I was browsing through Pinterest a while back and was inspired by this button monogram by Etsy seller Letter Perfect Designs. Button monograms are all over the Internet right now (if you don't believe me, just do a Google image search for "button monogram"), but I thought that this was the most attractive finished product I'd found so far. However, I really wanted to make something with my own two hands as a baby gift for a dear friend, so I thought I'd give it a go. Here is how I went about it.



( Button monogram tutorial behind the cut... )

In lieu of one of my usual blog posts, I'd like to present to you two articles that I found particularly interesting.



How Knitting Behind Bars Transformed Maryland Convicts by Jillian Anthony (December 2, 2011)

...Each week the men eagerly await the women's arrival, then promptly get to work. “It takes you away a little,” Horton says. “You have to watch what you’re doing, otherwise your stitches will become loose or tight or you’ll skip stitches. It almost makes you feel like you don't have to be anything. You’re all sitting there knitting. You can just be yourself.”...




Idle Pastime: In Off Hours, Truckers Pick Up Stitching by Jennifer Levitz (March 29, 2010)

...Mr. Banks... learned to knit last year after load-volumes slowed. Creating something tangible beats sitting around the truck stop "talking about who has a bigger radio," he said. He's finished a scarf and socks, and is working on a sweater for his wife.

"The fact that you can take strands of thread and basically make something out of it, that's awesome I think," he said. "It's pretty cool stuff, man."...

These days it's just so hard to finish anything that I feel a great sense of triumph when even the smallest of things is completed... Even when it's something that, by rights, should have been done ages ago. Take my latest task for example: reassembling my daughter Eve's new desk after it was painted. Heck, I painted the base two summers ago, but I couldn't decide how I wanted to do the top, leading to my father having to paint the top for me this past summer because I didn't want to worry about the fumes while pregnant. The otherwise-finished desk has been sitting in my house in pieces since then.

Of course, then I realized that I hadn't posted pictures of Eve's room that I decorated a year and a half ago -- you remember, the one that I blogged progress pictures here, here, and here? Whoops. So here's what the finished room looks like, with notes, and coincidentally there's a picture of the desk too.

• play mat is LILLABO from IKEA
  
• bed is DALSELV from IKEA (discontinued)
  
• torch lamps are MINNEN FACKLA from IKEA (discontinued)
  
• bookshelves donated by mightymeggie's awesome parents, and I think they're old IKEA too

• linens are double-bed-sized so they touch the floor and were purchased for $5 at a garage sale
  
• Raggedy Ann doll on the bed was made by Anne MacEacheron for me when I was a baby
  
• I made the sookie blanket on the bed myself and Eve still sleeps with it every night
  
• Snow White and Rose Red art by Bronwen Grimes
  
• cross-stitched baby sampler on the right bookshelf by Krismom
  
• Link stuffie on the right bookshelf by Andrew Pidcock
  
• scrapbook-framed photo on the left bookshelf also by Krismom

• the desk is this vintage desk (which was probably originally intended for a typewriter), with a new top
  
• the flowers on the wall are plastic and were bought on clearance at Home Outfitters
  
• curtains are MERETE from IKEA

• the rod on the closet door is one of two pressure rods used to keep the closet closed when not in use (the rod is conveniently out of reach of little hands)
  
• the art on the door was a baby gift designed by a friend of the family and looks like this; the frame is screwed securely onto the door

• my favourite little detail as you enter the room is this light switch plate, which was painted for me as a baby gift when I was little by wrathofdawn

I'm sure you're probably wondering why there is nothing on the three bottom shelves of both bookshelves. Well, we discovered pretty quickly when we moved Eve to this room that she absolutely will not nap (and sometimes not sleep at night) if there is anything in the room that she can play with. Much like how a battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy, I have learned that a parent's plans for anything, not just decorating, are often derailed by a child's wants and needs.

I can't believe I haven't posted since the start of December! Oh, well, maybe I can believe it. First there was all the build-up for Christmas and the frantic gift-making... And then, well, she arrived:










My youngest daughter, Cassandra May Youngs, was born at 3:10pm on Tuesday, December 27th, 2011. She weighed in at a healthy 7lbs 8oz, not too different from her sister. Cassandra and I returned home from the hospital on December 29th. I'm taking a bit of time off from my Etsy shops and will only be posting sporadically on my blog (obviously) as I balance the needs of the two little people in my life.

(As an aside, I am drowning in little girl things in my life right now. There are no boys on my husband's side of the family in this generation, not a single one. All of the children in this generation on my side of the family (which leans slightly, but not exclusively, toward girls) live at least a day's drive away. As you can probably tell from the pictures (among other things), I'm not much for pink and frills and frippery and the stereotypical things that a girl is supposed to like. But there's not much one can do to avoid it when there are this many little girls in the vicinity. I cannot wait until they all hit puberty. I can only imagine the sheer drama of it all.)

