Winter Knitting

My oldest niece has a December birthday and this year she wanted "wool mittens".  I really wanted to make these horse mittens because she is quite the horsewoman, but I was on a time crunch.  Lovely as the design is, they are knit with sock yarn and size 1.5 needles and just wouldn't get done in time with all the other baby knitting I'd been doing.   Maybe next year.  In the end, I found this pattern and dug through my stash and found all the Cascade 220 I needed so I didn't even have to make a special trip to the yarn store!  I gave them to her months ago without taking pictures of them and asked that she send me some knitting glamour shots.  She came through complete with a winter snowscape and birch tree backdrop!

We are 36 weeks along this week.  It is flooring me to think we could be literally having this baby any time now which makes the pressure all the higher to get things done.  We bought our stroller/car seat travel system months ago with Cartwheel savings and Target $5 gift cards I'd been rat holing for some time and paid half the original price...and then it sat in a box in the den for almost 6 months.  We got it out and acclimated ourselves to it this weekend.  As Dave was unpacking the box I thought, "This is a Kodak moment," and snapped this picture in his moment of bewilderment.  I think it is such a funny picture as he works with something so foreign to him.  We chose the Evenflo Sibby system because of safety reviews and we're loving how easy it is to manage.  I've been with people and tried helping collapse or connect their strollers and seats and you'd need a degree to operate the thing or lose your fingernails in the process.  We were joking that we'd time each other like they do in the Army disassembling and assembling their rifles!

And speaking of that baby, here is another pair of Hosenmatz for that fat little boy who is coming.  I used the same pattern as before with a sock yarn purchased at the fiber festival this year.  I went down one size in needles (these are 2.75 mm) to make the fabric a little denser and to slightly shrink up the dimensions and am quite pleased.  These are a nice neutral mottled colorway that should go with all sorts of tops.  I have one more fiber festival manly blues colorway I'd like to use up on this same pattern in the 3-6 month size.  After he outgrows those, I have a larger sized Drops pattern that uses DK and I have London yarn in mind for that one.  On the subject of travel and knitting, I'm happy to be using my Twilley's dpn's I purchased years ago in Ireland to finish this project  :)

I have not had time to participate in the Knitting Olympics this year or indeed watch much of any of the telecast, but I do know that Norway is a force to be reckoned with in these games! 

HEIA NORGE!