We went to Wooyung Beach on Tuesday.

I knit most of tthe second Debbie Bliss Moss Stitch Shoe while waiting for my first bloods of the cycle, I finished it on the plane later Monday morning. I seamed it yesterday while Jesse was helping someone instead of driving with me to the coast.

I seamed the I heel first using mattress stitch and the moss stitches don’t quite match up but I am leaving it as is.

I forgot to bring any pins and had to make do with toothpicks. What do they say? Necessity is the mother of invention?

Here it is, all done.

Can you believe how gorgeous this glass table is for photographing little shoes?

This mosquito’s legs were completely out of proportion to it’s body. You can’t tell from this photo but they were over an inch long (it’s body was fairly normal sized) and seemed to weight it down in a somewhat debilitating fashion.

Look closely, can you see it?

Oh and I have been knitting. More on that later.

Thank you all so much for your suggestions about pom poms and seaming! I will get back to you all personally as soon as I can manage. Today was another exciting day when I should have taken my knitting with me and it may take me a while to recover. Well actually I did take my knitting for the most exciting portion of the day and couldn’t bring myself to get it out. Anyway, things are unsettled just now, I am too busy recovering from my day to do much else tonight, my mother in law is showing up for a visit tomorrow afternoon, we are having a party Sunday afternoon and Jesse and I are going away ALONE together for three days from Monday morning. There may be a dearth of posting. Sorry. I will email you all before I go. I hope. I may even attach the pom pom and post a picture… Then again I might not.

Does anybody have any idea how to seam these shoes? The only seaming lesson in the book - baby knits for beginners - is for the various ways to do mattress stitch (selvedge to selvedge, selvedge to cast off, etc). The pattern says nothing more enlightening than to seam the shoes easing in the toe, so you would assume that she means you to use the techniques taught in the book - ie mattress stitch. Apart from the bit where she says to turn the shoe right side out when you are done, which you would not need to do if it were mattress stitch. Also, mattress stitch on tiny little baby shoes seems kind of bulky. So suggestions anyone?

Update: thankyou all so much for your suggestions! Just to clarify I am only struggling with which seaming technique to use, I do know which bits to attach where, if that makes sense. I think Julia’s modified mattress stitch suggestion may be the way to go at the moment.

Has anyone else noticed that my almost finished WIPs are breeding?

So I finished the hat night before last, attached the pom pom and gave it a wash. The result was, well it wasn’t good. How do you attach a pom pom so that it stays snug to the hat?

I have been knitting a shoe while further considering the problem of the pom pom.

I had planned to have this hat finished last night. And I would have too, had I considered that when converting a roll brim to a moss stitch one need not knit for quite so long before starting the decreases. It would have been one strange looking baby if I had left the hat as it was… This hat is for the surprise baby. In the end I decided against a quilt and have instead opted to send them this blanket.

The Big Bad Baby Blanket was my first real knitting project. It has been sitting in my closet for over a year waiting for a baby and it struck me that I would rather know it was being used by someone special. However, I also wanted to send something that was made with this babe in mind, so I am making a matching hat from the left over Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran. Hopefully it really will be done tonight.

I have been procrastinating again. As this is a knitting blog I try to mostly keep my infertility issues to myself but I think it has to be crystal clear to all of us at this point that my knitting is more than a little ruled by my cycles, particularly my medicated cycles. I was on a new drug this month and yet again found myself not knitting as it drew to a close. Anyway, the main point of this story is that yesterday I went to drop Isabelle at daycare. 20 mins there, 20 mins back and supposedly no stops in between. I left the house with neither my knitting (nothing on the needles), nor a book. BIG mistake.

I dropped Isabelle off, I had a 20 minute chat with her carer about school/preschool choices, I got back in the car and started the engine while trying to ring a friend and ask how her IVF transfer went (see that IVF nonsense plays a double roll in this story). The car made strange beeping noises and flashed lights at me but I was too busy with the phone to have adequately taken note of what happened. The car didn’t actually start, but when I tried again it did. I was worried about the beeping and the flashing so I turned it off and tried again. This time it seemed like it had a flat battery. New cars aren’t supposed to have flat batteries. Like an idiot I did it all again and this time it didn’t start at all. Ooops. Called Jesse and it started when I tried to demonstrate the bad noises too him, but sounded ugly. Called roadside assistance and they insisted that even if it was now starting it shouldn’t be driven until they had seen it.

So I sat alone in a car with no book and no knitting for TWO HOURS. Let that be a lesson to me. DO NOT leave home without either a book or knitting, preferably both. I played with my ipod and spent far too much time thinking about my father (who died over 10 years ago) and not being pregnant again. Really, I need to never leave the house without knitting ever again.

Road side assistance came and the car started perfectly. They took it for a drive and it was lovely. So they insisted that I better take it to Ford so they could take it for a drive. I took it to Ford and they thought is started just as it should, they also thought it drove beautifully. As I started thinking I was going to throw up from sitting in the passenger seat while the Ford guy drove the car hard to see if it would play up I realised that the problem was not with the car but with my stomach. The new drugs have made my stomach so delicate that I was noticing every bump in the road and thinking the car was handling badly. Oops. So we got back to the depot and he asked me to leave it 20 mins so he could try starting it one last time. No flashing lights, no beeping. As I was leaving he asked me casually “Hey did you by any chance put your foot on the accelerator the two time the car had trouble starting and then didn’t start”. Um, yeah I did. “Oh” he says “NEVER touch the accelerator when starting this car, it interferes with the computerised start up process”. When all was said and done I wasted 3/4 of a day on nonexistent problems. I had two hours to do a days work and the only thing that was actually wrong was a possible electrical fault that we maybe should get checked out sometime soon. All that time sitting around doing nothing.

I must not leave home without my knitting.