Win!

I hope you all want to see a smug ass face.

Yes, I finally have my very own Clapotis! Sure, everyone and their mother has knit one. But did they knit theirs with their very own yarn baby? Speaking of said baby, it really is beautiful. I’m not going to lie- I wasn’t 100% sold on it when I bought it. There was some buying peer pressure happening. Once it was rolled up into a beautiful cake I saw the allure of Briar Rose. The colors are freaking eye popping gorgeous. Plus when you feel it, well, it certainly doesn’t feel like wool. (Which may be a good or bad thing depending on who you are.) So all of this combined is enough to get a big old smug face from me. Plus there’s just something about dropped stitches that beg to have their picture taken from every angle imaginable.

It was such a satisfying knit! The pattern called for size 8′s but I went with what the yarn recommended because I figured since the dropped stitches were going to be huge, no sense in having big crazy stitches. While I like the stitches and the way the fabric feels, it made the scarf very wide and not very long. (More a shawl or “stole” than a scarf.) Plus at the end I thought I would run out of yarn so I didn’t do one repeat… and of course I had more than enough yarn left. It was deceptively dense in the middle. I need to stop winding stuff so there’s like a fist of yarn in the middle. Although I don’t think I wound this one, so I’m going to pass the buck on that.

Which reminds me of this quote that my friend liked from that movie Closer: “Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.”

This picture is pretty goofy but I figured, what the heck? I’m so excited about this project. I’ve pretty much knit it for a month solid to get it done. Everything was jiving, the yarn was great, the pattern amazing, the needles were making stereotypical clicking noises. I just kept losing steam and wouldn’t touch it for a day or two because I’ve had some severe attention problems lately. Watch movies? Read? Listen to music? Go outside since the chance of it being nice is 50/50- so much awesome stuff to do.

Wait- I mean, crap. Now they’re going to revoke my blogging license. Did I just say that I’ve not been knitting because there’s just too much awesome stuff to do in life? My life is just so freaking great all the time that it’s hard to focus on anything for any extended period of time. I’m thinking if this blog attests to anything it’s that I have craft project ADD. I started thinking about all of the projects I’ve started lately that I don’t even talk about. Like, for a foolish month I thought I’d try my moms craft and cross stitch something. The cats stopped that. Then my friend Miranda helped me get fabric to sew up an apron and a dress. When she asks about my progress all I can do is look sheepish.

Have you missed pictures of my cats? Because this one has definitely missed being in front of the camera.

While the merry bells keep ringing..

So I’ve pretty much decided that I don’t feel rushed or pressured this year. I’m just doing the fun stuff that comes with Christmas. And if nobody is satisfied with their presents this year they can just EAT ME.

While I should have been out figuring out what the heck my dad wants for Christmas… I decided to get a Christmas tree instead. Which Shmoo was very helpful with.

Well, she could only do so much without the thumbs and everything.

As much as I love the tree, it’s missing something. Or well, a few somethings. Like a skirt (oh my!), garland and a topper. Psht. Just a few things. However it does have lights! Which John is both entertained (“can we light the tree now?”) and frightened (“holy crap that’s red!”) by. But he made the final decision that we should have a red red siren song tree. So, here it is all lit up pretty like:

Isn’t Shmoo a beautiful model? Honestly, I couldn’t get a picture without her in the frame. She is seriously digging this Christmas stuff.

I’m just excited that we have a big time grown ass adult tree now. Although I still love our Charlie Brown Christmas tree… I want to do something with it but I don’t have enough ornaments to split between the two trees. In fact I’m a little worried our BTGAAT is going to fall over because I put everything on the front to make it look like we’ve got something going on.

Speaking of which, I want to share some of our ornaments with you. So I’ll do that when one for this year. Hopefully. Usually I go shopping with my dad for Christmas (and we get one then) but I don’t know how much that’ll work out this year.  It’s a pretty fun tradition though!

Well, I also made a gingerbread house! With my friend Heather and her mom.

Are you all in the holidy spirit yet or what??

When life gives you knitting needle lemons-

I pulled this out of my bag the other day:

My needle completely splintered out of existence. Does this crap happen to people normally? All that was left was the metal holder and a little nub of wood. I want to say this was the first time something like this has happened with me and the Harmony needles but that’s a boldfaced lie. Because the other day my size 10 popped right out of the metal holder. Just like ::pop:: oh you didn’t need this right?

