Emptying the WIP box

I started fixing some double moss stitch that slipped into a single moss for a row that was 4 rows back on the little cable vest I started for Austy back in January. It was painfully slow, one stitch at a time, dropping them and picking them up again stitch by stitch, to save me frogging several rows of the cable pattern and losing my place. But I got halfway through the mistake patch and popped it back in the box, pulling out these instead.

All they needed was a grafted gusset and a second eye stitched into the back. Oh, and the elastic put in, but that is the easiest bit. I had put them aside several months ago because I didn't think Austy would get any wear out of them since they would have fitted him the best over summer, which was far too hot for longies. But last night we had another soak through. Austy's Dad has misplaced a pair of his woollies leaving me a pair short, so instead he had PUL on last night. And tonight I am washing every sheet, every blanket and even the mattress got wet - there was so much that didn't get caught by the nappy that it a lot ran down over the mattress protector and soaked into the mattress protector at the side. So these might be slightly too short for him (they were made to fit him LAST winter) but they will do the job and keep him dry until I can get another pair whipped up. Extra large is not fun to knit though. Give me newborn longies any day. If only we could toilet train him at night as well... we're only just getting the hang of the day training though.

Please excuse the dodgy pics - I give up waiting for sunlight now as it's dark every night when I get home and it would mean no blog posts till the weekends if I was too fussy about my photographs. And don't look too closely at my knitting stitch embroidery either - I'm still getting the hang of it. I think these would have been better with the face stitched into the knitting using a fair isle technique instead.

A long time in coming...

Seems to be the theme for everything I have been making lately... I always think there are more hours in the day than there actually are and as a result start things that take ages to finish! And this one is finished just in time, I think. I give you... the "Wombat zippie"!





I tried it on Austy the other day, when all that was left was to stitch that pesky zip in. In fact that has been all it was waiting for, for a long while. But first I bought the wrong length zip, so went and bought another one and went to stitch it in, only to find that it was a dress zip and not the open ended zip I needed. It was a good thing though, because then I found this one, a much better colour match than the chocolate brown one I had (this is more of a wombat brown), and I like the chunky look of it much more than the standard ones. There was a big problem however - the chunky zips have quite chunky reinforcing at the bottom! It has a VERY hard plastic coated bottom that was IMPOSSIBLE to push a needle through, so I tacked it all down as best I could and (fear of fears) ran my knitting under the sewing machine!!! I'm not entirely happy with it as the tacking didn't stop it from stretching as I went and the tops of the pockets don't line up properly but there was no other way of getting that zip on there, unless I went and swapped it for a chocolate brown non chunky one which didn't have the plastic coating.


Not perfect... but FINALLY... done.


Austy will be snuggly warm this winter.

Oh, and a swap update. I am stalking my letterbox daily! I should soon have a DQS3 quilt in there waiting for me, and I have ordered some bright summery fabric for the Apron Swap. I will post pics as soon as the postie does his job.