The news, if it’s news to you: a Blue Garter Baby is in the works. (Some of you are going to say right here, “Hah! All those baby knits! I knew it!” but it’s absolutely true that almost all of them are for babies other than my own. It’s babies galore this year.) I have reason to know that wee new lives are not sure things and so I’ve delayed announcing this one here, but our Minnow is blithely thumping me with tiny feet and fists at this very moment and we have seen on the ultrasound that it looks healthy as a horse in every particular at 20 weeks’ gestation… and at some point soon I’m going to have to model an adult-size garment here (I hope it will be Pas de Valse) and you’re going to notice that my midsection is not so svelte these days! In fact, let’s just get that last bit out of the way right now:

We finally snapped some documentary evidence last week after we’d hiked up Mt. Hebo in Tillamook County on a glorious day. (How I love Spring Break!) As the hiking would indicate, I’ve been entirely healthy. I seem to be one of those hateful women who suffers no ill effects whatsoever during early pregnancy, although I’m sure there are still plenty of delightful physical symptoms down the road that can’t be dodged. When people know you’re gravid they thoughtfully ask how you’re feeling, and I’ve had to confess to feeling remarkably normal. One friend who’s raised two children replied, “Well, this is the new normal.” And she’s right. There will be all kinds of new normal to adapt to, and I think I’ll try to remind myself of that at times when I find I’m struggling against the changes to my comfortable routines.

Minnow should make his or her appearance in the world around 11 August. (Nerdy knitter that I am, I’m hoping for two days early on Elizabeth Zimmermann’s centennial birthday, and since 8.9.10 in the American dating system appeals to my husband’s sense of number he’s promised that he’ll have me out running stairs in an effort to kick-start the labor.) The sex will be a surprise to everyone but Alison the ultrasound tech — she didn’t even record it in her report for my doctor. We’ll be getting a niece just a few weeks later, so I can channel any urges to knit adorable girl things in that direction while making sensible gender-neutral clothes for my own offspring.

This is it. Our lives will never be the same. But there’s no spice and little joy in too much of the same anyway, right?

I’m at that age, apparently. The age when one’s beloved coevals start procreating. (If you’re curious, the age is thirty. Some dear friends and most all my relations already have children, but this feels like the real surge of the wave coming on.) Fortunately I am well equipped for this, as I can knit. I learned long ago that blankets are not this knitter’s cup of tea, but hardly anything is more satisfying that a cute, fast baby sweater. And booties? Wee hats? They’re like potato chips.

There’s more than one kind of baby knitting, of course. There are the precious heirloom knits that will be exclaimed over but worn only a few times, if at all. There are rustic drool-proof knits (some of them are ugly, though obviously made with love) that can be worn to rags without compunction. And there are are the holy-grail knits that will be admired and worn regularly until the baby grows out of them because they are cute enough to elicit compliments from non-knitters. As far as I know, I’ve only achieved a couple of the latter. One was River’s Spiral Yoke. Another was the Baby Surprise with the improvised hood that Aila outgrew almost immediately, but which was passed along to Lyric, who got compliments on it from strangers who really should have said something (his mother felt) about how adorable the baby was first. I don’t believe it’s any coincidence these are Meg Swansen’s and Elizabeth Zimmermann’s designs, and I’ll certainly be knitting both patterns again.

But a girl likes a bit of variety in her knitting, and there’s a wealth of old patterns out there that look just as stylish today. Kristen Rengren has tapped into this idea with her Vintage Baby Knits, which I’ve got on loan from the library. Of the 30+ vintage patterns she’s collected and updated, I’ve got my eye on Betty Lou and Rufus. And here’s the yarn to knit them:

Above: Black Trillium Fibre Studio Merilon Sock in “pomegranate”

Below: Imperial Stock Ranch Tracie in “quail”

I wish these sweaters were for twins so these yarns could be together all the time, the colors are so delicious. Imperial Stock Ranch is an Oregon grower and Black Trillium is a local dyer.

Another vintage bonanza fell into my lap this weekend, when Mr. G’s mother brought over a couple of pattern booklets that had belonged to her mother-in-law. I now have the Bucilla Baby Book, revised vol. 339 from 1950, and Fleisher’s Baby Book from 1957 (if I’m reading my roman numerals correctly). They’re both chock full of adorable sweaters, booties, bonnets, blankets, longies, and much more — for knitting and crocheting. Several of the designs appear in Rengren’s book. Both booklets give gauge for every pattern, which isn’t always the case, although I chuckle at the recommendation for “non-inflammable” needles. I don’t knit that fast!

I’m not only knitting baby things, though. My Pas de Valse has seen quite a bit of action lately and has almost one whole sleeve. I needed my second #6 circular to work that sleeve, so I first had to finish the hood of my long-neglected Tomten. It only needs sleeves, now, too. I really want to try garter stitch jacquard to embellish the sleeve caps if I can find some directions for it. (Franklin Habit taught a class on it here last fall that I’d have loved to take, but I had another commitment that weekend and couldn’t really afford it anyway.) Next week is Spring Break, so I hope I can get lots of knitting accomplished!