And me in my infinite wisdom thought, okay, no problem here, I can just superglue this thing and make it right, yeah?

Wrong!

So when life give you lemons, get a new camera:

Also, tie an ascot around your cats neck because that’s always hilarious. Or at least their indignant little faces are.

To be fair, Sax keeps scratching herself a new sore and since it would be mean to get a cone for her like you do with dogs, she gets the jaunty little neck tie. Also to be fair, I called knit picks all in a tiff and they said that no problem, they’d get me some new needles out. But while I’m waiting a month for them to get here because of all the holiday mail madness, will that vest make its Christmas deadline? So I got some Addi Turbo’s from my yarn shop. Which they found the whole story endearing in a “haha, that’s what you get for buying needles off the intarwebs sucker” sort of way.

You win this round Life.

I hope you hate your eyes…

Because this hat is ORANGE!

This is the third hat in my Christmas Hat Fest Extravaganza. It’s the beautiful Devra Hat by the lady behind pieKnits. So you might be wondering, where’s the brim?  Heh. Well, in the perfect plane of existence, there’s a brim on that hat.

Meet Ernie!

So lately I’ve had a big FAIL! word bubble over my head. One day when I got home though, I found this guy waiting for me:

This is our new member of the family: Ernie. He was crocheted by my awesome Granma. You might remember her from previous posts. She pops up a lot. She’s cool like that, you know with her extra Granma senses and powers.

As much as I was willing to embrace Ernie almost instantly as a member of our family, the cats were a little weary. Which is weird. I mean, I thought cats and crocheted dogs went together like peas and carrots…

Can’t they take out all their aggression towards real dogs on his durable crocheted exterior? These are the hardball questions I ask every day. Along with questions like: why aren’t my projects knitting themselves?

Shmoo needs to get over herself. I mean a levitating crocheted wiener dog is a pretty normal occurance around here. I’m starting to worry whether or not she’s getting along alright. Then I see her sprawled out in the most random places, like right in the middle of the floor-

-and I figure, she’s fitting in fine.

Ernie’s ready to hit the road:

Pumpkin Show here we come!

I’ll give it to a midget

I’m not dead! (Just maimed a little by life, woe is me, weep weep)

The thing is, I was secretly promising you, my dear blog, pictures of something finished finally. Weeeellllll, there’s a story behind that. See, I was working on a baby blanket for a friend. Then she randomly sprang a deadline on me and said, hey I’m having my baby shower! (Last weekend.) Well, okay. So I worked and worked and this is where I got to as I was leaving the door to go to her shower:

Close but not quite. It also looks a lot smaller but I think once I add all the little points, it’ll be a good size. Not as big as it probably should be but big enough for a baby blanket and small enough for a security blanket or “Linus blanket”.

Since I didn’t get this sucker done and I was working on it up until the last minute, I figured, crap, might as well go and get my friend something else so we got her a bunch of picture books… including my favorite kids book:

Because we got it, we showed up to the shower a little late. Plus the shower was randomly kind of far away. So I felt bad and thought great, I need to apologize for being late.

Well, we showed up and she wasn’t there. The shower started at 2pm and at 3:30 we walked out of the door and we were super miffed to say the least. I should’ve taken my damn books with me, honestly. Who doesn’t show up to a shower for themselves? She wasn’t in labor. Hell, the baby isn’t even due until September…

So now I have this stupid baby blanket and it just needs a little bit more effort put into it to be finished but what in the crack am I going to do with it? Gah! Okay, cat picture now:

Awww, I feel better now. Although I still don’t know what I’m going to do about this blanket. Whatever, I have other stuff to focus on finishing. Plus there’s other fun stuff happening here, like knitting in nature- look a bird!

Then we reached the promise land:

Much like in The Land Before Time. Only less dinosaurs and more knitters. What else? I’ve been reading and of course saw the Dark Knight like everyone else and their mother. Tomorrow I’m going to go see The X-Files movie with my mom. That’ll be… it’ll just be. Plus, I became a Big Sister today! However, I can’t really post about that yet because I’m still worried.

