It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Just kidding, my tree isn't even up and that's a shame. It's just hard to get in the spirit because I've been stressed out the everywhere. I have like 10 days to move, and I still don't have somewhere picked out, and I'm not packed, and I still need to find another job (promising interview Thursday, fingers crossed!) but that doesn't mean Monster Baby doesn't need some toys for Christmas (no she doesn't omg, she has so many toys and I have to pack each and every one, but I'm no Grinch, so...)
First I made some strawberries, mentioned in the last post and I finished the ice cream I started in the last post. Monster Baby likes the idea of ice cream, but never finishes her baby portions of ice cream, so I figured she'd probably get a kick out of these.

This is the soft serve option.. I didn't like how...limp... it looked.

I also made "sherbet" because I didn't really have any other ice cream looking colors

Just one scoop, since that's probably more than Monster Baby can eat anyway

And my favorite, both as a food and how it turned out, the dip cone:

I wanted to add peanuts but I didn't have the right kind of beads

I did modify the pattern a little bit; the sherbet scoop wasn't really turning out right when I did it as written, so I just ignored that part and worked it like a dip cone, then went back and did *sc, skip 2, 5 DC shell, skip 2* in the cast on to make the frilly bit. I liked how it turned out at least, and Monster Baby was saying "ice cream! ice cream!" while I was seaming up, so it seems legit. The pattern was Scooped by Marcie Nishioka and I think it was really fun. Then I made a donut:

This is the frosted side

Although, if you turn it over, I think it looks more like a bagel:

The unfrosted side, looking like a bagel.

I wanted to make another in just the tan so that she could have a bagel, too, but I didn't want to confuse her, so I'll save that for another day. I made this one myself after looking at a couple different in-progress pics of donut patterns and thinking "oh, I know how to do that, actually. It's pretty ingenuous, You start at the middle (which you can probably see from the seam there) work all one color, decrease down to the center, then increase back out in your next color for the top, turn it inside out, and seam it. I fiddled a bit with the center size, trying to see which I liked best, but I do love a fluffy donut in real life, so I decided to go with the smaller center. I'm thinking of writing this up as a pattern too, but there are already do many out there, I'm not sure it's worth it. We'll see, I guess.

I don't have a picture for this, but I'm thinking about trying to make some blankets for the children's hospital I had Monster Baby at. I still have so so much acrylic left, I'vfe exhausted all the food colors and I have this crazy fear of making blankets or clothes out of non-natural fibers, that we'll be on fire sometime and have this plastic melting into our skin and I just got a shiver typing about it. I don't know why I have plans for the apparently inevitable Time We All Catch Fire, but it scares me enough that I avoid it for my personal self. But that doesn't mean I can't give these fibers via some blankets to people who have less strange phobias than me, right?

Right now I'm thinking of a chevron blanket with dark brown, navy blue, and white, and I already swatched and cast on. I'll see if it turns out how I hope. I'm honestly still not sure how I want to do the stripe pattern yet. I'm thinking either color blocking (that's still in, right?) or white in between the two dark (as a half stripe, probably) or some kind of fade into each other in the striping? We'll see what happens after me and the yarn talk for a while.

Well, look what just fell off my needles!

This past week (?) has been a pretty productive one, knits wise. It helps that I've had a little more time than usual to just sit and do my thing, which I'm going to run out of as soon as I find another job, which saddens me a bit, but like, bills gots ta get paid, so...

First up is a little trio of dishcloths I made from some stash cotton:

This first, using a stitch called "banded basket weave"

The second, in "diagonal scallops"

The third, in "openwork mullion"

All three are made from Lilly Sugar and Cream, which I know from having used these specific colorways before, but since neither of these balls came with the band, I don't know what the colorways are called. These dishcloths were part of an experiment I wanted to try where I just used stitches that I felt were unlikely to curl and see if I could make cloths without a garter border, because I find it really distracting to the overall design sometimes to have that little "frame" around "the real thing," if you understand what I'm trying to say. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. Two out of three use slipped stitches and I wasn't completely certain until I'd swatched it whether the slipped stitches would help counteract curl or whether they'd encourage it, but it seems pretty clear that they work to beat the curl, so I was pretty pleased. I'm thinking about writing up my little experiment and posting it on my blog and maybe doing another sample cloth to take in-progress pictures with for the sake of a new PDF to download? I'll see what kind of time I have going forward.

