Back, with some updates.

I never really thought I would miss this blog. It had become a burden in a lot of respects, and it wasn't paying off in any way emotionally or mentally. Then, I took a look around at the piles of knitting I had been doing over the past few months and thought, "I am pleased." So I thought I would share some updates. You may also have noticed I fooled around with a new look. My blog hadn't been updated since 2006--it was time for a new look.
Kelbourne Woolens has been a success thus far and Kate and I have been busy. We are expecting 700kgs of yarn to arrive on our doorstep in a couple of weeks and my emotional state vacillates from 'about to vomit' to 'very happy.' I think that's normal. And no, I'm not pregnant again. I think the nausea is due to the very grown up steps my life is taking, though a shockingly similar reaction to last years grown up adventures of childbirth. I published a new pattern, Lucille, which is available on the Kelbourne Woolens website as a FREE download. Kate designed our website (it is so lovely) and she has done all the pretty pattern formatting. Grace has been doing our tech editing. I love working with so many amazing women--and women that I have know for so long and gush gush gush. I'll stop. You know where that was heading.

Lucille is a vintage inspired cardigan and bonnet set knit (shockingly) from the top down with eyelet yoke shaping reminiscent of The Half Pi Shawl, which also has a new home, finally. More about that in a minute.
Yarn: 2 skeins of Canopy Fingering from The Fibre Company, distributed by Kelbourne Woolens
Size: 0-3 months and 6-9 months
Gauge: 32 sts/10cms in lace pattern BLOCKED
My Estimation: a-freakin'-dorable.
Ravel it!
The Half Pi Shawl had a bit of a cult following but after I moved to the island and Grace moved to New Mexico we had to retool the way it was sold, and it needed a new format as a downloadable pdf file. The Half Pi, if you don't know it, will quickly become a perennial favorite. 2 skeins of Anne, some eyelet rows that increase like Elizabeth Zimmerman's Pi Shawl, but as a half circle. Ah, math. This one is great. There are 2 versions, Grace's version shown below uses just one skein of Anne and a large needle (I think she used a 10). It has eyelet increase rows with plain non increasing eyelets set at equal distances in between. Courtney's version (that's me!) uses 2 skeins of Anne, alternating 2 rows of one skein and 2 rows of another to blend the colors, and smaller needles (I used a 5 or 6) and has bands of plain stockinette between the eyelet rows so that you can improvise any lace pattern you want in each of the sections. There are two bind off options for decorative finishes as well.

Yarn: Shaefer Yarns Anne
Size: Variable
Gauge: Grace's Version 14 sts/10cms; Courtney's Version 22 sts/10cms
Ravel It!
The ravelry page says it's a Rosie Knits pattern but it isn't. It's just ours, but I can't get Ravelry to unlink to Rosies.
Part of my issue with maintaining this blog is that a lot of the things I would blog about here I would also blog about on Rosie's blog, like this hat I knit. The lines started to get too blurry between what went on Rosie's blog and what went on my blog; ravelry seemed like it killed all birds with many vast coded stones; and the thought of a third blog, the Kelbourne Woolens blog (which isn't up yet) sent me whirling into self promotion overload. But, I suppose I knit for my own website, for Rosie's Yarn Cellar's Rosie Knits patterns, for Manos del Uruguay, for Kelbourne Woolens and then the occasional submission to something else--and I manage to keep all of that organized. I suppose it's all still up in the air. I don't know how frequently I will post here, but I decided to keep it going. It's homey here.

Five Year Plan?

"Um...so what are you doing?"
"I'm on my way to class. Why? What's up?"
"So...um...do you, like, want to buy the Fibre Company distributorship?"
"What?"
"The Fibre Company. Do you want to buy the distributorship with me?"
"Shut up. I have to go to class."