Oh yeah and John’s cat thinks she’s a person:

Ideal Stores

So I’ll just randomly start this post out by saying that tomorrow will mark a year since John and me tied some sort of knot in infamy and looked at each other lovingly and said “sure”.

No, he’s a pretty stand up dude. Don’t let me fool ya. I still have no idea what to get him though. I guess anniversaries aren’t as big of a deal as I was building them up to be because everyone I’ve asked can’t remember what they got their sig. oth. for their first ann.

Does it bug you when people constantly abbreviate things that don’t need to be abbreviated but they do it to be cool or something?

Yeah, me neither.

What does bug me is that sometimes I get the shaft when I go into stores. Well, both John and I get a lot of crap. I think a good majority of the disdain radiates because of our baby faces. Although John is growing something on his face to cover up the baby smoothness.

This photo isn’t even completely current because I did make him cut the hair and trim up the… yeaaah. Well, once his hair got cut, something happened and it was like he magically morphed into Abraham Lincoln to me. Which, I don’t know if anyone here has ever seen Robin Hood: Men in Tights but the other night I was like “Hey, Blinkin” and he was like “Did you just say Abe Lincoln?” Then we tittered. OKAY WE’RE YOUNG. (And pretty damn weird.)

But does that mean you have to belittle me when I come into your store? My crazy baby money is just as good as snooty old jerk money.

There is a yarn shop around here that I pretty much refuse to go into anymore because they’re just complete snobby aholes. Or at least the woman who owns it and was always magically there when I went was mean to me and just an unabashed beeeyotch. Which isn’t to say that the yarn shop I go to now isn’t completely filled to the brim with snobbery- oh, it is. However, I usually get over it because of the amazing selection and fact that they’ll leave you alone and not follow you around like you’re a thief… Hrmph.

Anyways, I started thinking about my ideal yarn shop. Which made me realize that I’ve had this problem before I got into knitting… oh yeah, that’s right- I had this same problem with comic book stores! Now, I don’t pretend to be some sort of comic expert or even comic novice, I just like to read em because I like the art and I like the storytelling sometimes.

So there was this store near where I used to live and they were pretty awesome. They always had recommendations that really hit home and the guy who worked there was bald, which completely fascinates me- oh, and he also happened to know what he was talking about 100% of the time but without being pretentious about it. This guy really hit a home run with me. However, after every recommendation he would look around and say, oh yeah, I guess we don’t have that in right now but I can order it in for you. So two weeks later I get a call and I’m like, wait, what’s in? Whatever sense of being amped up I had was pretty much faded by the time the comic got in.

That made me run to the other store, which usually had everything that I’d ever wanted… and then a totally brain dead zombie running the cash register. It’s a scary thing when you’re contemplating checking somebody for a pulse and then expecting correct change, let alone recommendations.

I needed a middle ground!

That’s how I feel about yarn shops too. There’s a really great yarn shop (heh) and the people are awesome and will give you all kinds of advice on how to save money even. Then there’s the shop that actually has the yarn that I want.

Also, speaking of store snobbery, I got a new computar!

My last trip to the Apple store was pretty disastrous. However this trip was FRIGGIN AWESOME!

Oh yeah and I also got a promotion at work! So things here at Baby Face Central are pretty awesome. Or at least when people at stores aren’t being jerks. C’est la vie and also psycho killer, qu’est que c’est.

shhhh! It’s a secret…

I want to sit down and have an honest heart to heart with you right now…

It has been very hard to not document every second of making this next project. You guys know me, you know that I like to give you almost up to the second progress shots of what I’m up to. I’m not a secret keeper but I kept that last post a secret (mostly because I was afraid that I wouldn’t get it done/mess it up horribly/set it one fire out of frustration) and I kept this post a secret.

It has been espeically hard because I want us to be honest with each other. Of course, hopefully you’ll only be honest in a totally positive and up beat sort of way and not a “Jesus, you sure are looking fatter in your pictures” sort of way. However I can’t control that and that’s cool! So, I just want you guys to know, it is nearly impossible for me to keep anything from you.

Okay, so what am I talking about already?

Bam! Total sock domination.

Although, if I were only waiting to post a sock, I would have done this two weeks ago, because I swear the first sock flew off the needles… it was that lousy second sock that tripped me up.

