time travel, oooooo!

While life continues to be crazy, I seem to have fallen off the creative-wagon.  However, never to be defeated, here I am today with not one but two cute little projects to show you.  How, might you ask, can this be?  Um, well, to be honest, these are things that I made quite a while ago but never got around to photographing.  Now that you know my secrets, may as well get along to the good stuff.

Firstly, I bring you a little piece I like to call my Peony Sweater Dress!

(in actuality, it's the sweater from the Sweetie-Pie Kit)

It was something I had my eye on ever since I first stumbled across it on Pickles website.  They do this fantastic thing where they offer one free version of their patterns, and it just so happened that this was available for a 6 month old, and I knew it was meant to be.

Ok, so while I was knitting it up and stumbling over the fisherman's rib, I was a little less certain, but eventually I opened my eyes and really read the pattern (for any interested parties, you have to alternate between knit one, knit one below and purl, knit one below when knitting it in a round, silly me) and BAM, there I had a lovely little sweater dress.

Man, that's one cute baby, eh?

Oh, and to take you even farther back in time, back to the days when I didn't even know if I was having a little baby girl or a little baby boy, behold, the Stripey Baby Lap Blanket!

Now, to anyone wanting to knit up a fast simple and well loved gift, I highly recommend one of these.  A lady at our church gave us one for Bugaboo when he was born, and it was the most useful thing.  The trick is, that it's the right size to cover a baby's lap when their in the car seat or stroller.  It may seem small, but you see, if it's any bigger and covers their hands, they pull it up over their face (or at least my little monsters do) or you have to fold it in half, which gets bulky.  Oh, or sometimes it dangles over the sides (this is again, if it's too big) and then gets caught in stroller wheels or car doors, or drags on the ground and gets dirty... really I think you can see my point here.

Project-wise it's a breeze.  I don't really remember the dimensions; I just kind of cast on enough stitches to make it look about right, and then garter stitched away until it was the size I wanted.  Couldn't be simpler.

Not bad eh?

Oh, and if you promise not to tell anyone on ravelry, the glow-bug is actually covering a tiny little hole where I dropped a stitch.  tsk tsk.

Alright then, now maybe I can get something new put together.   Maybe.

ribbit and also choo-chooo

For those not in the know, the process of ripping out a knitting project is called "frogging" (because, you 'rip-it'...see where I'm going). This just goes to show that knitters are really as peculiar as they seem at first glance (present company included).

My point being that while I have a new baby and am on vacation and my creations are slow by any means to begin with, I'm also finding that I am having to go back a re-do a lot.

Firstly Baby's sweater dress, on take 3 and am trucking along well (finally). It will be fabulous.

Secondly, Baby's quilt. Well, while it's not called frogging when you rip a quilt, yeah it's in the same boat. I hodge-podge mashed a wild selection of prints together...wait, I'll start further back. I ordered a bunch of fabric off of Spoonflower. You can have too much of a good thing. With so many beautiful and wild fabrics to choose between, I eventually settled for just taking whatever I wanted instead of trying to co-ordinate it. Interestingly enough, A fair amount of the fabric worked, so I went down to fabricville and found a few pieces to tie it together. I'm using the Speedy Baby-2 from Quilt Taffy (which works really well with a handful of fat quarters). However, as I placed the last panels in place, I decided they were too much (too bright and crazy and colourful), so I've ripped them off and am putting in plain grey panels that match the little elephants instead.

Lastly, I realize that I've never properly shown off our train table. We finished it this summer. Every time anyone comes to the house Bugaboo takes them over to show it to them saying "My daddy maked me that". It's fabulous. We do have plans to expand and better paint the scenery and add a big red H for a heli-pad. I also want to state that the only things we paid full price for was the train 'Emily'. All the other trains were bought second hand from value village, or on sale, or were birthday gifts. The tracks were also found at value village ($5) except for the bridge which was also on sale. It's not fine art, but it's very fun.

(nice hat eh?)

Well, my little girl is hungry, so I'm off to do some mothering. :)