Author: Sarah

Is It Sunday Night Again Already?

Sarah General

We discovered this morning as we were about to leave for church that we’d both totally spaced and forgotten to pick up my car after we got the oil change yesterday. Who forgets their car?!? Luckily we have a spare car seat for Carrie that we could install in Denis’ car, because the Subaru place isn’t open on Sundays.

Really, I mean, how air-headed could we both be, that both of us could forget? It’s a good thing that Carrie and I don’t have anywhere in particular to be tomorrow morning, because I’ll have to wait until my parents are free so one of them can watch Carrie while the other one drops me off at the dealership.

Crazy.

KMKS Questionnaire

Sarah Knit Mitten Kit Swap

I’m finally answering the questions from the Knit Mitten Kit Swap. Apologies to my pal, who has been waiting patiently.

Are you allergic to any fibers? I’m not actually allergic to anything as far as I know, but mohair makes me itch like crazy.

What are your favorite colors? Blue, green, purple, pink, orange…um…almost anything? More intense colors are more my style than pastels, and I think I look pretty awful in yellows and tans.

Are you a new mitt knitter? How long have you been knitting mittens? I’ve knit mittens before. I have no idea when I knit my first pair – at least a few years ago, anyway.

Do you prefer solid or multicolored yarn? I like both!

What fibers do you prefer in mitten yarn? Wool! I’m not too worried about washability, since mittens don’t tend to need washing so often.

Where do you usually knit mittens? Wherever I’d knit anything else.

How do you usually carry/store small projects? I have various tote bags I rotate projects into when I’m working on them, and my craft room – where I store things I’m *not* currently working on – is a complete disaster of bags, baskets, boxes, and…piles. Piles of things.

What are your favorite mitten patterns? I don’t really have a favorite pattern. Most of my mittens have been made up. I’d actually like to have a pattern!

What are your favorite mitten knitting techniques? When I’m not using a pattern I basically knit them fingers-down, like toe-up socks, only for your hands.

What new techniques would you like to try? Maybe some colorwork or cabled mittens? I’ve done both techniques before, but not on mittens.

What are your favorite needles for knitting mittens? Circulars – I’m starting to really like the few KnitPicks needles I’ve gotten my hands on, more even than my beloved Addis…

What are some of your favorite yarns? I really like a lot of yarns, and I don’t think I really have a particular favorite. I gravitate towards natural fibers, and am most tempted by the soft, squishy hanks of hand painted yarns in the store.

What yarn do you totally covet? Nothing in particular.

Any pattern you would love to make if money and time were no object? I haven’t really looked at mitten patterns all that much, so, no.

Favorite kind of needles (brand, materials, straights or circs, etc)? KnitPicks circulars are my new favorites!

If you were a specific kind of yarn, which brand and kind of yarn would you be? Uh…I don’t know.

Do you have a favorite candy or mail-able snack? Dark chocolate.

What

How To Sew A Christmas Dress

Sarah Crafts

1. Find a pattern that appeals to you (luckily for the designer I could see past the awful fabric choices on the model.)
2. Measure squirmy toddler, decide on size.
3. Cut pieces.
4. Spend hours pinning, sewing, pressing and topstitching.
5. Try dress on toddler and realize…you have a very skinny toddler. And the dress? The dress is not skinny. In fact, the dress has a whopping 8″ of ease around the toddler’s skinny little ribcage.
6. Have sinking feeling in pit of stomach after realizing that 8″ of ease in a dress that’s only 28″ in circumference is, well, ridiculous.
7. Dissolve into tears when your mother concurs that, really, the dress looks a lot more like pajamas than a dress.
8. Spend hours with your mother picking out (double-stitched!) seams, fudging new armhole openings, cutting pieces off of the dress that was completely finished, and stitching it all back together.
9. Press the thing, put it on a hanger and wait until morning.
10. Try it on the toddler who never stands still and do a little happy dance since it actually looks like a dress instead of a flour sack now.

