Madelynne is here!

This month I became an aunt, and I am so excited! My niece Madelynne was born on August 5th and is the cutest little baby ever.

I told my brother and sister-in-law that I was going to be the crazy aunt who always sends knit and crochet stuff. They seemed ok with this, so I thought I should get started early.

When I first found out that my SIL was pregnant I asked for requests and if it was going to be a girl she had a crochet flower pattern in mind. (The pattern can be found here: http://www.etsy.com/listing/89500561/crochet-pattern-floral-baby-blanket).

I decided to go with yarn from knitpicks. Comfy (75% cotton, 25% acrylic) seemed to be a good choice as it is soft and machine washable. My SIL chose the colors to match bedding that they already had. She chose "Whisker," "Honeydew" and "Lilac Mist" for the flowers  and "Ivory" for the middle of each flower. I'm not sure if they ended up matching the existing bedding exactly, but it is really hard to match colors off a computer screen when you can't see the yarn in person.

Slowly the blanket grew from one flower into a blanket.

Hopefully little Maddy enjoys many years of snuggling with her flower blanket! (She has more knits on the way but her parents haven't seen them yet so I will wait until later to post them.)

Experimental Yarn

A few weeks ago I decided to dye some wool. I had my soon-to-be-born niece in mind here when I picked the colors. I broke the fiber into pieces to start off with. The majority was in one piece, then 3 much smaller pieces. I decided to go with purple for the main color then teal, pink and yellow for the mix-in colors. I knew that I wanted to try to use my drum carder to blend the colors. Other than that I was completely winging it here.

The dye did not take evenly at all. In fact, there were so many white spots in the purple wool that I dyed it again. To even out the color I decided to try running each color through the drum carder a few times.

Which worked pretty well.

Then it was time to try mixing the colors together. I evenly divided all of the colors into 6 sections and made 6 bats by randomly picking a color and running it through the carder.

Then I randomly chose a bat and started spinning. I was able to fit 3 bats onto 1 bobbin, 3 onto another and then plied them together onto the third bobbin.

Didn't turn out exactly how I expected (although I really didn't have much of an expectation to begin with). I was going for a darker purple and lighter yellow, but too late now. I think it might be ok for a baby jacket or something. We'll see...

Finally Finished

I was asked to make a baby set a long time ago. Then Christmas happened and I was so busy knitting presents that this project got put on the back burner. This is the first baby set that I have made that is entirely knit. The others that I have made have been crocheted. The reason for this is only that crochet is so much faster than knitting. In the end though, I love the look of the knit fabric so much more. First, I made the blanket. It is a super easy pattern, you just knit 1 row then K3, P3 across the next row for the entire length of the blanket with a few rows of plain knitting for the first and last few rows of the blanket. Then I put a white i-cord border around the outside.

 

Then the cardigan. This was knit in 3 pieces: the main section and the two sleeves. Once it was knit, the sides rolled in so much that I decided to pin it out and lightly steam it just to make it lay a little flatter.

Then, sewed together all the seams and attached 4 white buttons down the front.

The hat started with a simple ribbing in white, then I switched to blue and knit around until it was about 5 inches. I decreased and gathered up the top.

I thought the booties would be the easiest and fastest part, but I was wrong. I thought I had the right gauge, but the bootie came out big enough for a small child, too big for a baby. So I started over with smaller needles. The one on the left was knit 1st and the one on the right was second.

 

In the end, there is a baby set with two normal sized booties.

Hats Galore

This weekend I have been working on lots of hats! I had a few requests from people and needed to get going on them. The first one is a much smaller version of a hat that I have made many times for lots of people. I didn't exactly know how I was going to modify the pattern to make it go from adult size to baby, but it turned out to have a simple solution. All I had to do was use a much smaller crochet hook and I didn't have to change the number of stitches at all. Here is the finished product on my little model:

 

And here are a few that show the pattern a little better:

 

I have also been waiting for some yarn to come in the mail to start on some sets for a pair of twin boys. Luckily, the box came yesterday so I could get started.

Eventually there will be hats, booties and blankets. They will all be in green and yellow, but the main color of each set will be different. Here's what I have so far:

 

I will post the matching booties and blankets as soon as they are done!