Omnibus

I made these Bitty Booties for the whipper-snapper. They're from a pair of socks I knit for myself and then someone accidentally felted in the dryer. It's very hard to machine sew this fabric that the socks made. I'm on the fence about blanket stitching the opening. It would probably benefit, but I would need to look up how to do it. They are so darn adorable, I kind of want to make another pair out of polar fleece.


I made this drawstring bag for La to keep her gameboy games in. The monkey found a bunch of his old games and passed them on to her. It quickly over-flowed her gameboy binder. The bag reminds me of the marble bag my mom sewed for me when I was a kid (out of purple and white velour).

Saturday night, I found myself antsy. And couldn't find the remote. I figured I'd whip on something I had cut out recently and have something blogworthy to show. Then I realized that the reciever of the whipping up reads my blog from time to time and it was a Christmas present for that person. Well, one more gift mostly done. I got to a point where I needed some help and put it away for a while.

Friday night, La had a burst of play in the living room. The kind of burst where it becomes very hard to navigate the room. From the sounds of it, she was playing "family vacation". She and her baby Braedyn do not travel light. The chair fort in the corner was their hotel room and before that, it was their rental car.

For the past month or so, we've had a rogue pumpkin plant growing on top of our front hedges. This may not be the best time to come photograph our house for "House Beautiful". Hopefully the HOA doesn't notice. We just want to see if we'll get any baby pumpkins out of it. After waiting and waiting for nature to take it's course, I finally looked it up - in case you were wondering, here is a place where they talk about pumpkin reproduction. Now we're keeping an eye out for when a momma flower looks like it'll be opening soon.

I don't know why, but I think this has some potential for a sock yarn palette.

Entering an OCD phase & I hate when my husband's right

Well, actually, if we're both right, it's fine. But when he's right and I'm not then I'm not as happy about it. Since I've cut way back on my knitting my arm has felt much better. And it's not very much knitting before I start to notice some discomfort or oddness about the pinky and ring fingers. I'm down to the home stretch on the baby sweater. I did forget to put in a button hole where it was supposed to be (2 rows in) and just put it in when I remembered it (about 8 rows in). Like heck I'm ripping it back for a button hole.

I've found myself in an unusually OCD place recently. I was tidying up the children's department of our library. It wasn't that it was particularly messy for the children's department - but I couldn't stand that the puzzles weren't put together, and that there were crayons and abandoned library books on the floor. I. Had. To. Take. Action. I also cleaned out the snack bowl. This does nothing for the list of major cleaning/sorting/rearranging/making room that I need to do, but makes me feel better for some reason.

After picking out material a few weeks ago, Saturday night, I put this together.



I quilted the outside envelope a little because I used cotton batting inside. I wanted it to still look/work nicely after washing.

Here's how it looks when you open the envelope:



And the lining's full effect:



The lining is left over from the back of the Electric Sherbert quilt, the ducks would have been the back to my nephew's quilt, if some other material hadn't run all over them. The tasteful yellow flowers were from when I picked up this pattern. (Aside from the pattern, I managed to only buy a couple of fats for me, and some fabric for pants with pockets for La.)

(I'm not sure what happened to this photo. This is not how it looked when I downloaded it from Picknik. But then again, I was doing a couple things at once so it could have been.) At first glance the pattern looks kind of complicated. We'll see how it goes. It's in time out until it starts to look easier.

When I was cleaning my room the other day, I came across these socks.



Sadly, I think they were felted on about their 2nd wash. I didn't have the heart to throw them out. They are going to find a new lease on life as a pair of Bitty Booties for the whipper snapper.

A Quandary

So, about that knitting and carpal tunnel thing. I checked in with the doctor (via their web site) about the carpal tunnel and mentioned that my husband wants to know if I should stop knitting.

This is the nurse's response:

I got your message to the Dr and he said that you do need to stop the knitting. You can discuss further at your next appt. Thanks Brandy

Poop. I hate when he's right about that kind of thing. And it does seem kind of reasonable that that would be the grownup thing to do.

But I'm 3/4 of the way through a baby sweater sized 0-3 months (for a December baby in Florida) that I was kind of hoping she could wear home from the hospital. OTOH, I don't really want to do anything that could make the carpal tunnel stuff last post-partum. I've got less than 7" left to go! 1/2 with about 50 stitches and 1/2 with about 25. The agony!

My Adventures in Triage

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, my left arm was tingly numb. I called the nurse line at the OB's office on Tuesday when it became obvious that it wasn't just going away. They said to go to Triage at the fancy hospital for Women and Babies. I felt silly going, so I didn't.

Wednesday, my left arm was still numb and tingly. It was still usable, just making me a little extra crabby. It seemed to get worse and better. It wasn't keeping me awake. So after work Wednesday, I called DH's little sister the paramedic to get a second opinion. She kind of freaked me out a little and I went to the grocery store to get my blood pressure taken after dinner from that goofy machine outside the pharmacy. It was "high normal", and I think my arm is too thick to get an accurate reading so I went home and got my knitting and went to triage. I also got to thinking about how I needed to take my health and the baby's health seriously - I would feel horrible if something happened to the baby, and I don't want to miss out - and started to feel like a selfish jerk for not doing a better job taking care of myself (pregnancy drama?).

So, I went to the fancy hospital for women and babies triage. Wait for an hour. Get my vitals taken (hurts like heck to have your blood pressure taken on a tingly arm), hear the heartbeat (delightful and she found it even faster than the doctors usually do), talk to the nurse about this arm business. She calls my doctor. Comes back after a little while.

Sounds like carpal tunnel. Fah. Of course! Software Engineer. Pregnant and my joints are starting to be out of whack. So I'm supposed to keep track of it, let them know if my arm becomes unusable, and follow up in the office this week. I went to the intranet site at work and read the article about ergonomics and adjusted my chair as much as I could. Since I've been paying attention to it, it's been much better, and from what I've read on the internet, it should go away after the baby's on the outside.

That husband of mine thinks I need to stop knitting in the mean time! Hard to fathom! I'll need to ask the docs about it, but I'm hoping I can keep knitting. The little lemongrass sweater is almost done. The blanket is almost halfway. I was just starting to think about socks for me!