I’ve spent the past five days under the thumb of an ugly cold, not much good for anything but lolling on the couch with my box of Kleenex and countless mugs of tea. I’ve read about 140 pages of Wuthering Heights, watched the Pride and Prejudice miniseries for the umpteenth time, and I’ve finished sewing the binding for the baby quilt I started last summer. See?

This is the slapdash log cabin I named Satsuki (for the girl in “My Neighbor Totoro”). I finished the top months ago, then realized that the eight-point stars I wanted to machine quilt over each block were going to cause a problem.

If you don’t quilt from the center of the whole quilt, you tend to get bunchiness somewhere. For me, that was going to be in the sashing between blocks. I was too wedded to my eight-point stars to change my mind, and not feeling fastidious enough to make the quilting process much more complex by sewing the parts of the six stars on the interior of the quilt first. I wanted to just sew one whole star at a time, block by block, so that’s what I did. Like the rest of the quilt, the stars are intentionally free form. I made no attempt to align the points from block to block, and I let them be lopsided because the bright center squares aren’t really in the center of each block.

Sure enough, the bunchy sashing happened exactly as predicted. So I created a fix and pretended it was a design element.

Yep, I used red embroidery thread to whipstitch up the center of the sashing, gathering and securing the excess fabric in a pleat.

If you want to make a quilt like this yourself, you’ll need a yard of fabric for the back (I had enough excess in my yard to also make the small squares that link the sashing strips from the backing fabric), a yard of flannel for the batting, five fat quarters in neutral fabrics (mine looked very quiet in their bundle but livened up considerably once I was sewing them) for the log cabin blocks and the outer border (this was exactly enough; I had hardly any fabric left over), about a third of a yard of neutral sashing fabric, and small amounts of leftover brights for the block centers and binding. Start with a 2″ square of your bright fabric, then start snipping scraps of the neutrals at random to fit around it. I cut every piece with scissors as I was ready to attach it, and I let the strips be variable widths so the whole thing would be rustic and cattywampus. Don’t measure anything, but keep working around and around until it looks like you’ve got a square about a foot wide. When you’ve made six blocks, square them all up to 12″. Cut seventeen 2″ x 12″ strips for the sashing and twelve 2″ squares for the small squares linking the sashing strips. Assemble them around the six blocks and sew all together. Then cut the remaining neutral fabrics into 4″ strips of variable lengths and piece them together in lengths sufficient to log cabin them around the quilt to form the outer border. Make the quilt sandwich with the backing and the flannel, then draw eight-point stars (as you’d see in a compass rose) radiating from the center of each block to its edge and corners (don’t quilt into the sashing). Machine quilt around the center square and along the lines for the star you’ve drawn. You’ll need two hanks of embroidery thread to whipstitch the pleats; just pinch up the center of the loose fabric in the sashing and whipstitch from the center of one of the small sashing-linking squares (these must have a name, right?) to the next. Let the center of that little square stay loose and poofy. Repeat in all seventeen of the sashing strips. Cut 2″ strips of variable lengths from your scraps of brights for the binding and attach it in the usual way. (I like the directions in Bend-the-Rules Sewing for the Lap Quilt for bindings.) Et voila! A cute baby or lap quilt that makes you feel terribly creative and folk artsy and doesn’t task your patience for fussiness or accuracy. It’s liberating, I promise you.

Good for one Knitting Olympics finisher’s medal:

About this lever knitting business: several of you asked why I’d want to learn a whole different way of knitting, and it’s a good question. I am the kind of person who wants to know about this kind of thing just because it exists and because it’s so significant to the history of the craft (knitters who had to work fast enough to earn a living at it knit this way; our more familiar throwing and picking styles emerged from a desire to make the process of knitting look more ladylike).  I can’t yet lever knit effectively enough to make it faster than my usual throwing. But it does, in the mean time, let me use my hands and wrists in a different way, and as I now know from my class with Carson Demers, that’s a good thing. My work is all about using the computer, and between that and my knitting habit I’ll need to be careful if I want to avoid repetitive stress injuries. I was almost the only person in Carson’s class at Madrona who didn’t already have problems in the wrists, elbows, or shoulders, and I want to be able to knit in comfort until I’m dead. So changing up the positions in which I knit is a really good idea.

So back to this little practice sweater. I had the one lovely skein of Toots LeBlanc Jacob/Alpaca DK, but I knew it wouldn’t stretch to a whole sweater. I had some Rowan Felted Tweed in the stash that was about the same weight, so I figured I’d add a hem in colorwork. I thought I remembered Lizbeth Upitis’s Latvian Mittens having some nice large botanical motifs, and sure enough I opened the book right to the page with the chart for Graph #53: District Unknown. And I only needed to increase three stitches to fit in three repetitions of the motif.

I only worked half the chart because I didn’t think a long cardigan would be very practical on a three-month-old, but I quite like the sort of wallpaper effect that results.

There was still the problematic neckline to deal with, though. I tried tacking it down a couple of different ways, but I just wasn’t satisfied. A hood seemed like the best solution, so I quickly knit one up in the Felted Tweed. And since I’d already given up on this little cardigan being unisex, I thought I’d use the last yard of the Toots LeBlanc for a little embroidery to match the buttons.

Ta-da! Another little sweater banked against the onslaught of 2010 babies. I really want a whole grown-up sweater’s worth of the Jacob/alpaca. So tweedy. So full of character. Love it.