I've also been working on some little toy foods for my daughter. I assumed we'd probably buy her something this year, since that's what we did last year, but I didn't count on still being out of work, so I dug in the stash and looked through my queue and found some things I'd actually wanted to work on while I was pregnant that fell to the side. First, I made her some strawberries:

In three sizes, for educational purposes

And yeah, I know, they kind of look like peppers. I'm thinking of embroidering on some "seeds" and see if that improves it, but if I run out of time, I'm sure it'll be fine. When I was making them, she picked up the smallest one and said "berry," so I'm pretty sure she can tell what it's supposed to be.

And now I'm working on this:

It's a sugar cone

I'm making her a series of ice cream cones, using the pattern Scooped by Marcie Nishioka. I've had it queued for years and never really had justification for toy ice cream before, but the brilliant thing about kids is that if you have them, or work with them, nobody questions why you have/make toys. "It's for the kids, of course!" Oh, *cough* yes. Of course. *weak laughter* But this really is actually part of her Christmas gifts this year. She has a little toy kitchen her cousins gave her earlier this year and she's got toy bowls and spoons to cook with, but no food. So I'm going to try and make as many toy foods as I can before Christmas, wrap it up, and give it to her. The nice thing about having a toddler is I can make it in front of her and it doesn't ruin the surprise, partly because she doesn't really look at what I'm making except for occasionally, and partially because of *course* it was always going to be for her. Everything always is, isn't it?

That Pinwheel Rug Dog Blanket

Unbeknownst to me,the rug I had been happily chugging away at was destined to become a dog blanket.

A pinwheel rug with six segments, each segment having it's own color scheme, but the dominant colors are red and green.

I think it turned out pretty okay for a kitchen rug dog blanket. Yesterday evening when I went to go pick up my girlfriend from work, she ended up delayed and I was waiting in the parking lot for her while she did whatever it was. Our mutual friend came out to chat with me for a little while, and she asked "are you making a Christmas blanket?" I told her it was a rug, but that on closer inspection, it may as well be a Christmas blanket. Look at this thing. The last two segments (that would be the two bottom-most ones) even include a 4-ply yarn with two white plies, one red, and one green.

Close-up of one of the segments showing the yarn mentioned directly above.

So I guess it's my dog's (early) Christmas present. She doesn't know what day it is, right? Merry Christmas, pup. Enjoy your new blanket.

Now I'm working on the first of a set of dishcloths for my home. The first attempt I did was not so great. Here's a picture about one row before I decided to rip it out and try again:

This is a pattern the stitchinary called "Banded Basket Weave." It looked better in wool.

It just looked uneven in an unpleasant way and it was hard to see both the pattern and the colors because it was just busy in a bad way, to me. So I looked in the dictionary and found another pattern:

It called this "basket rib" 

I think it looks like a waffle stitch to me but its not reversible:

The back of the "basket rib" cloth

Other than that, when I woke up, I felt like total garbage. I have a weird cough that I can feel in my chest, but I rarely cough and aside from just general icky feelings I don't really have any symptoms. When I do cough, it feels like something is in my chest, but no amount of coughing brings it up. It's not that the coughs are unproductive, it's that it doesn't affect whatever it is in my lungs. But it can't be pneumonia because I'm not fevery or really ill, just kind of bluh. I've never been sick like this before. It's a strange feeling.

Stashbusting and general housekeeping

I'd hit kind of a slump for a while, but this summer I decided to knit myself a skirt (it's so fabulous, you don't even know - pictures to follow later, I still have a little housekeeping to do before it's "done-done") but I recently was gifted just ever so much acrylic (and a little cotton! That cotton is a life preserver in this sea of plastic) so I've been branching out into some stashbusting ideas.

The first is a pinwheel rug that I'm actually kind of excited about. This photo was taken last night, but I'm already finished with the incomplete segment and started on the next.

For scale, each tile is about 1 foot square

I had to rip back a few times when my idea of how much yarn it took to make a segment was sadly mistaken, but it's been fun deciding which colors to put together.

I've been told this combo looks like an avocado - I kind of agree.

Of course, I'm constrained by what I already own, but that's actually been kind of fun, too, I'm putting all those color theory lessons to work~!

Were they worth it? This combo seems to imply "no."

After this, I'm hoping to move on to another rug, this time something rectangular to put in the bathroom, but I'm still not really sure what I've got in mind for that. Right now I'm thinking something color blocked, but outside of that, it's still a pretty vague notion. I guess I'll figure that when I get to it.