So here’s the dress. Technically it’s not completely finished, as I can’t get Carrie to stand still enough for the split second it would take to figure out where to hem the sleeves. I’m going to have to baste them where I think they should fall and try it on her again.

christmas_dress_altered.jpg

Also, there’s a pinafore that goes over top of this thing (added bonus: I can probably find a nice shirt to go under the pinafore and have another variation for some of the holiday things we’ll be doing next month). This is the bodice before I’ve figured out how to cut it down to the right size, since I don’t want to have to alter it after I’ve sewn the whole thing this time. It’s a very fine wale stretch corduroy that is not quite as bright as the picture shows.
christmas_dress_pinafore_color.jpg

Has It Been A Whole Week?!?

Sarah General

It’s not that I don’t love blogging, it’s just that it’s that time of year again. The time of year where I abandon all pretense of sanity and decide to sew Carrie’s Christmas dress, while simultaneously knitting a way overdue baby gift (the gift’s overdue, not the baby) and creating dozens of handmade Christmas gifts. I know what you’re thinking. I can’t be bothered to make a Halloween costume and settle for buying a fairy costume when I really wanted a butterfly costume (to be fair, she was incredibly cute in that costume), but I can pass up the dozens of perfectly lovely Christmas dresses in the store in order to spend more money and hours of my time sewing tiny little hems on sleeves and fussy little collars. I can’t explain it. I’m pretty sure something’s wrong with the way my brain is wired. At least this year I’ve started the madness much earlier, and there’s a good chance that I’ll be done before Christmas. Mostly.

I just finished sewing in a zipper – since obviously that’s way more important than, oh, I don’t know, um, sleep?!?

So, big bloggy post tomorrow later today with…something…maybe a picture of the dress-in-progress. I promise. And to my Knit Mitt Kit Swap pal, I’ll get to that questionnaire ASAP! I just have to set in some sleeves… (Hmmmm. Sleep or sleeves? Sleep or sleeves? Do you think it’s safe to set in sleeves at quarter to one in the morning, or is that just asking for trouble?)

Oh! And did I mention I have a new laptop? We were at the Apple store on Saturday, and there was a super-duper, once-in-a-lifetime, can’t-pass-it-up deal on a new MacBook Pro. So if anyone’s looking to buy an original titanium powerbook, not quite 4 years old, 1 GB memory, 60 GB hard drive, and a new battery, let me know.

Two Going On Thirteen…

Sarah Carolyn

More Carrie-isms:

In reply to Denis asking her to come over and get her coat on this evening: “No, I busy right now!”

If I ask Carrie if she’s my baby, she’ll often say, “I not a baby, I a little girl!”

When she no longer wants to sit strapped into a shopping cart, she just wiggles out of the belt, starts to stand up (!) and says “I walk now, pleeeeeease!” (This is not a request, the “pleeeeeease” part is just thrown in there to make it sound like a request instead of a command.) Oh, and Carrie figured out how to hold onto the cart handle and stand on the bottom bar the other day. Not the safest thing I’ve ever let her do, but at least she’s sandwiched between me and the cart, I know where she is, and she’s not standing up in the seat portion of the cart.

I Do Believe In Fairies!

Sarah Carolyn

Carrie was interested in being a butterfly this year – at least, that’s about the one thing she’s tried to dress up as with her playsilks, so I figured it would be a good costume for her – but I couldn’t find a toddler-sized butterfly costume. The closest I could come was something else with wings: a fairy. (And no, I don’t make Carrie’s costumes. I’m officially a slacker-mom.)

Carrie totally got into the whole fairy thing, though, and went around “Poof!”-ing people with her wand. Before we went trick-or-treating she “Poof!”-ed me into a triangle. And the whole trick-or-treating concept? Yeah, that was a huge hit. I could just see what she was thinking: “You mean I ring the doorbell, look cute and say “trick or treat” and people give me stuff? And if I do something cute like wave my wand and say “Poof!”, they laugh and give me *more* stuff?!?” The first couple of houses we went to Carrie tried to give the people in the house the candy she already had in her ghost bucket. Luckily those were all family members and were good sports about giving it back when she changed her mind!

When all was said and done, between the houses we visited by car and the part of our street we walked down, Carrie trick-or-treated for over an hour. By the time we got back to our house she was practically skipping along, happily shrieking like a banshee, and “Poof!”-ing everyone and everything she saw. And then she devoured an entire slice of pizza (!) and a package of mini M&Ms. Ahhh, such a good, healthy dinner. Yep, I’m a good mom. (At least she had milk with her pizza!)

