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I’ve been meaning to make a mobile for the baby, but I didn’t rush to finish before he was born (a case of completely misestimating the amount of two-handed crafting time that I’d have available). While Kevin’s parents were here for a week, I took advantage of all of the free bursts of time to make some progress on the project.

My vision was brightly colored wood and fabric dragonflies. I’d managed one coat of paint while pregnant, and in the last few days I’ve added a second coat, decorated them with polka dots, added a gloss coat, cut wings, and glued the wings to the bodies. 🙂 Here’s an action shot of the painting during the football games last weekend:

The wings make me happy. I’d been stalled on them, thinking that I’d sew them out of cotton and reinforce them somehow (posterboard inserts?) but that was seeming fiddly and like a lot of work. Then I remembered a set of placemats that we’d bought – they were supposed to be machine washable but then they shrunk badly. I was so disappointed and even though they’re no longer usable, I’d kept them. But now they’re quite thick and structured, plus still pretty – perfect for dragonfly wings.


I’m still needing some brightly colored yarn to hang them with, and then I’ll be done!

In bits and pieces over the last three weeks, I managed to knit enough stitches to finish off my last pre-baby knitting project: a hat to go with the hydrangea sweater.

Despite its 15″ circumference, it looks enormous on him, so we’ll see if it ever actually fits. But I was so pleased to have it off the needles, and to be able to cast on for something else with slightly bigger yarn that this with its 7.5 st/inch.

Then, this morning, he fell asleep on my lap after nursing and I was able to cast on and get through eleven whole rows of a new project before he woke up hungry again! It doesn’t sound like very much, but it was such an exciting combination of cuddling time and “me” time. Kevin documented the setup: rocking chair, nursing pillow, baby, Kindle (I just subscribed to the NY Times!), coffee, pattern book balanced on my legs, and knitting.

Yay, even if it will take eons to finish any projects at this rate. 🙂

I’d been hoping to make it to the Redmond Saturday Market for the first time since July. It closes at 3:00 and I didn’t manage to leave the house until 2:37, but apparently when you get there in the final minutes all of the flowers go on sale! So, at 2 bouquets for $10, I was so happy to bring home this:

and this:

Quite the successful field trip.

I had such aspirations of keeping up with my posting post-baby, but that was before the reality of a sleep schedule with a newborn hit. Oh, well. We’ve had many people pass along the “this too shall pass” mantra, and I think it applies to slow blog posting as well as newborn fussiness, nursing habits and sleep patterns.

Kevin had his fantasy football draft yesterday, and so the baby and I were on our own for the evening. I put him in the Moby so that we could walk down to the park before twilight hit (the days are starting to get quite a bit shorter!) and was so pleased to see that one of his knit hats fits!

Dreadful flash-y photo, but it was a quick effort due to fussing (he likes the Moby after a few minutes of walking, but was pretty dubious about the Moby+photo session combination). I can’t wait until more of the handknits fit – he still has such narrow shoulders that he swims in them.

Kevin’s been doing such a great job keeping things running, taking care of errands, and ferrying food and beverages to the nursing chair. He’s also been in documenting mode:

It’s so wonderful to me to watch the two of them together, and to suddenly see Kevin stepping into his role as a father.

Other big milestones today included his first bath in the kitchen sink, and first haircut (just around the ears and back of the head). I was expecting outrage, but he was actually exceptionally calm through both and didn’t start crying until after it was over. Definitely helps that the kitchen window is so warm and there are all sorts of interesting things (bars, sky) to look at!

Kevin and I apparently had a bit of a miscommunication about the wasp nest in our backyard. (I think I posted about it, but a quick recap: I’d been out in the yard in early July trimming bushes, when I decided to go deadhead the poor, ugly rhododendron in the backyard. I was only a few flowers in when all of a sudden there were bugs everywhere – I thought they were horseflies at first – and I ended up with 7 stings. Ouch.) Of the two of us, Kevin’s demonstrated quite a bit of success as the bee-fighter, and the whole poisons and late pregnancy thing confirmed that he would be the one to take on the nest. While I was calming down after the stings, I thought I’d said something along the lines of “you don’t have to eradicate them this instant, but of COURSE the nest needs to go”. For some things, I’m live-and-let-live, but there are definitely limits (like spiders who find their way into the house, and wasps that sting me in my own yard). Kevin heard something more along the lines of “bees are our friends, we’ll just avoid the area”. I was trying hard not to pester him about it, but finally asked, and we were both so pleased to realize there had been a misunderstanding.

So after work, Kevin went out with his telephoto lens to assess the situation and find the entry hole that he’d be spraying the killer foam into. The nest is an amazing thing.

It was built right under one of the groups of leaves. You can actually see in that photo where I’d removed one flower completely (center bottom), and gotten most of a second one (right above the nest). Since I was working with both hands, no wonder they went after me – I must have nearly had both hands directly on their home.

I think the colors are so pretty, as is the wavy construction. It’s pretty impressive, too, the way they just add more layers in spite of the things in the way, like the leaves that you can see being encompassed by the growing nest.

I was so glad that Kevin got the neat photos, and even happier when Operation Wasp Removal was a success and Kevin emerged victorious without any stings.

On Sunday we had a nonstress test (which the baby passed and then some – he was moving so much that they were having a hard time establishing a baseline for his heart rate), and then we braved the heat to go over to the Bellevue Art Fair. The second booth we stopped at had a painting that we both just loved, so we bought it.

It’s a print on canvas of the Bellevue skyline with the Lake Washington in the foreground and the Cascades in the back. It actually fits well in several spots so I’m not sure the fish room will be its permanent home, but we’re both enjoying it there for the moment. When we first put it up, we just sat on the couch and admired it and said all of the things we liked about it. It took us several minutes. 🙂

It’s obviously not photorealistic, but it captures so much of the way it feels to live here in the summer, complete with mountains towering over the view, the greenery, all of that blue sky and water, the outdoor activity, and even a crane on the skyline. It’s unusual to find art or photos of the eastside – usually you see either Seattle or nearby mountains and national parks. It’s such a pretty place to live and such a nice thing to have a permanent rendering of it.

The Yarn Harlot has a theory that babies don’t come until their knitting is done, and so with that in mind I made a concerted effort to finish the hydrangea sweater this weekend. I finished binding off the last few stitches during the 9th inning of the Red Sox game, and immediately took a few more minutes to sew on the buttons. So just in time for 38 weeks, the knitting is all wrapped up. 🙂

I was starting to deeply resent this sweater while working on it because it was moving so very slowly (the hazard of knitting at 7 st/in.) and I wasn’t loving the colors. But now that it’s all bound off and the lime buttons are on it, I love the colors again and the pattern strikes me as cute.

The pattern calls for garter stitch all around, but I was feeling iffy about knitting at such a tiny gauge without being able to see the stitches, so I changed the yellow on the fronts and sleeves to stockinette. I left the blue in garter throughout, so it provides some textural contrast. You can see the stockinette on the backs of the sleeves and the garter on the back of the body here:

Next project will be something for me – I’m thinking a lace cardigan. Something big/fussy enough to be impossible to work on with a newborn. Perhaps we can use the jinx of a big project attempt to lure him out?