Catching up

On some crafty stuff I had going on before the baby came. Above is my haul from the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival that we attended two weeks before the birth. I did manage to finish the little sweater for Adrian before he was born. Every year I get seduced by the amazing hand-painted yarns at the festival and this year was no exception, as you can see. In the past, I've been somewhat perplexed as to what to do with hand-painted yarn like this--it doesn't really look good with cables or lace or anything else that is interesting to knit. But this year I went with a plan and got the yarn for 3 projects--one for each kid except Claudia (I'm not knitting for her since she tried on the beautiful Noro cardigan I knitted for her and said "I hate this."). I'm already on the 2nd sleeve of Diego's project and will start P's next with the pink yarn above.
Flowers from our garden.
Placemats I made for the family inspired by the 'Aunt Millie's hot pads" project in The Handmade Home. I used an old moth-eaten wool blanket that had been my grandmothers for the back. It occurred to me belatedly that I probably ought to have pre-washed the blanket so it doesn't shrink in the wash (since they are placemats after all). They have stayed remarkably clean thus far, but a recent frozen blueberry episode has made a wash necessary, so we'll see they hold up... I made a bunch of small hot pads and a mug rug too. The hot pads have been great because they are the perfect size for lots of things I do a lot--holding the handle of a hot tea pot, taking an overheated mug of tea out of the microwave, serving as a coaster for a mug of tea (are we sensing a theme here?).


An old wool cloak of my grandmother's became the wall pocket from the same book for my reading boy. He requires a lot of stuff next to his bed: books, chap stick, tissues, water bottle. You wouldn't believe all the accoutrements. Since his bed is a top bunk, he can't put it on the floor, hence the wall pocket. I made it in his favorite colors--dark blue, turquoise and yellow. In the book, it is mounted on a beautiful unfinished wooden branch, but those are hard to come by here in West Philly, so I used a left-over curtain rod instead.

As you can see, I had quite a love affair with this book in the last few weeks of my pregnancy. I also made a bath mat and baby sling from it. It was weird because I'd had the book for years and had never really been inspired by anything in it, then all of a sudden, I wanted to make almost everything in it.

These are my favorite kind of projects, fast, fun, almost no rules and basically impossible to screw up...