It was another really mild Halloween, like last year: nearly 60°F, although it was misting for a while we were out. Good thing, too, because a coat wouldn’t have worked so well with wings!

They Didn’t Get The Memo

Sarah Carolyn, Dogs

“Falling back” is nice in theory, but when you have dogs and a toddler, it’s not such a great deal.

For some reason Carrie woke up at 5:30 (which should have felt like 6:30 to her and that would still be at least an hour earlier than usual for her). That triggered the dogs to wake up and start whining. Carrie was very concerned about them: “Mommy, Murphy sad. Mommy, Daddy, take Murphy out!” But somehow I managed to convince her it was still the middle of the night, and after a little milk and a diaper change she went willingly back to bed. On the way back to my bed I made a little pit stop, and just as I’m flushing I hear the alarm going off. Ack! Here I’ve just managed to convince Carrie it’s the middle of the night and Daddy’s alarm is going off…

Then I laid in bed listening to Carrie babble over the monitor, the dogs whining, the wind howling, and Denis snoring. I finally fell back to sleep at some point (it was sometime after 6:45, since that’s the last time I remember seeing on the clock). Denis at least let me sleep until 8:30. I went to bed around midnight (well, 1 AM, but we turned the clocks back before we went to sleep), so I did get somewhere around 7 hours of sleep, but it was too broken up.

I need more coffee.

Socks, Hot Socks, and Christmas Stuff

Sarah Knitting

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I mentioned some entrelac socks that just weren’t working out? Well, I ripped back and tried again in stockinette, and that didn’t look good either, so I temporarily abandoned those. Instead, I cast on for these two Sundays ago:


This is that luscious merino-tencel blend I bought at Ellen’s 1/2 Pint Farm at the fiber festival last month, and the pattern is from there as well. I love the way they turned out, and they were a really fast knit!

And literally, just as I was hiding the last end, the mail truck pulled up. And what was in it but my Hot Socks swap package from my pal Camilla! Yes, I got this lovely package all the way from Denmark:


There’s two skeins of lovely blue cotton/wool blend sock yarn, some very interesting looking cocoas, dark chocolates, a book of Hans Christian Andersen stories to share with Carrie, and some pretty little bangles for Carrie to wear. The cocoa is basically chocolate on a stick, which you put into your mug and pour hot milk over – I’ve never seen anything like it, but I can’t wait to try it! I’m also really excited about the solid colored sock yarn, since I seem to be on a lacy sock kick lately. Thank you, Camilla, for such a lovely package!

Unfortunately, some gift knitting – both Christmas and otherwise – needs to be accomplished before I can cast on another pair of socks. In the meantime, I’ll have to go in search of the perfect lacy (or cabled?) pattern to use my pretty blue yarn for…

Speaking of Christmas gifts, I have 11 gifts completed and 4 more so close it’s almost ridiculous to consider them unfinished. (I need to go buy two sets of 30″ shoelaces and they’re done.) There are 6 more gifts in the works, and then I may try to fit one or two more in there if I have the time. By Thanksgiving, anything that isn’t done, reasonably close to done, or is more than a day’s worth of crafting time to do is not getting done. That’s what Amazon is for, right?

Creepiest Appetizer Ever…

Sarah Food

Long-time readers know by now that I have a completely irrational fear regarding spiders. So why I thought I should make these for a party tonight is a mystery.

I think I’m going to have nightmares about these things. (They’re just standard deviled eggs with black olives for the spider parts, if for some reason you want to make them yourself. I found the idea *somewhere* on the internet, but I didn’t bookmark the page.)

I’m Re-Tired!

Sarah Carolyn

We were at my grandparents’ house for lunch today, and as I was putting Carrie in her car seat we had the following conversation:

Carrie: “Great-Grandma go bye-bye too?”
Me: “No, honey, Great-Grandma isn’t going bye-bye.”
Carrie: “Great-Grandma go to work?”
Me: “No. Great-Grandma doesn’t work, she’s retired.”
Carrie: (after thinking for a bit) “Great-Grandma need a nap!”

I guess I’m retired too, because I sure do need a nap!