No Idle Hands Here!!

My friend Stacy is having a baby! Stacy teaches 2nd grade and we've spent many of our prep periods talking and talking and talking...without realizing that we had used our whole 40 minutes talking and none of it working! She is so great.

When she told me at the beginning of the school year that she was pregnant, I knew I wanted to make her something special! Her mother-in-law is a scrapbooker, so I figured she'd take care of things on that end. I came across this adorable baby sweater pattern on knittingpatterncentral.com It's the Quickie Baby Sweater and it really was QUICK! I made it in one weekend, except for sewing on the buttons and weaving in the ends, which always seems to take me longer than the actual project to get myself to sit down and do it!

There would be a shower for her at school, but I would also be invited to her personal friends shower. So I decided to make 2 gifts! I started this blanket using the same yarn as the sweater so the gifts would coordinate. Here's how far I had gotten as of February 9th.


I put my knitting down for a while in a fit of housecleaning. I didn't have the energy for both, I guess. On February 25, the day of the marathon, I realized that Stacy's school shower would be in just a few days...and that her other shower was only 2 weeks after that! Well, the good thing about running a marathon is that your legs and feet hurt afterward, but not your hands. So I spent my recovery period on the couch with my feet propped up and knitted up this blanket. Actually, it took me the entire two weeks to knit the blanket and only a few days to recover. But it was still nice to hang out on the couch so much!
It was a close call, but I finished the blanket last night---the shower is today!



If any knitters out there are wondering, the pattern for the blanket is the Basketweave Blanket from the Storey Publishing book, Knit Baby Blankets. Yarn: Some Red Heart baby-type white, Patons Astra Hot Green, Lily Sugar n' Cream Rainbow. Same yarn on both projects. I used a total of 4 skeins Sugar n' Cream, 6 skeins of the green and about 1 skein of the Red Heart-the skein had been partially used before, and I did run out just before the top border of the blanket. (I spent over an hour removing the iridescent string from a ball of white/sparkly yarn to finish the project!)

Against the advice of my SV friends, I did ask Stacy if I could borrow the sweater back to give to her at her other shower. She doesn't know about the blanket! I want to give them together to up the "Wow factor". The shower is in about 2 hours... I can't wait!
And I hope my next project will be much smaller than a baby blanket!