I finally finished that second pair of Smelly Socks for my niece, who will be receiving the socks and a copy of the book for Christmas. So yes, you can definitely get two pairs of Smelly Socks out of a single ball of each colour of Mandarin Petit by Sandnes Garn, with some left over.


I ended up with 68g of yarn left over in total, and my scale puts a finished pair of Smelly Socks at 41g. I'd definitely have enough yarn to make another pair of socks in this size using this pattern, although the colours would be wrong (the yellow is running out first since the toe, instep, and heel are all that colour).


Speaking of socks, I have inherited a stash of sock yarn from a friend. She is seriously ill and the doctors are so pessimistic that she will ever leave the hospital that she has begun settling her affairs. She asked me to go over to her house and take her sock yarn because this way she can be sure that it will be used. It is a lot of yarn, some in whole balls, some in smaller remnants. I have to think of a way to use it all up and do her proud, so I'm on the search for good patterns, especially for the remnants (I can of course always make socks with the whole balls).


However, whittling away at my friend's stash will have to wait until the new year. (Perhaps it can be my New Year's resolution?) I've only just finished the last of the socks I wanted to knit up for Christmas, the ones on the top of the pile above. I used my Ribbed For Her Pleasure sock pattern again, although I made them a bit longer than usual to fit the recipient's feet. The yarn is the Heidi's by Hand (by Heidi Wulfraat) hand-dyed specialty yarn (75% wool, 25% nylon; 3.5oz/100g; 459yds/420m; $22.00) that I picked up on my Moncton yarn crawl this past summer. I'm pretty sure that I have enough yarn left over to make a second pair just like these, but once again I'm going to wait until after the holidays. I still have a number of requested projects on my list to finish up in the next few weeks, along with of course all the decorating and parties and hooferah of the holiday season. Oh, and gestating, that takes up a lot of my time and energy these days. I have mentioned that, right?

My three-year-old daughter Eve is a huge Robert Munsch fan. Well, Robert Munsch and Dr. Seuss (as if this year's Hallowe'en costume wasn't a big tip-off). Since Munsch and Seuss are both classic authors from my own childhood, I'll admit to encouraging her current obsession, even though it means that, between the library and the bookstore, I've pretty much memorized every singly book they've ever written by now. Heck, Eve isn't yet reading by herself and she can pretty much tell the stories to me from memory. (As an aside, it's rather cute to have your preschooler "read" stories to you. If you have access to a kiddo this age, I highly recommend trying it sometime.)


(Illustration by Michael Martchenko from the Robert Munsch book Smelly Socks;
image available as a free wallpaper via Scholastic Canada.)
I was raised on such Munsch classics as The Paper Bag Princess (1980) and Love You Forever (1986). However, Eve's current favourite is Smelly Socks, which came out in 2004. Smelly Socks tells the tale of a girl named Tina who begs her grandfather to take her across the river to a big sock store to buy some fancy socks. She finds herself the perfect pair of red, yellow and green socks, and she cries, "Socks! Socks! Wonderful socks! I am NEVER going to take them off!" Of course, the longer Tina wears the socks, the smellier they get, until her friends get fed up and drag her down to the river to give those socks a good washing.


After reading this story hundreds -- if not thousands -- of times, I decided to knit some "smelly socks" so my daughter could have some of her very own. However, I was determined that they not actually become as smelly as the ones in the book. I'll hand-wash adult socks, but kid socks tend to get dirty so quickly that I determined that these socks should be machine-washable. (Somehow the Munchkin Socks that I knit for Eve ended up in the wash and shrunk so small that they're even too small for her dolls. Never again.) I also wanted them to be mostly natural fibers, since I find that acrylic and nylon make the feet sweat. Lastly, the yarn that I chose had to be sock-weight and available in bright red, yellow and green. Those last criteria were the hardest to meet, actually. It's amazing how many yarns just don't come in all three solid colours.


I eventually chose Mandarin Petit by Sandnes Garn, which is machine-washable (air dry flat) 100% Egyptian 4ply cotton). I used Yellow 2004 (although I think Goldenrod 2315 would have done just as well), Cardinal 4418, and Green 8017. It cost $5.95/ball plus tax at Wool Trends in St. John's, Newfoundland. I was lucky enough to have someone visiting St. John's at the time who was willing to pick it up for me, but if you wish to order from this shop and don't live in town you can do so via their website or toll-free by phone. I never had a chance to visit this shop myself, but I am told that it is a lovely establishment in a beautiful old building with extremely knowledgeable staff.


