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.

Pattern: Simple Hat, at a finer gauge, in the round
Yarn: Debbie Bliss Cashmerino in colour 340503
Needles: 3.5mm Addi Natura DPNs

It does seem a bit long and narrow, but it’s very stretchy so hopefully it will fit around the same age as the cardigan. I do love baby things, so sweet and small and quick to knit. I just have to finish those shoes now so that I can get on with making a quilt for a baby that was born last week without our ever knowing there was a pregnancy… Um, must keep in better contact with our friends.

I cast on the Simple Hat a few days ago and have been knitting away at it off and on. The pattern is intended for DK weight yarn so I had to do some math to convert it for the finer gauge of the cashmerino baby. It’s a bit sad quite how long it took me to work this out, I was once good at math. I spent the first night struggling yet again with my DPN technique for managing the oncoming needle until I finally remembered where to put my thumb and it has been plain sailing since then. This hat is not exactly rocketing along as we were supposed to have a house warming party over the weekend, which was cancelled due to the small person developing an upset tummy that we felt obliged not to share with our guests…. First there was party planning to keep me busy, directly followed by a lot of ickyness all round. It has been a strange, quiet few days around here and I have picked up the needles only occasionally.

As for the Jacket With Moss Stitch Bands, a friend has offered up her 4 month old son to model my cardigan for a nine month old girl… I am waiting to see what it looks like on him before deciding whether to rip or not. I am hoping to leave well enough alone.

So last night I finished the last front, in short time as predicted. I agonised over how to pick up as many stitches on the cast off part of the neck as recommended, knit it and was aghast at how badly it sat. So I ripped most of it out and knit it again as tight as I could. No luck it looked just the same. I didn’t short row the neck because the number of stitches supposedly needed in the neckband was so many more than this method would have left on the needles. More fool me, short rows probably would have produced the perfect number of stitches for a perfectly fitting neck.

I decided I could live with it and attached the arms, my first attempt I realised I was getting one cast off arm stitch to two rows of body. The arm would have taken up more than half the body of the sweater so I ripped it out and did it one stitch for one row, which is what the instructions seemed to be implying. Well just look at it now, all puffy. Ugh. Of course I had to seam the whole damned thing before deciding I was worried about the arms.

I am going to go knit a Simple Hat, or perhaps a pair of shoes while I consider whether to fix it out or not, and if so how.

So this run of trouble free knitting had to end eventually. Right? Every project needs at least one “Duh!” moment. Last night as I cast on for the right front I looked at the pattern and thought “Hmm, if I do it that way I am going to end up with a yarn end to weave centre front of the cardigan. Why not knit the first row after the ribbing as a purl row and have the cast on end at the side?”. So that is what I did. It was all looking marvelous until I forgot to add a few rows to the row counter and had to go back and count them. As I peered oh so closely at those tiny little stitches something occurred to me. The moss stitch looked a bit different on this piece. The cast on looked a bit different on this piece. Witness below, right side on the left, wrong side on the right. Oops.

As I further considered my mistake I realised that the twisty pattern of the stocking stitch stitches was reversed. This is a small thing that most people probably wouldn’t have noticed but it would have bothered me forever. Double oops. I forgot to take a picture of last nights stitches before I ripped it out, but you can see how distinct the stitches are in this photo.

So I ripped back to the band and started again. Oh well. Knitting a piece a day was never going to last was it? However, I have had lots of knitting time on buses and in waiting rooms today and am just about to start the neck shaping, I should be finished quite early tonight. The problem is I think it may have been a mistake to knit the button holes spaced as per the pattern for 6 buttons, just less the bottom two, I think they probably should have been bunched up a bit more in the top half of the sweater, but I am not completely sure, so I am going to finish the piece as is before deciding.

And finally, another question. I am thinking about a hat to go with the cardigan and booties. I am thinking about continuing the moss stitch theme. These are the three options I am considering. Debbie Bliss Cable and Moss Stitch Hat, Debbie Bliss Simple Hat and this Moss Stitch and Single Rib Hat. In some ways I think the last one is closest to what I was imagining, I worry the Cable and Moss Stitch Hat is too fussy and the Simple hat has no Moss Stitch, but maybe it’s too plain? What do you think?