That was an approximation of the conversation I had with Kate back in April. She though I was messing with her. Sometimes at the shop we'll call each other with disguised voices and say things like, "Do you sell yellow yarn? How much does it cost?" or "Can you tell me how to do an Estonian Vikkel braid cast on?" just to mess with each other and I think that Kate thought that was what I was doing. But alas, I was being totally serious. So here we are, 4 and a half month (and many excel spreadsheets) later the proud distributors of The Fibre Company yarns, Kelbourne Woolens.
Whoa.
I own a business, I have a career. It is in the field that I got a degree in (amazing for an art school grad, believe me!) I don't hate my life. I really like it as a matter of fact. Who thought that 10 years ago when I went to get a job in a yarn shop that I would own my own yarn company one day? It's kind of incredible. I am still in shock, can you tell?
As for this blog, I think it's possible that it's day has come. It has served me well, but between Kelbourne and Rosie's (which I am still very much a part of, Rosie's is why I am even writing this right now. Thanks, Lisa, for being amazing and teaching me so much) I just don't think I'll be spending much time here. It's not goodbye for ever, I still have my website, smithislandpatternfactory.com, and Rosie's blog and we'll have a Kelbourne blog so I'll still be around. And there's always Ravelry.
See you around.

Pineapple Afghan

I made this Pineapple afghan long, long ago, in knitting terms these days. I made it in the old days of yore when there were no knitting blogs and doing a search for "Estonian Vikkel Braided Cast On" got you search results involving Estonian travel packages, hair braiding studios and sailing websites.

You like my jank (a philly-ism meaning junky or messed up) Ikea sunken couch of doom? When I was pregnant someone moving had abandoned it on the sidewalk and I made Max help me bring it home. I think it was pregnancy induced psychosis. I had decided that our couch was horrible and needed to change before the baby was born or I was going to freak out. I was going to hold him in until we got new furniture. Or, new for us, I guess.

I have been going through and slowly documenting all of my old projects and adding them to my Ravelry notebook. You can Ravel this project here. I put this one up about 6 months ago and lots of people commented and favorited it so I submitted the pattern to Interweave Crochet Holiday Gifts and never heard back so, their loss is your gain. Get yourself a copy of Interweave Press' Harmony Guide to Crochet Stitches and using an S crochet hook and some Rowan Big Wool work the pineapple doily motif.
I am sorry I have been away longer than usual, but Kate and I have this project going on that is taking up an inordinate amount of time. We are not doing the following:
1. Publishing a book
2. Opening a yarn shop (as if!)
3. Starting an online knitting magazine or social networking site
4. Entering into a knitting theory Phd. program
But that's all I am saying at the moment.
But it's totally exciting!

The "Kelley" Heel?

When I first learned how to knit I desperately wanted to make socks.  It was 1997 and to my knowledge people didn't do things like make socks anymore, it was old fashioned and weird.  I knew it could be done, but didn't know how to find out how to make them.  If you are a recent knitter, like started knitting in the past 5 years, you have to realize that there was no knitting online and no one published sock patterns.  There were Alice Starmore sweaters, Kristin Nicholas over at Classic Elite had some great intarsia going on and then there was just "yarn."  But people didn't make socks.  Maybe I'll get flack for this statement, but for me at that time it was true.  My LYS carried no sock books, no sock patterns and come to think of it no sock yarn.  I had a really hard time finding double pointed needles too.  My LYS didn't carry them and you couldn't buy them online because no one sold knitting things on the internet.  The internet was still just for email and porn!   Lisa didn't carry double pointed needles when she and Jennifer opened up shop in 1995, who would?  I remember going into shops and asking for them and getting a range of responses from blank stare to downright hostility.  Young people didn't knit and I'm sure people assumed I was not going to use these for actual knitting.  Who knows what they thought I was up to.  Or maybe they thought if they sold them to me I'd come in every day and make their staff help me use them, and obviously I was an idiot and in over my head!   In sock knitting's defense, there were probably some sock patterns published, and maybe even a book but I certainly didn't know how to get a hold of them.  People knit sweaters.  I knew that socks had been knit, but as far as I knew they hadn't been for hundres of year.  The answer to my sock-less dilemma was to figure it out for myself.  So I thought about all the ways to make a curve in a plane.  I knew nothing of short rows and I had never heard of a heel flap.  I had the idea that if I did a bunch of decreases really fast the fabric would create a pocket of sorts.  I cast on some stitches and just knit back and forth and tried out my hypothesis. It worked!  If I decreased really fast in the middle of the square the fabric wouldn't lay flat. So I got some double pointed needles, which incidently were also hard to find, and I cast on.  Essentially what I ended up doing was a heel flap, but it also answered the problem of the gusset at the same time.

