Finally!

I was starting to think I'd never get it done!

The shorts were simple, though I did make them more difficult than they really needed to be when I was trying to figure it out.

Then I spent a flippin' long amount of time trying to figure out what I wanted to do for a shirt. I'd first intended to crochet the whole thing, but I just wasn't making any progress on that, so I finally took a onesie and crocheted a turtle motif (yes, my own pattern) to sew on it.

The booties are a variation of the ones I made for a girl, and the hat's just a tube I crocheted the top of closed. (Yes, I wanted it to look like that.)

Very simple, and it all took perhaps half a 6oz skein of sport weight yarn (including several false starts that I simply cut loose & gave to the kids to play with).

So, for all this, I am done! I'm going to consider the hexagonal blanket I made a while ago as being for the new baby (this is how much I hate making blankets), and anything else from here on out will just be for fun.

Absolute silliness

Conversations over at Mama Drama about what to give a breast-obsessed child for her first birthday and the butt obsession my own kids seem to have led to someone joking that I should knit my kids a butt for their birthday.

Of course, I don't knit. So what I came up with was this:
This, of course, is a butt-shaped bean bag. This is what happens when I am bored and in an ornery mood. I crochet rear-ends. (Well, actually, this is the only one I plan on ever making.)

I'm a little scared by how quickly my mind solved the "how do I crochet a butt" conundrum. Answer? Make two hemispheres, whipstitch them together partially (then put another line of stitching further down, to hold the halves together), and then crochet around the unused stitches to bring it together & finish it off as one piece.

I filled it with good ol' Texas pinto beans, which adds another layer to the joke.

Sigh. Still no progress in the boy's shirt field, but should the little tyke be born assless, I know what to do for a prosthesis.

I am not feeling the love.

Though I have made a cute little pair of shorts in case I have a boy, I haven't yet been able to make a shirt. I'm just not feeling it. Sigh. Hopefully things will clear up soon.

Whoa, I lost about a week there.

This is a photo of the completed baby girl outfit. I had almost all of it done within I'd say 48 hours of finding out I was pregnant, but then the first wave of morning sickness knocked me on my rear and I spent a week dozing on my cousin's couch. (Bless you, Maggie.) I finally felt well enough today to do the tiny bit of work it took to finish the hat.

I don't really have a pattern for the dress. As you can tell from looking at it, I basically crocheted a skirt onto the bottom of a wrap-front shirt.

How I did it: I made a chainless single crochet band a bit longer than I thought I'd need, tacked down the starting end of it, then carefully sewed it to the bottom of the shirt (finding out along the way that you really need to snap this kind of shirt closed first), then unraveled the extra. Second round was single crochet again, then next round got into my lace pattern. I believe this is called the fantail stitch. I was doing it (or a modified version thereof) from memory rather than my stitch pattern book. The first round of it was the fantail (9 alternate double crochets in one stitch), skip 2, single crochet, skip 2 around. This wasn't even, but it made a nicely full skirt in the end. After that initial round I went into the normal lace pattern. It's a 2-round repeat, basically like so: rnd 2 of the pattern is a single crochet in the middle (5th) stitch of the fantail, then chain 4, double crochet in the single crochet, chain 4 around. Then the next fantail round is to work the fantail in the single crochet, skip the chains, & single crochet in the double crochet.

If memory serves, the original fantail stitch in my copy of 300 Crochet Stitches is actually something like 13 trebles instead of 9 alternate double crochets. I've never found it to be really workable in its original form, since trebles take me so blasted long to do, so I was happy to come up with this variation.

I'm thinking of flattening it out to make a blanket, but I'm generally not too fond of openwork blankets. We shall see.

The booties...I had wanted to use Pam Gillette's Mary Jane Slippers pattern, but she doesn't have a baby size. So I looked at the picture & figured out how I could make something that looked similar, and that's what I've done.

They're really cute; unfortunately I have no idea if they'll actually fit. (Oh, & in spite of this picture, the "strap" isn't really crooked.) They're also a whopping 11 rounds/rows, and so work up in about 10 minutes. Here's to hoping I got the proportions reasonably correct.

The hat was quite simple as well. I used the base of my hat pattern for the Beginner Baby Set, only from top down this time, and made it just short of 5" long before finishing with a couple of single crochet rounds to help it stay on (it was pretty loose with just the half double crochets).

I'll post the patterns for the hat & booties here shortly; I really don't have one for the dress (which is why I went into such detail for it & not the others).

Tiny Baby Dress

Wednesday I found out I'm pregnant for the fourth time.

That same day I started a dress. I took a Gerber snap front tee and attached a crocheted skirt to it. Being that I was working at it from scratch, it took me some time to work out exactly what I wanted to do and how I needed to do it.

I finished it today. I now have a tiny little baby dress. There's something about making newborn stuff that brings the reality of it all home.