littles

I'd like to start off by saying that Valerie's suggestion that I leave the tiny babies around the house for Cee to come upon unexpectedly--and thus be totally freaked out--made me about giggle my considerably-large-sized arse off!  I could never be that mean, however, 'cause I do love him, after all...and because I grew up with two older brothers, who took entirely too much devious joy in doing just that type of thing to me as a child...looking back I'd say that's where half my problems stem from...yeah, yeah, that's it....couldn't be anything I ever did or said...right?  Ahem......

My loving brothers took delight in doing things like blowing up black leather gloves and shoving them at me in the doorway to my bedroom as I was walking through, so I'd think someone was grabbing at me (you had to be there, it was scary!) or putting tabasco sauce on a lemon wedge and telling me it was a 'Danish Candy' and doing the literal ROFL (before there even was ROFL) while my eager chubby little hands stuffed it into my mouth...don't you laugh, it wasn't funny!  Well, I guess it was--to everyone but me...and maybe I fell for that one more than once--stop giggling, you!--but hey, I was little...like 2 or 3 little...and you tell a chubby kid it's a candy and they will fall for it almost every time....my dad didn't have to practically wet his pants laughing over it though...harumph...

Speaking of little...it's the season of littles....the next little is due this very month in my hometown of Calgary.  Arrival date is technically May 18th, but this little (who is a girl, the first one in a while in my world--everyone has been making boys for years!) seems to want to make an early appearance.   I have previously blogged about the February baby sweater on two needles, which is destined for this wee one, but thought she should have some footwear as well, so I made some socks and some booties:

The booties are seamless, which I absolutely loved!  I embroidered some little pink daisies on them because they just seemed so plain to me....and I think this little deserves some May flowers, since she shall be a May baby.  The socks are a fast little knit that I've used a few times before. 


I acquired one of those ridiculously cute sock blocker keychains recently, and decided I'd make it a little sock with my leftover Yarn Pirate from Ishbel (which is blocking as I type this)...it started off swimmingly, but, well, a picture is worth a thousand words...or in this case; five:

Well, technically four words and 1 slang....I used the needles the pattern suggested, honest...and I knit very loosely...so I can only guess that the yarn was too fine for the pattern specs...still...fun!  I shall have to try again, and it only took mere minutes to make.

And this is what the Killer Shih-Tzu thinks of my knitting teeny socks:

Here's a link to the little bootie pattern I used:  Seamless Baby Booties (Top Down)

And here's a link to the little socks pattern I used:  Baby Cables Bootie Socks

file this under

'You Know You Knit Too Much When'....You know you knit too much when, in the course of watching a primetime crime drama show you observe that someone on said show has been killed on an airplane with a knitting needle (through the throat, no less), necessitating the solving of that crime...and maybe they show the victim from a long angle and you say out loud, to no one in particular, "Hmmmm...that looks like about a 4 1/2 mm, maybe Susan Bates"....and then they show a close up of the wound....and you discover you are right....uh thank you verra much...and then maybe your husband looks at you and says "you really need to step away from the needles"...yeah, like that'll happen...you will be pleased to know it wasn't the knitter that committed the crime...us knitters can be so wily and crafty...I just worried that maybe they will ban knitting needles from air travel...and I wouldn't want anyone eyeballing me whilst I was getting my knit on during a flight...

Thanks for all your well wishes on my health, you guys have no idea how much that means to me!  Things are coming along fine with physio, in fact I have my last in-home visit in about two weeks...after that I may need more therapy, but it's still up in the air.  I have flashes of normalcy more and more often...and by that I mean I'll be going along and realize I've done something I haven't been able to do since I got ill--like stand on my right leg and lift my left foot off the ground, for instance--and then I will do the fake dance of joy and lift my left foot about a million times just because I can...and then later on in the evening I'll be in enormous amounts of pain in my right leg because--duh--I put so much weight on it...it appears I won't learn...ah well, maybe the resolution of this condition won't take much longer...she said with hope...

I've been knitting...still finding it hard to stay monogamous to one project, so I'm just rolling with it...yes I have a lot of stuff on the needles, but it's all getting finished, so no big whoop.