The "heel flap" is knit over 1/2 of the cast on sts and a decrease is worked at the beginning of each row, or at the beginning and end of every other row until you've decreased to 2-4 sts.  When you knit back around on all the stitches and pick up the heel flap stitches you have basically knit the heel turn and gusset into the heel flap.  A typical heel flap is rectangular.  So, when you pick up the stitches along each side you still have the instep stitches and the stitches for the bottom of the heel.  In short, you have more stitches than you need.  You have all the stitches you started with PLUS the stitches you've picked up along the sides of the heel flap.  In a typical sock you then turn the heel to make a "pouch" for your heel to fit into and then you work a gusset by decreasing the stitches along the sides to get rid of all those extra stitches.  With this heel since you haven't added any stitches there is no need to decrease them afterwards so no gusset necessary.  Also, the decreasing shapes the heel flap creating a natural "pouch" for your heel.  Fewer steps, less time fussing, more time knitting around and around.  A more sensible sock if you ask me.  

 I used about 30 gms of Koigu mill ends from Rosie's Yarn Cellar for these baby socks on size 2.5 mm dpns.  I have to confess though, I haven't knit a grown up sock with this heel so who knows how it'll work.  Any volunteers?

In the meantime, here's the pattern for the baby socks.  Try it for yourself!

Instead of Blogging

Since blogging less, or at least spending less time worrying about not blogging enough we have:

Been to the beach

Gone fishin'

played whiffle ball in the park (okay, sat on a blanket and watched while friends played whiffle ball in the park)

gardened

and played (this pic is for you, andrea! You totally make my day, even if blogging about the people who make my day stressed me out too much to participate!)

I even knit a little bit.

I also managed to do my taxes, start a manos group on ravelry (you know you want to join), cleaned my house (company came) and ordered new Rowan for fall, among other things.  I also started reading Knitting America, finally, and love it when I thought it was going to annoy me.  It is really well written and well researched which suprised me, I don't know why.  I guess because I have come to expect publishers to reign writers in when they get too interesting.  Jaded?  Me?  No!

Technology Amazes Local Woman

I am not a blogger, I am a knitter. I have tried to be a good blogger. I have tried to care about the people who for some reason or another want to read my blog. And I appreciate those of you who do read my blog. However, devoting the last 10 years of my life to knitting, I have never in my life spent less time knitting. Keeping up with knitting these days doesn't mean spending more time with needles in your hands, it means spending endless hours with a mouse in your hand, updating a blog that will never be updated often enough to keep readers happy, listening to podcasts, perusing patterns on ravelry, sending comments, favorite-ing the project of that person you like or want to like you--when the hell am I supposed to spend time on my ACTUAL KNITTING?! Something is wrong when the time that I do actually spend knitting feels riddled with guilt for not updating my blog or getting out my camera to document every minutae of progress on a project. It is incredibly frustrating to me to be seen as a less good knitter because my graphic design isn't as good as the next person.

It's like the Powerpoint-ing of America, but knitting style. Power-pointing? Hear me out: Powerpoint is ruining creative process, and ruining business and academia in this country. If you cannot use Powerpoint no one will listen to your idea, even if your idea is incredibly brilliant. If it doesn't fit the Powerpoint format your idea is useless. Why is academic teaching now all relegated to what is essentially glorified overhead projections? That is not teaching. The SF Chronicle wrote an article on the technological dumbing down of academic work and the way that the technological divide has hurt poorer schools by flooding them with technology they can't afford to maintain or use and is taking away time previously used to learn basic academic concepts:

School papers are so dominated by computer graphics these days that students often spend only a fraction of their time on the intellectual content of the report. Strangely, instead of bemoaning d developments like these, nearly everyone -- teachers and parents, principals and politicians -- applauds them. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/30/ING8L39SIP1.DTL)

I can feel the computer rotting my brain. Are the blog-less, or those whose blog is not the be all end all of their existence, seen as less intelligent, less driven, less talented? It seems so. But a blog well-photographed doesn't make one a good writer and knitting projects photographed with good lighting do not a technically proficient knitter make.