Anyway, I finally wrote up the new pattern for Smelly Socks! It's my first toe-up sock pattern attempt and I am quite pleased. I used the magic cast-on and based the heel of the sock on Wendy's generic toe-up sock pattern (if you've never knit a toe-up sock or a short row heel, check out her pattern before mine, since she explains things better than I ever could). Of course, I had to make some changes to size it for a three-year-old. Here are the step-by-step details:

( Smelly Socks sock pattern behind the cut... )

These socks fit my daughter perfectly, and she wears a size 8 children's shoe. For sizing reference, the socks fit well on sock blockers made just a tiny bit bigger than the middle-sized child's sock from this template (PDF). I make my sock blockers from stiff plastic place mats, especially when they're just going to be given away. I'm going to try to make a second pair of socks from these same balls of wool for my niece, to be given as a Christmas present with another copy of the book. If that works out without having to buy extra, I'll let everyone know!

The real question here is, does Eve like her "smelly socks"? Yes, yes she does. She loves them. Getting the socks off of her is almost as difficult as it was to get them off of Tina in the original book. Mission accomplished.

P.S. As usual, if anyone tries this pattern and notices any errata, please let me know so that I can correct it ASAP! I will totally admit to not being perfect, and I have no test knitters.

I opened my upright freezer in the basement tonight to discover this on the door:


Do you see it? I don't know how long it has been this way, as it doesn't look that bad at first glance, but here's a close-up:


Crud. That's two 1L jars of cooked, canned pumpkin that I'll never be able to use. Yes, I did leave lots of head space in the jars (almost 2"), which is usually more than sufficient -- I freeze food in this style of jar all the time. Yes, I let the food cool down slowly overnight before I put it in the freezer. I lose the occasional batch of freezer food this way every year in all sorts of different jars/containers, but this time it really ticks me off.

This year pumpkins and I just haven't meshed. Usually I cook and preserve my Jack-o'-lanterns from Hallowe'en, but even though I carved them the night before they were already disgustingly moldy by November 1st. I have no idea why. So the following weekend when I went to this year's Great Pumpkin Massacre (photos are from the 2008 event but it gives you an idea) I was lucky enough to snap up a half-dozen small pumpkins that weren't going to be hacked, stabbed, or otherwise destroyed. Except that two of them rotted between the Massacre and me finishing cutting/peeling/cooking/canning, and I mean the kind of rotting where sections of the fruit are totally liquefied. That reeks, by the way. And then I burnt the bottom of the first batch of cooked pumpkin, wasting a bunch of it. And now two of the five or so liters that I did manage to cook up have burst in my freezer.

That's it. This winter, if people want pumpkin treats once my meager remaining supply is gone they'll just have to live with commercially canned stuff. I'm done.

This year I was so inspired by the Hallowe'en monster silhouettes that I wrote about earlier in the month that I had to try making some for myself. I don't think that mine are in any way as good as theirs, but I had a lot of fun making them, and the trick-or-treaters really seemed to like them. I spotted a lot of kids across the street pointing up at my windows with looks of awe on their faces.


Total cost for decorating all of these windows? About $13.00, including tax (although I already had the white curtains). I used $0.92/sheet black Bristol board from WalMart and tissue paper (the same kind you'd use in gift bags) for the colour pops.

( Detail photos... )


Of course, the silhouettes were not the only decorations that I put up. I am not a great gardener anyway, but I tend not to touch my garden for pretty much all of the month of October, letting the plants wilt and die. It makes a great backdrop for Hallowe'en decorations; after all, who'd believe in a haunted house with a perfectly manicured yard? Here you can see the skeleton pumpkin stand that I picked up after last Hallowe'en, as well as some of the cardboard gravestones that I painted last year. I went with a vampire theme for the stones.

( Pumpkins and other decorations... )


Of course, we're not the only home in the neighbourhood that gets into Hallowe'en. Most houses only display a pumpkin or two, but there are a few houses that can be relied on to have great decorations year after year. These guys, for example, always have great pumpkins. And costumes. And a smoke machine. And a graveyard.

( More neighbourhood decorations... )


Even a few ceramic tea-light holders on the porch can liven up your house for Hallowe'en. As a bonus, you don't have to do any carving! Actually, I liked how this shot turned out so well that I made it into a wallpaper. It's available as 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1200x800, 1280x1024, and 1680x1050 (Flickr set).

I hope you all had a safe and spooky Hallowe'en!