First up is the Ishbel shawl/scarf.  I love looking at the "people" tab on Ravelry, and found that I was clicking on shawl projects more and more thinking 'wow that looks gorgeous'...after about 7 or 8 clicks, I realized it was the same pattern I was clicking on over and over...the Ishbel shawl, by Ysolda Teague, which appears to be very popular on Ravelry...I decided that since I was so drawn to it, I must have the pattern...now lace and I have a love/hate relationship...I always try lacy things and always end up screwing the pattern up and having to frog...and then hating them...but still the siren call of the pattern...so with wide-eyed optimism I cast on...and discovered that I'm really not that bad at lacy patterns after all....sure there was some tinking, and after one particular row I spread out the shawl to see how wide it was and didn't notice the 30 or so stitches falling off the one side of my circular (man was the air blue that night!) and had to rip back 2 or 3 rows because the stitches just unravelled so quickly...but still...I got it done!!  And now, I need to block, but here it is, in all its naked finished pre-blocked glory...

I made the small size, so it's more of a scarf than a shawl, and I have a feeling that the yarn is a little busy for the pattern, but still....lurv...I already have the yarn picked out for another...

The above picture is a better representation of the colourway...this is Yarn Pirate in Neptune, and when I went looking through the stash to find yarn to knit Ishbel, this literally fell out and hit me on the head, so I decided I'd better use it and not tempt fate.

I also found another dishcloth pattern to love...love to knit, love to finish, just plain love;

This is the Round Lacy Cloth by Rhonda White...it's a free pattern online and it really should be illegal to love a pattern this much, but if loving it is wrong I don't want to be right....it's ingenious...knits up wickedly fast and is so pretty when it's done it's almost a shame to use it on your dishes...well, maybe I wouldn't go that far...

Again, I already have another on my needles as I type this...it looks awesome in the variegated colours.

I also have a guilty pleasure to tell you about....sigh, here goes....my name is Kiki, and I like making doll clothes...



There, it's out...don't judge me....can I hear some of you singing "Creepy Doll" by Jonathan Coulton???  I can't help it, friends...I think they are too adorable...these are little 5-inch Berengeur babies, and their little duds are made out of crochet cotton size 10 thread and my teeny steely crochet hooks....




Cee is looking decidedly worried these days...keeps saying things like; "You're not going to turn into one of  THOSE women, are you??"...you know, the kind that fill their houses with weird porcelain dolls or those 'reborn' thingies?  I can't say as I am...but you just never know how deep this rabbit hole will go, folks.  Cee is seriously creeped out by them....he thinks they will come to life and try to steal his eyes while he sleeps....

I personally think they are far too adorable to ever be that mean, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion...

If you would like to knit Ishbel, you can find the pattern over at Ravelry here  you do need to purchase it, I think it's 3 British Pounds...

The Knitted Lacy Round Cloth by Rhonda White is free, and you can find it here

If you would like to join the dark side and make the tiny baby clothes, I found them in a booklet called "Itty Bitty Babies"....

"...and there's a creepy doll....that always follows you...it has a ruined eye, that is always open..."

holy sh#t

Hey...............

Wow, it's been a while, hasn't it?  The last time I posted we were just rid of our 'house guest' and I was having some pain in my right hip that I was assured was strained ligaments.....

Without going into a long (and probably very boring) story, the strained ligaments turned out to be acute Sciatica, which is an inflammation of the Sciatic nerve (lower back, either side of your spine, top of your butt cheeks is a nerve which feeds allllll the way down your leg)  I had it on my left side in the summer, but recovered fairly quickly...the right side...well, it's taking quite a bit longer.

Basically kids, not long after I last posted I ended up taking an ambulance ride to emergency (boy was that fun--not) because I could no longer move without screaming in pain....this seemed to unnerve my husband for some reason, the me screaming in pain, and also my continued pleading of him to take his alluminum baseball bat and cave my head in was really starting to wear on his psyche....can you believe the heartless bugger refused EVERY single time??  After xrays and tons of blood tests and all that junk, I was given some very strong narcotics and sent home....home to where I couldn't get up the stairs, or move..or even get IN the house for that matter...um...yeah.  It was decided that I should go and stay with my mother in law, as she has a bungalow, so everything is all on one level, plus lots of neat equipment like a lift chair, walkers, etc. etc. and after a couple of weeks I should be back to normal.  That was November 1, 2009.  I made a visit to my doctor about a week or so later and was told that it was Sciatica...they had to dope me up big time to get me down the few stairs and into the car, and I was still screaming most of the way...every bump in the road felt like it was 3 feet deep.