Writing about a thing and doing a thing are two different things. I am not a public speaker, I am not a writer. I actually almost didn't graduate college because I owed a teacher a rewritten paper I couldn't bring myself to complete. I don't want to go to grad school because I don't want to write the thesis. I am not a writer, I'm a maker of things. And there should be nothing wrong with that. Isn't it someone else's job to write about the things I make if they are considered worth being written about? Someone with some training in, you know, writing about things worth writing about? If I am moved, as I am today, to write I will write. But no one should honestly give a flying fuck what I think about the meaningless minutes of my day. We should all have better things to do and care about, like what our cat is doing. Because we are honestly in love with our cat, not because her latest antics, if properly photographed, will make good blog fodder! The more time we spend trying to be clever on our blogs the less intelligent we become.

Then on the flip side there are all the things that technology makes easier and faster.  Old methods of advertising are no longer working, or simply aren't viable. Paper mailings are dreadfully unsucessful, not to mention all the paper that is wasted. People expect amazon.com-like personalized advertising. We gave up on our newsletter mailings a couple of years ago, deeming them not worth the expense, time or resources. But what happens to the knitting customer who inevitabley calls once a month or so asking if we have a catalog we can mail her? Do we have a newsletter we can send? I have to say no. This woman must depend on a larger company like Patternworks who can afford to meet her non-internet needs or she can't have access to knitting anymore. Her local yarn store has totally let her down. And if we hadn't, if we decided that was unacceptable, how many of our other customers would we loose as a result? When there is a finite amount of advertising money and time we can spend on projects are we going to update the website and advertise on Ravelry, which will cost us less to nothing and reach many more knitters, or go to the printers with a newsletter and spend hundreds of dollars on postage and address labels and hours of staff time sticking mailing labels and sliding piece after piece of mail through the postage meter? And obviously this is a macrocosm of a larger news media advertising problem.  
I'm not saying I'm going to stop blogging or anything. I know that it is too late for that. Joining the throngs of redundant print media writers beleaguering blogs and those "young upstarts" who write them will not serve me well. But, I miss the good old days when someone would prove their talents by being talented at the thing they cared about, not the graphical beauty of it's dissemination.

I am a knitter, and I sometimes blog too. But I am going to try and spend more time knitting and playing with my baby instead of putting him in a chair next to the computer to sit while I blog.

oh, the cuteness.

Clyde and I have been home with the flu for 3 and a half days now.  I have not been out of my pj's, out of bed or eaten anything more complicated than oatmeal.  But I am feeling a bit better today so I've been spending some quality time with ravelry.  Hence, the short blog post about this.

Excuse me while I go cast on.

Loss

Two weeks ago Max and I were planning on a long weekend trip to Tennessee to visit friends, in particular a good friend who was dying. We were hoping on him being able to meet Clyde, whose arrival he was very excited about. Unfortunately we didn't make it in time, and rushed out of Philly at the last minute to drive 14 hours to middle Tennessee with me, Max, Clyde and Queenie and many suitcases in a snow storm. We arrived, late, in the dark, snowy, hungry, tired (especially me, who is the only driver in our family) and cranky (especially Clyde who couldn't understand why he spent an entire day strapped in a chair). But when we woke up the next morning we saw this lovely sight out of the bedroom window.

and while walking around in the snow we saw this in a pasture! Awww...goats. Our friends have goats and sheep and chicken on their farm and while we were there a baby lamb and two baby goats were born! I have more pictures but for some reason they aren't cooperating.

