Homeliest Baby Hat Ever

(I borrowed this photo from the Crystal Palace Website, where you can see all the lovely colorways of Mochi Plus self-striping yarn)

I bought this gorgeous yarn at Black Sheep Wool Co. months ago. I knitted my favorite baby hat design.

It is so hideous that I couldn’t give it to the intended new mommy. I should have used one of their other colors!

I was reminded of this experience when Jane Brocket published this too-true  post about the beauty of handpainted yarn…before it gets knitted up!

Please don’t go saying that this hat is beautiful. SOMEHOW, it is just marvelously photogenic, but I know you’d agree that in real life, it’s atrocious.

Tales of a Bad (Overconfident) Daughter

A tale of woe. A tale of overconfidence. A tale of yet again saying “how hard can it be?” only to find out that I should have read up on it a little more.

So. I saw this beautiful tutorial over at Kleas. Felted beads…so easy that the preschoolers were able to do them. I thought, this is great, these are gorgeous, I will make these for my mom, who always wears interesting necklaces to coordinate with her outfits.

Such is my confidence in my fiber-wrangling abilities, that I waited until Mother’s Day morning before starting this project. My friend Kristin came over to help (I also consider her a specialist in wool control). She made the puffs.

I wetted and rolled a puff with a tad of soap. Ok, maybe too much soap. I labored alone in the kitchen, whining and wheedling that this was taking longer than I thought it would, and that the snakes weren’t felting properly. And that jeez, this is not working! Kristin felt certain that I was doing it wrong, so she came to the rescue:

She had no more luck than I did. Our snakes never did get firm enough; one felt hollow in the middle and the other had a permanent slit up the side.

When we cut the beads up, they were not as pretty as I had hoped. Worse, they started falling apart almost immediately. I am not as talented as the preschoolers at that other blog!!

I ended up giving my mom a baggie full of vaguely bead-looking fuzz stuff. Happy Mother’s Day from your not-so-talented daughter.

Zach kept teasing me that I should have glued them and some gold-painted macaroni to a piece of construction paper and told her the Boogedy made it for her.

My mother, bless her heart, oohed and aahed and tried to think of ways to salvage them and still use them.

A good mom praises a good effort.

Hyperbolic sunset pants!

What an embarassing dust cloud lurking beneath my sofa. Don’t look.

How cool are these pants?! My sister-in-law Natalie gave me the pattern last year for the Boogedy’s first b-day. She originally saw the pants in Craft: Magazine, but my boy was already too big for the published pattern, so she bought me the book. She gave me money to buy yarn, which I purchased in cream and dyed using kool-aid (see previous post).

The pattern was really easy. I had one tiny question and emailed the author, who assured me that I was doing it right. Before I seamed them, I handed them to all sorts of people to puzzle over, including these two teachers at my school, who wondered on what planet this “thing” would be a pair of pants (and possibly why I thought “sunset” was an appropriate “boy” color scheme).

The Boogedy was impatient with photography while I was snapping these photos, and got grouchy, but you need to see the difference between the front and back of these pants. Plus, you get to see Nat, the gifter of said pants.

Hot Cuddle Bottle

When asked “what is the one invention you wouldn’t want to live without?”, I’d have to say it’s this little darling…the hot water bottle. I am cold from October through May and keep a hot cuddle bottle at my feet every night. We turn our heat way down at night to save energy, so the whole house is pretty chilly. We pile on the blankets, but a cuddle bottle feels like such a luxury!

When I was a little girl, my mom would fill the hot water bottle with warm water and I would carry it around, pretending it was a wiggly, giggly little baby. When I was pregnant in 2006 and visiting Sonya, I told that story to her daughter (she was probably 4); she thought that was the silliest thing I’d ever said and shook her head at the ridiculousness. So I drew this face on my hot water bottle, filled it up, and left it in my guest bed. When I came back later, she had wrapped it up in a blanket and played with it all day while I was out.

During that same vacation, I bought the yarn to knit Ms. Cuddle Bottle a sweater. I used a Trensdetter yarn called Tonalita. It self-striped, and I went through two balls without ever seeing a repeat in pattern. It keeps getting softer and fuzzier.

The face is still there, a reminder of a nice Thanksgiving visit.

Sorry for the low-light photo!

The quilt here is called “Wild as a March Hare”. My mom sent it to me when I lived in SF, and needed the bright colors to survive the foggy days. It features tons of madras plaids from old thrift store shirts, lots of oranges and hot pinks.

Hints for hot water happiness:

* If you want to be as warm and cozy as I am, you can purchase a hot water bottle like this at most drugstores, but you must look for one that is non-latex. The latex ones smell funny, and they leave a weird red dust on your sheets.

* Look for a fully plastic plug and seal, the metal ones don’t seal as well.

* Dry the whole thing off after filling it with tryuly HOT water. Dry near the plug really well. Any drops that get in your bed cool down real quick, and damp sheets are NOT cozy.