I haven't posted kids, because I don't remember the entire month of November, nor the first 3 weeks of December....and to be honest, even January is a bit hazy....I was too busy being in indescribable pain, the nerve was spasming almost constantly, sending jolts all the way down to my big toe, praying I didn't have to get up and "walk" anywhere, because not only did it take me almost 20 minutes to walk 20 feet, but the pain was....well let's just say the pain was bad....really bad....like praying for a quick death to get away from it bad.  I basically lost the use of my right leg...in between crying jags, begging for the pain to go away, and making uncontrollable involuntary noises while not being able to even speak at times, I was without tv, computer, or even my beloved knitting (because believe it or not, I couldn't even  hold my knitting without being in pain, much less complete the act of knitting) 

Flash forward to today.....that "two weeks" I was going to stay with my mother in law?  Well it turned into almost 4 months.  I'll say that again....Four Months.   For obvious reasons we bypassed all the holidays...in fact, to me it still feels like it should be Fall...and even though my mother in law and I get along...well....you fill in the blanks....there were tensions....and issues....and even though Cee came and visited tons, it of course wasn't the same, and I wasn't in my own home...

When I finally started moving around again, after being whacked out for a month and a half on heavy duty pain killers, then spending two weeks sick as a dog as those came out of my system, I realized that my muscles just wouldn't do what they were supposed to...mainly support the weight of my leg (did you know that your legs make up about half your body weight?  You don't realize how heavy they are until you can't move them anymore)

I've been having multiple physio therapy sessions (they are fabulous, come right into our home, which is good, 'cause I'd have a heck of a time going to them), at one point she was coming twice a week....after learning to walk again, and learning in stages to do stairs again, I was able to come back home 3 weeks ago, and have slowly started getting back into a routine...the dogs were all like "Hey, I remember you....sort of....got any snacks??"

I am making slow progress, have come a very long way, and have a very long way to go, friends.  I will probably have to have more tests to see just why I got it so bad (something about me being 'too young' to get 'this' 'this bad') and maybe have to see more specialists....and I may yet face more relapses and pain....still, as long as I wake up and I'm not in that awful pain it's a good day.  I can do the stairs now...it's not pretty, but I get it done....and I'm able to walk (although I have to use a walker still), and am trying right now to improve my gait, but it's all good.  Why, just last night I was able to sit and actually lift my right foot off the ground, and raise my leg....a huge triumph!   Guess I ended up telling a long and boring story after all, huh?

Annnnnnnnyway, as soon as I felt even the teeniest bit better, I asked for my knitting, of course!  And as soon as I got home I surrounded myself with all my beloved projects in progress, they had been left languishing in the exact places I'd put them down last Fall.

Life has gone on, as it tends to do, and the people around me keep having babies.  I always think this is very considerate, as it give me an excuse to knit baby clothes, which I love...two are expected this year, the first is a girl due in May, the second is yet a surprise, due in the Fall....so when I got home, I got out the trusty Knitter's Almanac (Elizabeth Zimmermann) and cast on for the February Baby Sweater on Two Needles.

Just needs buttons!  The simplicity of this pattern is a pure joy, it's no wonder the adult version is so popular with everyone at Ravelry!

Then I decided I needed some booties or socks (or both!) to go along with the sweater, so last night I cast on the Little 16 Newborn Socks...it's a free pattern you can find on Ravelry.

Just using some Bernat baby sport yarn for these, so far they are fun to knit.

Cee has been wearing the socks I made him almost constantly, so I figured he needed a new pair.  I started the Mock Wave Cable socks from Favorite Socks last week.

This will be the fourth time I've knit this pattern....I must say I love it, and he really likes them....or at least he wears them....probably because he loves me  :o)  Using some manly-type coloured yarn...I think it's Kertzer with the Aloe Vera.

And last but not least, I've made progress on my 'Cowichan' style cardigan I started waaaaaaay back last September, the back is now done.

Those are meant to be beavers there,  I  found this hilarious, but to me they kind of look like fatty squirrels...which is even more hilarious....I have a weird sense of humour though....

Anyway kids, that's it for me now, but not forever....can't promise how often I'll post, but touch wood it will be often (hopefully that's a good thing!)  Thanks for reading, TTFN.