Wednesday night we arrived at our other friend's house, in the woods on the side of a mountain, for a lovely memorial service.
It was a very lovely warm service, full of friends and food and music and much passing of Clyde around the room. This is an alter for our friend that they made. On the little table there was a dish with his ashes and wildflower seeds. Everyone was encouraged to take some home to scatter. We're going to scatter them in our garden on the island since he never got to come and visit.
And the rest of the time we were there we ended up having lovely weather, and what a beautiful place to spend some time, huh?More to come...
Much knitting happened in Tennessee!

Color Me Psycho

So Grace emailed me today and said:

i thought of you when i read this

http://nymag.com/fashion/08/spring/44210/

it's about new yorkers who only wear one color.

Like this woman above, who kinda makes me want to die. Intriguing, yes, to wear all one color. But the brain reels--do these people have some kind of massive personality disorder? Mental illness? Eccentricity due to overconsumption? Eccentricity to appear more interesting than they really are? Yep. I decide that that is it. This woman buys Chanel shoes in white and colors them with electric blue sharpies. I took a moment to look it up and this shoe:
retails for $670.00, although it's not white.

and this shoe, from designer Christian Louboutain retails for $950. Could someone really take a Sharpie to a shoe that costs more than my rent? I am reading this article mouth agape, unable to restrain myself from the annoying one color wearing people.

And then I get to this lady:
I love her. She's totally amazing. I want to be her one day. Here's an excerpt of her interview:

"Why green?
I’m from Nova Scotia, where green is in your surroundings. I missed nature when I moved to New York. I started wearing green nail polish, and it spread all over me.

When did you move here?
I hitchhiked down in 1964. I had long braided hair; I was a beatnik.

Where did you live?
We used to live on the Lower East Side. A hippie gang was on our block, and you had to know them to get down the street. They had weapons and chains. They babysat for our son.

What’s your son up to these days?
Sam is a mentalist, a magician. It’s classic mind-reading; he’ll memorize a deck of cards. He’s our one and only.

How long have you been married?
Forty-one years. Every Saturday morning, we’d say, “Maybe we’ll make it to City Hall this morning.” We missed a few because we slept late. Finally, we went and got married. We didn’t have a ring, so my husband, Robert, made one out of paper.

Do you have any grandchildren?
No, but I have a grand-puppy. My son asked me to babysit him, and I airbrushed his tail green. Sam flipped out."

And then I start thinking about how green is my favorite color and blue definitely one of my least favorite. You don't think that had something to do with it, do you?

Garter Stitch Appreciation

In 1997 I pulled out some old knitting needles (old yellow plastic ones with metal tops) and some yarn (a skein of burgundy 100% no-name acrylic) that my grandmother had given me, and taught me to knit with, when I was probably about 8 years old. Somehow I still had this yarn and these needles 10 years later, and somehow they made it with me from D.C. to Chicago, where I was going to school. I remembered how to cast on, the e-loop kiddie method, and that was about it. For a few days I just cast on stitches until the needle was completely full and then took them all back off again. There must've been over 200 sts on those 10" needles. I really packed them in. It sort of started coming back to me and one night I tried remembering how to form the stitches. I knew I was supposed to put the right hand needle into the stitch on the left hand needle and then do...something. I tried a few goofy things and then succeeded in forming some kind of...something. I ripped it out and put it back under the bed until the next night. At this point in my college career I had broken up with my alcoholic boyfriend and moved out of our amazingly cheap and large apartment in the Ukrainian Village--for you Chicago-ites it was on Oakley between Division and Augusta, 2 bedrooms for $550 a month. Yeah, that was reasonable then and now I sound old ("back when I was a kid, sonny, you could get a loaf of bread and a nudie magazine for a nickle!"). I moved into a studio above a sex toy store on Milwaukee Ave just south of Division (rent? $400). My bedroom was jammed into this little hallway that led from the big main studio room onto a roof deck. There was a little window in it so I decided it counted as a "bedroom." The kitchen was also a separate room, not just a strip with a stove in the living room, thus, to my mind, turning my studio into a real one bedroom apartment. The bedroom/hallway was probably 5x7 feet. I had a twin bed and it fit in there with no room at the head and a bit at the foot for me to keep a teetering pile of clothes. It was just wide enough for the bed and a person to squeeeze past on the way out to the roof. I loved this room. It was my very own bedroom in my very own apartment. And here I learned to knit. Sort of. I did get it one night, after many false starts where I couldn't understand why this length of yarn between the needles kept getting longer and longer as I knit off the cast on, and when I realized that I didn't need to FILL the needle with stitches and 20 or so would do fine, I produced garter stitch. And decided I MUST be doing something wrong. It didn't look like knitting at all. It was all bumpy and wavy and even with the holes in it it was just all wrong and didn't look anything like my sweaters, which I knew were knit. Screw it. I gave up for another few months or so. I picked it up again a while later after getting a Reader's Digest how to knit book from a thrift store.

