THREE posts? Wow. Here's Reuben's afghan as promised

I started a tradition when I was pregnant with Rachel of making an afghan after finding out the gender of my baby. Rachel's took forever to make, and I almost didn't finish it in time, but it turned out really quite nicely. I started Reuben's about the same week as my ultrasound and was nervous about being able to finish. I finished it in like 2 months hehe :D So here 'tis:

2 posts in one day? I think yes.

Well now that my fabulous update about Rachel's dress is out of the way, I read through some old posts and figured I was due for an update about my grey cardigan, so here goes.

I started this a loooong time ago, and was hoping to have it finished by fall 2010. Well, I found out I was pregnant in fall 2010, so I put this project aside since I knew it wouldn't fit/I wouldn't be wearing it for at least a year. In the meantime I worked on baby Reuben's afghan and Rachel's dress when my circulation would let me. Which reminds me, I never posted pics of Reuben's afghan. That will be next. Anyway. Once I finished Rachel's dress as far as knitting goes I pulled out my grey cardi again. And here's what happened.

First of all, this pattern is weird. I decided not to do the goofy vest insert thing, and decided to just do a straight stockinette stitch for both front panels. This gets complicated, though, because the vest insert thing is knitted separately AND sideways and then sewn on, so to change the pattern I had to do quite a bit of figuring. I tried out my re-worked pattern on the left front panel, and all seemed to go well, so I'm really excited. I then moved on to the right front panel and got about 8 inches up before noticing I had counted wrong on the waist shaping and had to almost start over. No biggie, it was only a few inches. But as I was unpicking it I realized that I should probably make sure the front shaping matches the back shaping. When I pulled out the back piece I finished about a year ago I realized a stupid thing I had done.

The pattern has you stockinette up about 10 inches and then switch to garter, so that's what I had done on the back. But when I changed the front to be straight stockinette all the way up I had forgotten this tidbit. Also when I worked the back I increased in a weird way that made it poof out, and was thinking of re-doing it anyway. So I spent the other day undoing a good 50 rows or so of my cardi back piece. :( I'm okay with it though, I can fix the poof problem at the same time as making a normal looking sweater.

So that's my update. I now have a front panel, about 1/4 of the other front panel, and I'm down to probably 1/6 of the back piece. I'm still planning on seeing how it looks as just a vest, so it might still be done by about Christmas if my kids let me knit every now and then.

I finished something!! This rarely happens anymore...

Having two babies makes knitting very unlikely. Lately I've been getting my kids to bed and then planning an hour or two of The Big Bang Theory while knitting, but Reuben has other plans. He goes down at 8, gets up at 8:30, down again by 9, up again by 9:30, and then down for good around 10. Tonight he actually went down permanently after his initial waking at 8:30, so I did end up with an hour BEFORE 10 pm, which was lovely.

And what did I do with that hour, you may ask? Well. I added buttons to Rachel's dress. That's right people, it's FINISHED!!



I don't think the blocking worked quite as well as I had hoped (or maybe I just used crappy yarn) and the pattern creator seems to think 2 yr olds are a lot fatter than mine is, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out :D