Still, I murdered that second sock:

I’m thinking that the first sock flew off the needles because I knit it starting out with bigger needles than I probably should have… which is also why the one on the right is all slouchy. Er, whoops. I think some elastic thread should clear that up nicely though.

This was all part of a Secret Sock group that meets at my LYS once a month… apparently. This was my first time going and I’d say it was pretty successful. What do you think?

Most people who know me have already heard my story about the meeting and I can’t really tell it over the interwebs, however, the clientèle at this particular LYS happen to be a very specific brand of swanky. The woman who designed these socks named them the Double Diamond socks, after a ski trail or something.

My first thought when she told us the name was of that Outkast song ‘The Mighty O’:

Maybe I should throw a double diamond party in the North Pole
Invite all the writers and journalists, even biters will tournament to see
Who can be me better than me?

I shared that with some of the ladies the other day and I’m pretty sure tabula rasa couldn’t be blanker than the stares I got. Ehn, it’s just a lesson to pick and choose your audiences… I think?

Oh! Hey! Remember these?

Yeah, I forgot about them too. I want so hard to take credit for these, but as you can see, I only finished the one. Then got so fricken mad at them that I shipped the suckers off to Granma, who was a nice gracious lady that finished them for me. She also added super cute buttons.

Also, because you love me, I’m sure you’ll tolerate a picture of my cat hamming it up for the camera:

Last night, when the pizza man came, she ran out the door. She seriously made a break for it. You’d think it wouldn’t be hard to catch a cat with a gimpy leg but dang she can run fast when she wants to! So, our solution to this problem (after I caught her and gave her a lecture like she could actually understand English) was to buy her a leash. I’m hoping the embarrassment and shame will make her never want to run away again.

Also, if you don’t hear from me for a while it’s because I’ve hit another road block. It’s so bad that when I think about what I want to knit next, that crappy song from Evita pops into my head; “where do we go from here…?” Should I be proud or ashamed that I saw that movie in the theatre?

Mini nanner

Hope you guys aren’t tired of fruit yet! (If you are, that last line was a warning then to maybe not read this post.) Since I have no idea of what’s appropriate ever, I showed one of the bosses at my work my crazy wack blog and she humored me by saying it was cute. Then she asked me if I could make a banana for a baby kit.

Well what’s better for babies than a baby banana? I think George would agree.

This was my first attempt at crocheting on my own and I think it came out pretty stellar (let’s just ignore the nubbin on the top) so there. :p Nyaaaaa.

John and I agreed that Curious George has gotten way cuter than what we remembered. Or maybe being ugly kids, we just imagined everything else to be ugly…? I mean, I don’t know about him but I was definitely queen of skinned knees. Speaking of John, his facial hair lately has been a constant source of amusement to me:

I don’t know if the picture is doing the redness justice or not. I love it. I want to call him Big Red but even just typing that I’m afraid that I might need to sleep with one eye open tonight.

As far as blogging goes, I feel I’ve been pretty lame lately… especially since I never know when to use then or than. Also, I haven’t been knitting too much lately. I haven’t been reading too much lately. Or sleeping. I have absolutely no idea what I’ve been doing to be honest. I just hope whoever is abducting me isn’t using probes.

Kitty pictures!

Pattern: Baby Banana

See, it’s stuff like this that makes me thankful for Ravelry.

super awesome happy fun day!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOHN BEAR!

That’s my manic unicorn

I think he’s had a super awesome happy fun day. Mostly because today his promotion became official! He is now a senior something or other but you can call him senor badass. We also went out to eat for his birthday and got a desert brownie that I took a very dark picture of (it’s on the flickr). Then, since I was tired of hearing him talk on and off since Christmas about how we should get a friggin XBOX 360…. I finally got fed up and said, sure, why not?

ONLY on the condition that I get a cute pink controller and Juno. (Okay, so I also was the one who was rallying for Rock Band since that’s the only game I really want to play on the whole system.)

So yeah, John’s birthday = promotion, crazy brownie, XBOX 360/Rockband. He’s got it super sweet here guys, I’m just telling you. How did the cats contribute?

DO NOT WANT!

(ps Avenue Q was hilarious and great! (Except for my obstructed view thanks to the blob man in front of me the whole first act.) Sorry I dropped the ball on that, this week has been pretty crazy. What with the promotion, we went away last weekend, I had training at work… blah blah blahblahblah)