I went up to Vermont this past weekend to visit my baby sister, who is finishing up school at UVM. (I might be having some issues with the fact that my baby sister is about to finish school. Just a few.) Since it’s a bit of a ride (seven hours, give or take traffic…) I had plenty of time to knit. So I did.
Pattern: Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Baby Surprise Jacket; Christine’s Stay-On Baby Booties by Christine Bourquin
Yarn: Koigu PPPM, colorway P511L, picked up from a Rav destash
Needles: US 4 (3.5mm) and US 1 (2.25mm)
Notes: I love this pattern like crazy, and it’s always fun to knit up. It also makes great traveling knitting, since it’s all one piece of fabric: nothing to drop or lose or have get stuck underneath the seat for two hundred miles. A million people have waxed rhapsodic about this pattern so I will just say that it’s my stand-by for a good reason.
I love these booties possibly even more than I love the BSJ. I refer to them as moon booties, and I think they look adorable on and off baby. They are also easy to memorize (I haven’t looked at the pattern in, oh, five pair or so) and and I have yet to hear of them not living up to their name. The blockiness matches the square lines of the BSJ well, and together they make a nice little layette.
This particular pair is heading off to an old coworker expecting next month, and I hope her baby wears them in good health and happiness.
While up in Vermont, I prevailed upon my traveling companions to stop at one of my favorite yarn shops anywhere, Kaleidoscope Yarns. The shop is in a lovely little house in the middle of Essex Junction, notable for a large intersection (the Five Corners) and swift responses by AAA. (The car battery died. It was totally not my fault.) Retail therapy is a beautiful thing:
I was going to stop at the Piece of Vermont bamboo sock, but then I spotted the Starmore book, and by then I’d walked past the wall of Koigu three or four times, and then it occurred to me that buying Euculan in person means that I’m not shelling out for shipping, so there you have it.
If Kaleidoscope were any closer I’d be in real trouble. I am pretending they don’t have a very efficient and wonderful website, but if you go look I won’t tell.
While putting my new yarn away I decided it might be a good time to skein up my first attempts at a drop spindle, which have been sitting on said spindle, for, um. Months. It’s hideously over/underspun (depending on where you look) and broke several times, and is generally pretty wretched and unknittable. I really don’t care. It is my first yarn, and I’m calling it artistic and letting it live in its skein.
It’s not exactly fine fiber (actually, it’s scraps that I picked up cheap at Rhinebeck) but for a first attempt it’s really not half bad. The real question is, how will my second skein look?