It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a toddler cape!

Somewhere along the way, I got it into my head that I should be making new projects for all those babies who got blankets and socks and whatnot when they were born, now that they are toddlers and preschoolers.  And what do small children like?  Capes!  (Honestly, we all like a cape when you get right down to it.)  Who doesn't want to be a superhero?

An internet search led me to Thread Riding Hood, who posts not only the pattern for making capes out of felt (best fabric ever for kids' dress-up stuff) but a quick tutorial.  She recommended Googling for Superman logos, which led me to this website.  I decided to start small by getting enough materials to do four capes, in case this turned out to be a goat rodeo and I ended up Freecycling most of it.  Which is what happened when I tried to a project that involved satin.  We will not speak of satin, fabric of the devil.

Anyway, I bought a couple yards each of light green and light blue fabric (very gender-neutral), coordinating squares for background color, and some white stick-on felt to make the letters.  I cut out the letters, stuck them to the shaped squares, sewed them onto one side of the cape, sewed up the other piece, added Velcro, and got this:

The inside of this cape is the same shade of green as the background for the M.  I cannot tell you how pleased I am with how this came out.  It took about two hours to make, but I think that was because it was the first version.  After sewing the two pieces together, I did have to trim around the edge because they were not exact mirror images of each other, but that was a quick fix.

Deep winter is birthday time for many of these toddlers & preschoolers.  Guess what everyone's getting this year?  I'm a little sad the pattern only goes up to 4T.  I could use a cape myself.

What else I'm working on

For my birthday, my favorite local yarn shop sent me an email coupon for 15% of my total project - yarn and needles.  In my mind, that's practically free.  I had been intrigued by a pattern I saw in the winter 2012 edition of Love of Knitting called Opening Night.  Instead of the recommended yarn, I splurged and bought 14 skeins of Manos del Urugay Wool Classica in this lovely purple colorway:

You knit the sweater in pieces, then stitch together.  I have successfully finished the back and two front pieces; now I am working on the upper trim.  Sadly, both the upper and the lower trim are 12" wide and about 65" long, so that part is not going so fast.  Also, it's a winter sweater and we're headed into summer, so while I am still excited about how it's coming out, I've lost focus.

Fortunately, the summer issue arrived on Wednesday, and in it was an article about a Summer Night Shawl calling for Metallic Rayon yarn from Blue Heron yarns.  I was delighted to see this, because I remembered that I had seen 3 skeins of it (and they are large skeins - 550 yards) in a slightly different colorway at Windsor Button in downtown Boston.  It is an expensive yarn - it retails for $46 a skein - but the pattern calls for only one skein.  Plus, Windsor Button was going out of business (sadly, they've lost their lease) so all the yarns were discounted.  I went online.....and discovered I had missed their final day by about five days.  I looked online but couldn't really justify spending the money plus the shipping to order it online since my local yarn shops don't carry it.

I decided to see if I had a substitution in my stash on Friday morning.  And discovered that I had splurged on all three of the skeins from Windsor Button at some point before they closed.  I clearly need more sleep if I can't remember a purchase like that.  I determined that I could use the other two skeins to make a summer sweater pattern I had recently downloaded, and that the shawl was a go.  I'm about 90 rows in of 145:

It is an incredibly easy pattern:  cast on three stitches, turn.  Next row, knit one, yarn over, knit to the end.  Repeat 143 more times, adding the yarn over as the second stitch on each row.

I am hoping to finish it by our anniversary this weekend so I can wear it out to dinner.  I am thinking that's a bit of a stretch, but it will be finished in time for me to enjoy this summer.  It might be a little fancy to wear to the movies, but I'll get over it.

Knitting for new arrivals

I don't knit as many baby blankets as I used to, as many of my friends and family have completed their families and now need hats and sweaters rather than blankets for newborns.  But I am always in search of an interesting knitting pattern for babies, particularly ones that look much harder than they are.

My cousin J had a baby on February 11.  L is her third son (she has 5-year-old fraternal twins) and bless his little heart, he stayed put until almost his due date, giving his cousin the knitter enough time to get his new blanket done just after he arrived.  Those were some dark days, though, right around his birth, where I was committed to knitting 10 rows a night in order to be able to meet my own self-imposed deadline to send out his blanket via post to Chicago.  I pondered calling in sick, but then we had a huge blizzard (Feb 8-9) so I had plenty of time to work on it while I watched meteorologists and television news reporters scurry about, looking for yard sticks long enough to measure the snow that arrived.  (It was about 27" where I live.)

The pattern is Knit Teddy Bear by Barbara Breiter, which I found for free on the web and really liked.  The pattern comes with a teddy bear chart, but I have found it easier to write out the pattern by row rather than count, lose my place, recount the chart, recount my stitches, lose my place, count again, lose my place again, give up and pour myself a glass of wine and watch Mad Men instead.  A good friend of mine, a much more expert knitter, double-checked my counts and I was good to go:

Now, the yarn for this is Merino 5 by Crystal Palace Yarns and calls for 5 skeins of 2 colors held together, for a total of 10 skeins.  The best price I found on it was $7.90 a skein, so the blanket was looking to run me about.....$79.  Before tax & shipping on the yarn, and shipping to send the blanket to the baby.  I would be better off writing him a check for $100 for college at that point and making myself something nice.  Still, third baby and I didn't want him to be treated any differently than his older brothers, and I did love the pattern, so I went to my favorite local yarn shop with the pattern & asked for some advice. I was steered towards some Plymouth Encore DK yarn, which retails for $5.99.  Already I was liking this better.  Based on the weight, they were recommending a single strand for knitting, rather than doubling up. Things were looking up even more.  And when they said I would need 4 skeins as opposed to 10 because of the yardage difference, I had my credit card out so fast it would have made your head spin.  I am really pleased with the way it came out, and would make it again.  It's nice to have a blanket over my knees while knitting in January & February.  I am less inclined to knit baby blankets in the summer; it is just too hot.

The other thing that I love is that I'm getting much faster at knitting patterned baby blankets.  It used to be that as soon as I found out someone was having a baby I had to start the blanket, in a gender-neutral color, if I had any hope of being done when the baby was born.  Whipped this one off the needles in about 6 weeks, a new record.  It is just knit and purl, though, which helps.  A lot.

Yet another hobby

So really, what I didn't need was another crafting hobby.  In the past year I've picked up card making, tried crochet (epic failure) and set a goal for myself of making decorations for upcoming holidays.  (Sometimes this is successful, usually it's a giant miss.)  I also sew, garden, write two blogs (kind of) volunteer 15+ hours a week, cook and work 60+ hours a week (including commuting time.)  So, you know, I don't really need new hobbies.

But I have one:

That, my friends, is a knitter's loom.  I took a class at the end of October that ran two weeks and included the "loan" of the loom, which meant at the end of class I bought one, and the stand, so I could keep on weaving. 

My first project was a scarf with scrap yarn (which came out pretty good, if I do say so myself) and the second project was a baby blanket for a friend who's just had her first child and is now living in Canada in an area where it starts snowing in October.  That came out really good:

Unlike crochet, which I have no talent for nor any urge to practice, weaving is much faster, easier and produces a beautiful project.  A knit blanket like the one above would have taken me 2-3 months, with weaving it was just 2 weeks (of half-attentive effort; I was out a lot at meetings during those 2 weeks.)  I could probably weave a whole blanket in a weekend.  The possibilities are endless.

I am practicing my weaving using some of my stash yarn - up next are placemats for Valentine's Day using some fuschia, white & red yarn from my stash so I can practice hem stitching and Spanish lace weaving.  Sounds very fancy, doesn't it?