Baby Blanket

K's older brother, also a "K" is expecting a little boy!  K and I are so excited for our new nephew!  I knew we'd be on a lot of trains while on our honeymoon so I brought a bunch of yarn to make this baby blanket for our soon to be nephew, Leroy (that's K&J's name for their fetus...lol!)  I guess I can say this blanket is made in the USA, France, Switzerland, and Italy? :)  On another note, I am getting tired of just knitting squares (blankets) and rectangles (scarves)...time to learn a sweater or something?

It's a chevron pattern...looked a bit more masculine than all the wavy patterns I saw.

The blanket is pretty big...like 3' x 4'!  Thanks Snuffles, for modeling it for me!  I must say though it's not easy to swaddle a polar bear...

With all the crafting I did for the wedding plus all the cooking and baking I've been doing now with all our super awesome new wedding gift appliances, I realized just how much I like the notion of making things with my own hands and being able to see, touch, taste, feel and/or smell the final product.  No wonder I have such mixed feelings about the practice of law, lol.

Baby Love!

My lil sis J is having a baby girl next month!  I knitted my niece-to-be a little baby beanie that sorta reminds me of a strawberry sundae with a white cherry on top, and two pairs of baby booties to match. 

The white pompom on top of the beanie may be a bit much (or just too wintery for Arizona) but it's so cute it sorta makes me giggle every time I look at it :)

I learned how to knit in the round to create the beanie using three double pointed needles.  I <3 youtube tutorials!!!!!

Satin Lei

K is graduating with his MBA one week from today!  To commemorate his three years of going to work early to make it in time to evening classes, meeting for group projects on weekends, and seemingly unending summer sessions, I made him a red satin lei.

This is one of those handmade projects that is not terribly difficult but takes a lot of time and patience.  Good thing I made him such a special lei...we found out a few days ago that K was chosen as the outstanding graduate student for Information Decision Systems (his MBA specialization)...I think he got magna cum laude too!  I'm so proud :)

Here goes my first stab at blogging artsy-craftsy making!  This project only requires satin fabric, scissors, and needle & thread.

1) Cut the satin fabric into 2 inch (or slightly smaller) strips.  Instead of using a ruler, I cut one of my business cards to 2 inches.  Snip the end of the fabric to size, then pull a thread loose from the snip and pull the thread all the way out, creating a guide line of where to cut.  For the entire lei, I used 35 strips of fabric that were 2 inches by roughly 2.5 feet long.

 

 2) Fray the fabric strips using a needle (or your finger nail, though I found using the fingernail hurt the pads of my fingers more) until the fabric left in the center is the width of your finger.

3) Put enough doubled thread on the needle so that the lei would go just above the belly button.  Knot off about 3-5 times and then sew on the frayed fabric strips, doing a running stitch down the center.  When you sew the entire length of the fabric strip, as you squish it down, start twisting the fabric around and around so that the frayed edges create the lei!  That's it :)

Voila!  It took me about 3 weeks to make this one, or the first two rounds of the NBA playoffs.  I also made this easy ribbon lei too.

Baby Booties

K's high school friend A and his wife S are having twins!  We went to their baby shower last month (btw, easily the biggest baby shower I have ever been to with probably close to 150 guests...) so I knitted these baby booties out of 100% organic cotton.  My lil sis A sent me the pattern for "one hour baby bootles" from her Stitch n' Bitch Nation book.  I followed the pattern exactly except I did not put buttons on the sides to decorate the booties because I thought that might be a choking hazard; instead, I did one pair with single straps and the other pair with double crisscrossed straps.

I love how easy they are to make and the fact that each pair really only took an hour...and the fact that anything that mini just looks so adorable!

Pair #1 - single strap

Pair #2 - double strap

Both pairs next to my cell phone for size-reference.

Bear Down Scarves

I knit these two red & blue striped scarves for the Holiday Bowl last week because none of my UA gear is cold-weather friendly.  I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to knit stripes using two colors! D'oh I should have tried it much sooner! I used this youtube tutorial on knitting stripes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyE4zBSyGng

The scarves are 2x2 ribbing and were fairly quick to make because I used oversized (in relation to the yarn) size 10.5 needles.  For stiff, 100% acrylic yarn, the scarves actually turned out very comfortable against the skin.[1]

Here we are, bundled up with our new scarves!  Even though our seats were high up, we were right on the 50-year line which was pretty cool.  Not-so-cool though was UA's terrible performance in the Holiday Bowl.  We got totally shut out and there were way too many Huskers fans sitting on the Arizona side, boo!  I was all ready to sing "Bear Down, Arizona" but the opportunity only arose after the marching band played it once in between quarters due to the aforementioned shut-out.  Even though UA was not that great at football when I was there as a student, the games were always still a ton of fun ...probably because of the rowdyness of being in the student section.  Alas, I suppose the grass was greener then :)

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[1] I would have liked to use nicer yarn but it was the only type that came in both red and blue at Michaels and there are not many other places to get yarn here in SD...the knitting stores I do know of are only open until maybe 5 or 5:30 pm.  ***Note to SD knitting store peeps -- people with full time 9-to-5 jobs knit, too!***

How to be a Cactus

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(small army of pipe cleaner "needles")

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needle, thread and Forrest Gump on TNT

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  felt to make flower and lizard  

two happy cacti!

Happy Halloween!

(you can't really see the felt flower on my hoodie or the felt lizard on K's chest, booooo!)