I learned to knit and purl and use double pointed needles and all sorts of things from this amazing book. I learned to create beautiful smooth and lovely perfect stockinette stitch and decided that garter stitch was horrible and ugly and useless and a total waste of knitting. Until now.

A simple shawl, all in garter stitch with a little picot edge. It couldn't be simpler. I am totally obsessed with it, even it's little imperfections. If you look very closely at the left side in the photograph I ran out of yarn about 15 stitches before casting off and used a bit of Scottish Tweed 4 ply in the color Sunset to finish up. It's a nice contrast will the blue-y gray of the main color, which is Jamieson's DK in the color Eucalyptus from the dawn of time area of the stash. I love it. It is simple and I didn't need to pay ANY attention, except every 3rd and 4th row I made a little picot. Check the website (hopefully!) later this week and I'll add it, nicely formatted, to the "free patterns" section. This pattern is so mindless it deserves to be shared.

Learning to use the new computer

I bought a new computer for my birthday.  We vacillated between getting another mac (which I wanted) and a pc (which Max wanted).  Now, Max had very good reasons for wanting a pc.  He is in school and he would never have to worry about things not being formatted right.  His disks for his board study guides would always be compatible.  He could do all sorts of useful lifey things. But it was my birthday and I like macs and so I won.  Sometimes I am such a jerk.  

So I have a new computer and I love it.  It is fast and can hold millions of pictures and other useless things.  It can't, however, read the photoshop disk that we have.  I have Adobe Creative Suite on the old computer from a job I had years ago, and alas, not the disks.  So I have been experimenting with having the two laptops side by side and constantly moving my thumb drive between them.  I am sure there is a better way but I am not that technologically savvy.  I did manage to upload a new pattern to ravelry today using that system and I will include the link here too.  I can't get it up on my website because all the guts of the site are on the computer at work.  That's a project for another day.  

The pattern is super simple and I am kinda proud of myself for writing it and getting it online even if it is super simple.  It does take a bit of getting used to how long it takes to get even the simple things done.  It took me six hours to get this sucker up on Ravelry today.  Granted, I was interrupted from my task quite a bit to nurse the babe and eat food (I've never been so hungry in my life!) and play with the baby.  He is starting to get older and it is sort of a shock to (what I thought was) my routine to have him be awake for longer periods of time and need things like entertainment.  A week or so ago it was just sleep, nurse, change diaper, sleep, nurse, change diaper.  Now it's pay attention to me, hold me, play with me, nurse, sleep, change diaper, nurse.  It takes a bit of getting used to--and if what I think is true is in fact true then once I get used to this routine something else will happen.  He'll start moving around on his own or something crazy like that.  

Motherhood

A lot has happened since my last post, as I'm sure many of you could guess.  I promise that after this post I will try not to be baby obsessed.  

So, on November 28th I was pretty sure I was going to have a baby.  I woke up at 3:30 and couldn't go back to sleep.  So, of course I paced the living room and desperately tried to finish knitting the bonnet that went with the outfit I had knit.  My due date was the 30th of Nov. so I had figured I had another week at least of horrible horrible pregnancy and hadn't rushed to finish the little hat.  

