In Progress: LetterBaby Jacket

I decided to make Esther Ro a jacket for her birthday. Probably should have decided this much sooner than about 3 days in advance. Her birthday was over a week ago, & I am still working on it. Oh well, we're having temps in the low 80s during the days anyhow.

Still, as I've been updating so infrequently lately, I thought I'd share a picture of it in progress:
I decided to call it the "LetterBaby Jacket" because, as you can see, it is vaguely modeled off a high school letterman jacket. This is mainly because I didn't think I had enough of the purple yarn (yes, that's purple; my flash did funny things with the color) to make the sleeves as well. So I decided to do this. I probably do have enough yarn after all, but I'm paranoid. I'll make a hat or something with the rest. For one of the older girls who will actually allow a hat to rest on her head, that is.

This is obviously a very simple design, with minimal shaping (decreases on every other row of the front neckline only). It still needs, obviously, sleeves, a collar, & a button/snap placket (havent' decided which to use yet). But I took the time out to crochet a little E. The yarn is a bulky version of Caron's Simply Soft which I don't remember the exact name of, the hook is J, and the stitch plain ol' HDC (except the E, which of course is done in SC).

But I just couldn't let her birthday pass by without somethinghand-crocheted, so I went to Big Lots (which I now worship, by the way) and bought more yarn out of the Amazing Dollar Yarn Display, and made Esther a hat for her birthday:
As you can tell, she likes Fun Fur about as much as I do. I had to have someone hold it on her head (I think that's Jon Jr, coz Maggie's kid) to get a picture, but I do have a couple of cute video clips of her yanking it off her head & throwing it on the floor. What she is holding in her hands, if you can see it, is a box of tights, which proved to be the most-loved gift of the evening. The box, that is, not the tights. She spent most of the night gnawing on the box of tights, even threw down her cake to chew on it instead.

(The Fun Fur hat is also partially the result of my joke to my supervisor at work that I was going to make Her Baldness a wig for her birthday.)

Today's photos, by the way, are brought to you by Image Enhance. It's actually free, rather than just a trail version or a limited-use version or some other such nonsense. It is quite simple to use. I don't know how good it is at editing photos, but it works quite well for resizing them, which is really all I need it to do right now. The only thing is that it defaults to saving them as bitmaps even if they're orginally JPGs. So watch that, since a lot of photo hosting places won't work with BMPs.