciously agreed that if I was not having fun and it was becoming a chore then it would be better to abandon it and she was willing to take it on, being much more experienced with lace patterns. Seriously, she just won a lace competition, this woman is so good. Check it out: http://www.needleworktraditions.com/needlework-contest/ , it's seriously insane. And she said I could knit both the sweaters, which is more my wheelhouse anyway, so I could still making something for the babies. 

I'm not happy about any of this. It feels like failure, I suppose because it is kind of a failure. The lost yarn is not entirely my fault (even though it mostly is, but I can ignore that), but the blanket absolutely is. I gave up. I chose to be done. 

But I think my mother-in-law had a good point. This whole knitting thing, this crazy obsessive thing that knitters do, is supposed to be FUN. Whether we enjoy the making more than the created object itself, or if we like having the thing that we can say we made with our own hands, or if we like both, knitting is supposed to be fun. Relaxing. This blanket was feeling like a chore and was no longer in any way enjoyable. To complete this blanket would have been nothing but bad vibes and evil thoughts and making me thoroughly uncomfortable and annoyed. None of those things are what I want to wrap around a baby. So I can accept that sometimes you have to give up a project for the sake of your sanity and that's okay. Just as I've been coming to accept that my ability to help people or not at work is not a measure of my worth as a human, I should accept the same with my knitting. My ability to produce knitted things of any quality is not a reflection of my ability to be a worthwhile human being. That may seems like a rather extreme comparison to make, but we all judge our own self-worth by something and more often than not it's not a fair scale. 

Don't be afraid to give up on something that is not making you happy, especially when it's something so inconsequential and something that is supposed to be fun. 

Moving Right Along...

I am almost at the end of this self-appointed nonsense. 6 small baby projects done. I'm down to the 6 month sweater for my friend Fish and his wife's second son who arrived about a week ago. It's in this sort of state:

Clearly, some real progress!

Yeah...

Anyway, I was also on a deadline. We were heading to Colorado for a wedding where I would meet my new cousin-in-law W. Cousin R and J had Baby W in February, but I hadn't gotten anything done. I finished a hat really quickly and decided that 3 hours on a plane was a great time to knit.

All sorts of things

Note to self, double-pointed knitting needles are easily dropped and not easily recovered on a cramped airplane.
But sure enough, 3 hours on the plane and several long drives in Colorado, I got a small pair of mittens done.

Not going to lie, I love these colors 

So cute

So, a couple of things. One, this weekend was SO busy, I finished the knitting and didn't have time to really photograph them well. These were literally taken on the top of our rental car a few minutes before I handed them off to poor surprised mom Cousin J-F. (Seriously, why would twins R and J marry J and R, respectively? Madness. But handy, I can remember R and J's wives better than I can tell R and J apart on their own). 

Two, I actually did my first bit of crochet on this project. I wanted to make a cord to connect the mittens so they don't get lost. Making cord is so time consuming and boring and complicated in knitting. You can do I-cord, which is using 2 needles and circular knitting to make a thin tube, but I find that it pulls a lot and is irritating. You can also cast on a million stitches and then bind them all off again immediately. I've never tried this because I hate this idea just on principle, so I couldn't tell you how it looks. On the other hand, single chain crochet sounded fairly easy, proved to be, and was so much faster. 

Third, I love these colors. I love navy and green. My mother and color consultant was convinced that the frog green was going to be too obnoxious and I think these proved her wrong. 

Four, I have made too many hats. I have the pattern memorized. Multiple of 10 stitches, 1-2 inches of ribbing, stockinette stitch to length, K8 K2tog around, knit, repeat decreasing K# by one each time. Super easy. 

Five, color work, even simple stripes, on something as small as these mittens is...interesting. I was so worried about gapping at the switches between blue and green that I pulled too hard and there is an area up the side of each mitten where the green stripe mysteriously disappears, the stitches having been pulled all the way behind the blue background with the force of my tension. Ugh. Ah well. I am not a type A knitter, I am okay with these small idiosyncrasies in favor of the project being done.  

Being done with the hat and mittens, I was now able to cast on for my sister-in-law H who is in fact having twins, though we won't know genders till mid-August. This was not a problem for me as I had already announced my intention to knit christening blankets in cream or white, even though the babies probably won't be christened or baptized, dedication being more of the thing at our church. Still, it's the thought that counts and I really wanted to do something of more heirloom level.