Max woke up around 7 or 8 and we decided to go about our day normally.  Me and Max and our housemate Jes went to Satellite and got coffee and snacks and we walked and walked and walked.  I went home and pretended to nap, called my mom and demanded we get Ethiopian take out.  Teresa came over with her baby in the hopes that he would send secret messages to Flippy that the world outside was the place to be.  Mom arrived and brought snacks.  

Then everything got sort of fuzzy.  I remember moments like eating pudding at the kitchen table.  I remember asking my mom to rub my belly and then yelling at her to stop touching me.  I remember taking a shower.  Two showers?  Max was there I think.  In any case, things happened and then there was a baby at 12:45 am.  Doesn't Max look tired?

It was only really bad labor for about 8 hours and then he shot into the world after 15 mins of pushing so from what I hear I'm really lucky.  He weighed 6 lbs 10 oz and was 19 1/4" long.  I kept telling him to stay small.  Good baby.  The worst part of labor?  Contractions.  The second worst part?  Having a cold that includes a hacking cough.  The worst part of postpartum?  The cracked rib that I had to heal from the combo of contractions and coughing.  It wasn't until 2 weeks ago that I could sleep comfortably.  

Here's me and my mom and Clyde in his cool 4-Ply Soft outfit, minus the hat I tried to finish the previous morning.
Okay, so the details out of the way we can get on to the fashion show.  This is his cool outfit in a close up, it's a basic top down raglan cardigan using 2 balls of Rowan 4-ply Soft.  It has garter stitch edges and 5 buttons.  
Underneath the sweater is a bunting I designed.  It's out of the same yarn with an amazingly well matched satin ribbon tying the bottom closed.  

Here's a nice detail of the button.  The top is done in garter stitch because I really couldn't bring myself to purl that late in a pregnancy.  The body is done in the round up to the armhole then some stitches are cast of on either side and it's just knit up the back and front.  

The pattern will be coming soon.  I don't think I took any notes while I was knitting this, I just sort-of made it up as I went along.  So much has happened since then that if I had notes I have no idea where they are now.  It'll be an evening of counting stitches.  Ugh.  Max has been in on the knitting too, and knit this awesome Koigu hat.  He used the James Dean hat pattern from Rosie Knits and just used a size 2 needle and Koigu instead of the size 8's and Kureyon.  Voila!  Genius, really.  This is the cutest baby hat ever and everyone should knit one.  They make babies look like little elves.  

This is Basil, one of my patterns, but done in Koigu.  I have to give Wendy props for doing this first, I am really just a copycat.  I am really hoping that this blanket becomes "The Blanket."  I wouldn't mind knitting it over and over again as one wears out and another one has to sneak into it's place.  

There's more knitwear to come, but I have to keep some fodder for the blog.  

In more news, I just returned from TNNA in Long Beach.  I took the cashew with me and Max came too so that I could experiment with being babyless for periods of time.  It was an adventure but we managed to pull it off.  The flights all went swimmingly and we discovered that the cashew enjoys a good pacifier now and then.  It's becoming more now than then however.  We got to Long Beach Thursday afternoon, met up with Lisa and ate tons of food, fitting for a breastfeeding parent who just traveled for 12 hours.  I ached all over and was incredibly tired and chalked it up to being tired and crammed into an airline seat for so long.  So you can guess at my surprise when I woke up in the middle of the night aching all over with chills and discovering I had a fever of 101.  Yikes!  I had mastitis.  That's an infection in your BOOB!  Oh, god.  Back to sleep, at 8 am called doctor, sent Max to Walgreens, slept.  At 4:30 I wa a new person.  I went to the showfloor and tried to salvage part of my day.  Day 2 of the show was much more successful.  I ran around like a crazy person and Max took the cashew to the Aquarium.  I wish I had pictures but I took dead camera batteries with me.  We did buy a disposable camera but that requires physically going to the drugstore and I'm just not willing to do that unless I have 5 other things I need there.  Doing anything now takes 5 million years.  

I successfully spent an entire day without the cashew.  Whoo-hoo!  I touched great yarn and ate good food.  It was successful in the end.  And now we're home and I am back at work and life is back to normal, sort of.