Knitting Lace

A little late for holiday recap, but here's the only finished object I managed to gift:


It's the Swallowtail shawl (for the second time) knit in alpaca lace yarn. I think next time I'll use a sock yarn just to see what the added weight is like. This turned out floaty and soft, I'm on a purple kick right now.

Baby Trellis

Happy New Year! I just realized that the photos links I uploaded weren't working, so here are the pictures again. Hope you all enjoyed the holidays, indulged in lots of good food and drink, and had merry reunions with your families.

Once again, here's Trellis:

The Trellis sweater was my nephew's Christmas present - he got it early though, because I figured he'd get some more wear out of it now, that boy grows so fast! Did I mention he started walking at 8 months?!


I really enjoyed knitting Trellis and was very pleased with how it turned out. It's a free pattern from Knitty, made with just under two skeins of Plymouth Encore (an acrylic/wool mix). Soft yarn, good stitch definition, and great for babywear since it gets washed so much. If I have time, I'm going to make JJ one too.

Notes: next time I'd knit this as one flat piece to avoid all the seaming - have you tried joining together garter stitch?! It's awful. I'd also attach the collar with k2tog onto the neckline as I went along, and avoid sewing it on after - not sure why the pattern is written like that. I thought I'd be thrown off by short rows later on, but it's just a straight stretchy piece of garter band, which curls into a shawl-collaresque thing.

So cute!!

Baby Sun Hats

Wow, where did the summer go? School has started and it's been over a month since we returned from our big Canadian trip. JJ turned 7-months old recently, and is really on the go - trying to clamber over anything and everything and desperately trying to crawl.

Back in the summer I made these little sun hats to protect her little bald head from a sun burn. I had grand plans of making one for all the little babies I know, but sadly that never happened...it took me much longer than I expected. Maybe next year. I've got patterns that go up to toddler sizes. I think it's a Simplicity one, I'll have to look it up.



I've been knitting too. I've actually knitted a few things but haven't gotten around to photographing them, so my blog has been painfully slow for some time now. I finished my hot-pink Ishbel, the Swallowtail shawl, and started the Tulip Cardigan for JJ. I've got some Christmas knitting on my mind too...maybe a little ambitious, but I'm going to try this year.

Hope you're all enjoying the cooler weather!

Baby Lily's Quilt

I can finally blog about a little project that has been completed since early July! It's another version of the stacked coins baby quilt, this time using a pattern from Oh Fransson (which is actually featured in Sew Mama Sew). This past summer I have been doing more quilting, and I read Elizabeth Hartman's blog quite often - she's great with colours, and her designs are modern and fun.

Baby Lily was born on June 21, and I wanted to give her something handmade that would be useful (I'm sure she received a ton of clothes, bibs and stuffed toys) so a personalized baby quilt fit the bill. It turned out a little bit smaller than I expected, so I added an extra two rows of off-white sashing to increase the size somewhat. It's just the right size for the park, or using in the stroller. At the time, I didn't know if Baby Lily would be a boy or a girl, so I chose rainbow colours to keep it sort of neutral but not too boring. I love the animal fabric! Lorah said her nursery had a safari/animal theme going on so it seemed like a perfect fit.

I used stippling again to quilt the whole thing. This time, I made my designs much bigger so that there wouldn't be as much thread going onto it - the last one I made felt really heavy, probably because it was so densely quilted.

Some acrylic paint and stamps to put the name and date on...

Here's the back, with just a narrow strip of coins. This is my second baby quilt, and I'm still figuring out how to get the pieces lined up straight. Is it just practice? I thought I had cut and sewn so carefully, but still things turned out wonky and I had to rip out stitches and try again and again. I even pinned! The sashing is hard to get straight. Maybe next time I have to line it up square by square instead of just judging by the ends of each strip.

I did finish a third quilt, the Red Triangles, but I forgot to take a picture of the finished project, and now it's found a new home at my mom's house. I can show you the quilt top at some point...I do have a pic of that.

We just got home from our Canada trip - JJ had a great time visiting everyone. She grew up a lot during the vacation - learned how to sit up, eat from a spoon, and even took a dip in the river!

Daisy Wedding Cake

Hi all! The wedding was this past weekend, a fourth of July wedding - we had a lovely time even with the unbelievably hot, hot weather. The cake turned out just great and yes, it survived the transport, and no, it did not melt! Who could ask for more? I couldn't have done it without D's help and JJ's good behaviour - love to you both!

The finished cake:

TA DA! You are looking at over 10 lbs of fondant, another 10 lbs of granulated sugar, and overall one hugely heavy cake! We decided to do it in two parts and finish the assembly at the reception, so that it would fit in our fridge and also be liftable by one person.

The lovely bride and groom cutting the cake:

I will be absolutely honest. It was wonderful seeing Kate and Jim pose for the cake cutting photos. But the cake cutting afterward? AIEEEEE!! I nearly had a panic attack. It was rather painful to watch. I think there's a reason that pastry chefs don't go to the weddings they bake for. I was warned that it would take a lot of willpower to relinquish control at the cutting. Generally I was quite good and stayed away, but truthfully I did wander over a few times to supervise. Anyhow, it all tasted delicious though, and the bride and groom loved the cake. What's more important than that?

Here are a few more photos of the whole process. I'm not going to offer you a schedule for making the cake like last time, because it occurred over so many weeks that I lost track of how much time I spent doing things. With JJ at home, I would just work on the daisies whenever she took a nap, or whenever D was able to watch her.

The baking was completed over two days, well-wrapped and then frozen. The icings and fillings were completed the next day, the splitting, filling and crumb-coating the fourth day, and the fondant and flowers were done the night before the wedding.

A few notes:

• Cake recipes from Confetti Cakes by Elisa Strauss
• Icing recipes from Toba Garrett for swiss meringue buttercream and chocolate buttercream
• Lemon curd recipe from How to Bake by Nick Malgieri
• Satin Ice fondant
• Cake supplies from Global Sugar Art

This was probably the cutest part of the wedding:

There were so many children at this wedding, all ages. The wedding cake provided an endless source of entertainment and whenever I looked over, there were a few kids hovering about it. They would go up to have a look, get their photo taken beside it, smell it, and eye it longingly. They would pick up the daisies on the table, turn it over in their fingers, then gingerly put them back down. They were very, very excited for dinner to be done. So cute!

Field of Daisies

Five hundred daisies lined up on my dining room table, in need of cheery yellow centres:

Some royal icing in the appropriate sunny yellow:

Happy daisies! I certainly hope there's enough for the wedding cake. I have about 50 backups in case of breakage.

Doesn't this kind of look like wallpaper?

The wedding count down begins! Tomorrow: tinting 10 lbs of fondant.

Daisy-making Machine!!

That's right, aka me. Unfortunately I don't have an actual machine that stamps them out and does all the sculpting and moulding. JJ is sleeping right now and I managed to crank out another 130 daisies today. Whew, I'm daisyed-out.

I'm up to 379. Only another 121 to go!