Pattern: based on the Knitty French Market Bag
Yarn: Lincraft “Cosy Wool”
Needles: 7mm Addi Turbos (60cm)

All done - and SERIOUSLY smaller now! If only I could get Isabelle to pose with it to give you a sense of scale. I am so thrilled with how this bag came out that is going to be hard to part with!

One more gift to go before this baby comes, I have had a cold and I have been procrastinating terribly, but it suddenly stuck me that the baby might not come until it’s done! And if she does come before the gift is done it may never be finished - either way, Yikes! Time to get moving. I think I am going to make some socks from one of the new Jo Sharp yarns.

Belinda has taken me by surprise, sending this parcel for the impending arrival. And she has taken my breathe away with the cuteness of it’s contents:

I had every intention of waiting until the baby came to open it, but pregnancy brain being what it is I didn’t actually think to hide it from Isabelle in the meantime. As you can imagine, once the parcel was noticed there was no letting up until it was open. How sweet is this bonnet?

I can’t wait to see it on the baby. And as for Isabelle, she is absolutely smitten with Clara here.

It’s almost enough to inspire me to start making softies. Almost. But I don’t think I am brave enough with such high standards to live up to! Thankyou so much Belinda, we could not be more delighted.

It’s 18 months since I first stashed this yarn to make a Market Squares bag for a dear friend. She was with us when Isabelle was born and we are hoping she will be able to make it (from interstate!) when this little one arrives. So this yarn was the first thing I pulled out once I finished the baby knitting. I did look at the Market Squares pattern, for a couple of days in fact. I even cast on. Three or four times. But in the end it was more than my pregnant brain could cope with and so I returned to the old faithful French Market Bag, with my favourite mods.

No Market Bag production experience is complete without the knitted bag being thoroughly tested by Isabelle. She’s grown a little in the last 18 months!

All it needs now is felting, which requires time with the washer, something that is in short supply at the moment. I feel like I have been washing 4-5 loads of washing a day for weeks. I probably haven’t been doing quite that much washing, but I tell you, it’s close.

No, not our little one, who needs to cook another couple of weeks, but the new owner of this set:

Pattern: Dumb Baby Sweater from “Knitting in Plain English”
Yarn: Rowan Wool Cotton in “Elf”
Needles: Addi Turbos 3.25mm

Welcome to the world baby Jasper.

Pattern: Yvonne’s Double Flower Cloth with some significant mods to make it a newborn baby sized hat
Yarn: Rowan Calmer in “Drift” with trim in “Powder Puff”
Needles: Addi Natura 3.25mm DPNs and circ

This was the last hat! It’s been done for quite a while now, even photographed for quite some time. Jesse is in the middle of undertaking a major overhaul of our photo management software & processes, leaving me somewhat disabled when it comes to getting stuff off the camera. It took figuring out a temporary work around to get the quilt photos off the camera for me to realise that I didn’t have to stop blogging just because I have no iphoto at the moment.

Anyway, back to this being the last hat. It’s quite hard to believe that all my planned baby craft projects are done, harder still to believe that I am 33 weeks pregnant. A few of the babies that all this knitting is for have already been born, so little parcels have been making their way out into the world. But this is what my baby knitting drawer looked like the day I finished this hat.

The only things missing from that drawer then were the first Baby Shedir, which had already been gifted and the Dolly Blanket, which is in hiding.

I had planned to reward myself with yarn for a baby blanket of some description once I got all of this done. But of course as soon as I cast off the hat I realised I had more gifts to make, for my midwife, OB and other carers… So now I am knitting another French Market Bag. Or not knitting it as the case may be. I went to bed before Isabelle last night and got up after her this morning. And I think I need a nap.

In the mean time Isabelle has been doing some amazing craft of her own.

Yes it does look an awful lot like the one in the last post I know… This was partly an economy of scale thing back when I wasn’t sure how many (if any) of my planned craft projects I was going to finish this pregnancy. But mostly it was because the fabric for both quilts was bought long ago, when I didn’t know when (or if) we would ever get to this point, but wanted to make sure I could make both babies one of these quilts if we did. Little did I imagine quite how close together the two babies would be due to arrive!