Dress for Leah

 Last week I went to Michael's to see what I could see.  I much prefer Joann's when it comes to craft supplies because they have fabric and Michael's does not.  Both stores have basically the same assortment of yarns and knitting tools but Joann's has a far superior selection of knitting books.  Anyhoo, I was in Michael's and stumbled across a store exclusive line of fingering weight wool yarn that was on clearance...so I bought a few bags full of it.  It is a soft slowly self-striping yarn that reminded me of Kauni.

 I had been looking for something to knit this baby dress and got started right away.  I tweaked the pattern just a little by using size 4 needles and fingering weight yarn instead of worsted but I wonder if there were issues with translation that led to those errors.  I just loved that this was knit in one piece and there was no seaming!

The dress is begun knitting flat back and forth to create the neck opening and then joined in the round for the yoke and body.  The shoulders and sleeves are created with mitered increases to form angles.  The upper edges of the arms are bound off and the underarms cast back on to shape the body.  What a wonderful pattern.  I wanted to use some of Maynerd's buttons but I didn't have 2 matching in a coordinating color.  I was very happy with these gray vintage-looking buttons from my stash.

I finished the dress on Saturday and worked on a different project yesterday during the Super bowl.  I'm doing some knitting for my new niece and I'll post those pictures later.  I DID have to share pictures of (some) of our Super Bowl food!  We are just terrible when we are home together--almost like alcoholics encouraging each other.  So long story short, we majorly cheated on our diet while the game was on.  We'd picked up a jar of Cheez Whiz on Saturday expressly for soft pretzels.  Here are the pretzels rolled out and shaped and brushed with egg wash and sprinkled with coarse salt.

Here they are fresh out of the oven brushed with butter.  I hadn't made these in a while and for good reason.  They are so good but not so good for you.  I used to bring these as treats on my Sunday to work when I used to work at the nursing home years ago.  Now it is time to get back on that dieting horse.