Knitting

I'm back into knitting and tried out some new stuff - new patterns and Fair Isle knitting, which is difficult (especially when you're teaching yourself and have no idea what you're doing!). Here are my three latest projects.
This is a wool soaker, which is used as a diaper cover for cloth diapers. I followed this pattern - Soaker Knit in the Round - and found it pretty easy to follow. Luckily, my mom is a knitting genius, so she helped at one tricky point. Had to try out the Kitchener Stitch which joins the two sections together. See the seam? That's supposed to be invisible. Not so bad for my first try though (and I don't think the baby will care). The dark area at the bottom is there because I thought I was going to run out of yarn so I added a little section with some other yarn I had. Mom says it looks pre-stained :-) The matching I-cord drawstring makes it look a little better, I guess.


I made these two hats this weekend. The left one is my first attempt at knitting in the Fair Isle style. It's very satisfying to see the design emerge, but also very tricky. You have to make sure that it doesn't end up too tight, which unfortunately is what happened for me, I think. I have yet to try it on a baby head (hopefully within the next week or so I'll be able to!), so it might be okay, but right now, it doesn't stretch too much. So, it looks sweet, but may not be wearable! I adapted a pattern from here. It's newborn sized, so if it does fit, it won't for long! It's made of two yarns - the red is Sampa Organic Cotton by Mirasol in Red. The white is Bebe Cotsoy by Queensland Collection (50% cotton, 50% soy) in Ecru.

The hat on the right I made by following the original pattern (that I adapted to make the hat on the left). It's made of some dreamily soft cotton, bamboo and silk blend (Louisa Harding Jasmine in Cypress).

What We've Been Up To...

The baby has not arrived yet - 9 days till the due date!! We've been spending our time in a variety of ways - mostly relaxing, getting ready for the baby and wondering what the hell we're going to do with it! Ha ha...actually, we're feeling pretty good about welcoming a little one into our lives. It's scary as hell, but super exciting at the same time. The diapers and covers are ready to go, the clothes are all washed and waiting, our freezer is packed with food for the first weeks, our neighbors are on call, the midwives are ready. It's very exciting!! Other than baby stuff, we've been up to this:

Eating Passionfruit - they look absolutely disgusting, but they taste amazing!

We spent a night at El Capitan Canyon Campground (which is a fancy resort "campground"). We got upgraded (for free!!!) from a Safari Tent to one of their nice cabins. It was fabulous! We made s'mores and sat by the campfire. What a cozy and fun way to spend a day off together!!

This is not our cabin, but it was like this.

After our night there, we went for a lovely walk at El Capitan State Beach. Here I am sitting on a picnic table.

Today we went down to the Santa Barbara Harbor to see a replica of Colombus' ship, the Nina. It was surprisingly small - definitely NOT something you'd want to use for sailing off to a new land. Apparently, it worked for them, though. I did not take this picture, but if I had, I'd be very proud of it. When we saw the Nina, the sails were furled (can sails be furled?) and it was docked. The tour was six bucks each, so we passed up on that, but it was still cool to check out from the dock. Then we went for a chilly walk on the breakwater and watched tiny ducks go diving for food. Rosie came with us and smelled everything.