Hallowe'en has come and gone; the trick-or-treating is over but the candy will live on, possibly lasting until Christmas at this rate. I made costumes for myself and my daughter this year, although we didn't coordinate this time. I was inspired way back in 2007 by Anda's costume for the Etsy Labs Halloween Party, but as it turns out I didn't get a chance to try out the idea for myself until this year.


Yes, this year I was pregnant for Hallowe'en -- very noticeably so at 30.5 weeks. No way was I going to just paint my baby bump up like a pumpkin or a globe or some such, it's much too cold around here to go around with that much skin exposed! So I just had to do the pregnant skeleton/pregnant X-ray costume. You would not believe how many people totally ignored the baby part of the skeleton...


I'm pretty sure that I went a different direction than Anda with the costume's execution; I think she used applique. I started with a pair of thrifted pants ($7.99 at Value Village) and a cheap turtleneck ($12.00 at Zellers). Then I used painter's tape to mask off a stencil of where I wanted the bones to go. I did a Google image search for references, although I wasn't trying to be anatomically correct -- when was the last time that you saw a truly anatomically correct skeleton costume?


Then I used a thick paintbrush to apply two coats of Speedball opaque white screen printing ink. This is pretty expensive stuff to be used as simple fabric paint, but I had a bunch left over from a screen-printing experiment a couple of years ago. I left the ink overnight to dry, and in the morning I removed the painter's tape and then used an iron to heat-set the ink. Now the body was not only finished, but also 100% machine washable and very comfortable, which is necessary when you're both the mother of a often-messy three-year-old and pregnant. I bought the mask pre-made for about $8.00 at Michaels, gave it a white base coat of spray paint (for some reason the original colour was off-white), and then I used Scribbles shiny black fabric paint for the black parts. This paint adheres surprisingly well to plastic, and I've used it successfully on plastic masks before.


My daughter Eve's costume was a little bit more involved. She was supposed to be Thing 1 from the classic Dr. Seuss children's story The Cat in the Hat. I would suspect that most people recognize the character, since the book has been in print since 1957, and there was a feature film made in 2003 with the same title. Even so, I've had a number of people not get what she was supposed to be, although to be fair they're usually from my grandmother's generation.


The pattern that I used for the bodysuit was Simplicity 2788. I only used the bodysuit component, made out of a decent T-shirt fabric (95% cotton, 5% spandex). It too two fittings to get it just right. For the first one I had to take in the sides by a couple of inches, since the original pattern was intended to fit bulky for warmth. The second fitting just confirmed that I'd done the sizing properly and gave me a chance to adjust the sleeve length. I ironed HeatnBond Ultra Hold iron-on adhesive to a piece of white cotton, traced and cut out a circle, and then ironed and stitched the white circle to the front of the costume. I used Scribbles fabric paint again to write "Thing 1" and draw the black circle. The wig is from Dollarama and cost all of $2.00, and was added to a pair of red stretch gloves ($1.00 at Walmart) and a pair of red socks that we already owned.


I should probably mention that I also made my mother's Thing 2 costume, Hers was the easiest of the bunch, since she already had red one-piece long johns that she didn't mind me altering. Unfortunately the long johns did up the front, so when I added the white circle (using the same technique as on my daughter's costume) I had to cut it in half and replace the red buttons with white ones. Add the wig, red socks, and red gloves, and ta da! Thing 2.


As a planned bonus, all of the costumes I made this year were big enough that we could wear layers underneath when going out trick-or-treating that night. Comfortable, washable, and warm: perfect costumes for a Canadian Hallowe'en.

I am happy to say that I managed to finish costumes for both my daughter and myself in time for the first Hallowe'en gathering of the season today. It required staying up until almost 2:00am last night, but it was worth it! I am pretty sure that the only reason that the costumes were finished at all is because I was able to return the following troublemaker to her proper home yesterday morning:


This is Lily, my parents' cat. She's a rescue that they brought home from the Humane Society almost two years ago now. You would never know that when they got her she only weighed about 2lbs; she had a broken tooth and couldn't eat for who knows how long before she was rescued. Now I'm pretty sure she weighs at least 8lbs. She is part Siamese and part who knows what. She is also extremely affectionate and playful and must get into everything remotely interesting. Like the costume fabric that I was trying to cut on the floor. Or the lovely crinkly paper out of which the pattern was made.


I had forgotten what it's like to get any crafting done when there's an interested cat around. It's worse than a toddler; at least toddlers have bedtimes! All of my cats have either been elderly (like last five years of their lives, passed away of old age at 19 elderly), or tiny kittens that I found homes for and didn't get to keep. And I want another cat or two of my own? Hmmmm. Maybe I'll need a sewing room first.