A Quilt for Baby J.

My former classmate and labmate Emily had her second baby in February, a boy! An although she has moved on to a new career away from the bench, she's still a very special person to me :)

To celebrate little Baby J's arrival I quilted up one of my stack of completed tops, a kind of eye-spy scrappy top made of 2" and 4" squares bordered in my favorite regal, deep purple solid.

Chinso helped me audition backing fabrics...

And helped me settle on a red fabric my sister thrifted in the UK.

He also supervised the piecing of batting and basting...

But where he really excels is binding. He makes it into a contact sport.

For the quilting I was inspired by both Chawne's "Vanishing" and Caro's "Pixel" and tried doing radiating straight lines from a single point. It looks really cool in the two corners there the lines start but I think maybe I needed to make it more dense to get the effect I was really looking for. Lesson learned!

My friend was very enthusiastic in thanking me for the quilt so I hope she and Baby J liked it!

More Cage Comforters :)

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I found an AMAZING Le Creuset cast iron pot in someones garbage pile while out walking the dog. Well it seems the, um, garbage fairies (that sounds kind of gross?) are really looking out for me! A few nights ago I was walking the dog down another block and came across a large rubbermaid container full of bed linens. I'm aware that potentially this could have been oh-so-gross, but the area was well lit and I could tell the linens were all in clean condition. So I bundled them all under my arm, stored them in big ziplocs overnight, and in the morning my boyfriend laundered them all on hot.

The pillow cases I picked up were a little worse for wear, jut a bit worn and bleached, so they were very quickly turned into 14 more cage comforters! This time I used the polyfil sheets from inside some old, cheap bed pillows (the $3 kind from Kmart) as the padding which meant the beds are a little loftier and lumpier. On some I compensated for the lumps by adding extra lines of quilting to tamp down poofy bits and to help stabilize the batting for when they will be washed. Once I ran out of pillowcases I used a little bit of leftover fabric from a bed sheet I previously used to back a quilt, and a bit of ugly fabric I snagged from the scrap table at quilt guild.

These will be dropped off at The Mayor's Alliance for NYC's Animals this week!

A New Sweater for the Little'un

Last week Chinso's purple sweater got bundled in the with the "dog laundry" went through a hot wash and then -gasp- into the drier. Needless to say it would now fit a teacup chihuahua.

It's still cold enough in NYC to freeze the balls on a brass monkey, so for a day or two we made do with his original acrylic sweater and the acrylic coat & Chinso became the doggy equivalent of a Tesla machine. Zap. Zap. Zap.

So I did two things - sewed a cotton fleece, cotton batting and micro-fleece jacket (water resistant), and knit a new sweater! This time from superwash wool because, OMG I'm not stupid.

 

I used 1.5 balls of Washable Ewe held double on US8 needles, cast on 52 stitches and knit in K2 P2 rib all the way through. This time I was a bit more strategic with the placement of the increases in the breast plate and back, added one extra button loop, and did (if I say so myself) a nifty rounded and neatly finished edge on the tail end. All things that had bugged me about the first one fixed!

 

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the first person to ever figure out how to make that edge but I'm proud of myself nonetheless :) After doing a bunch of mirrored decreases of increasing rapidity (K2tog 2x, k3tog, K4 tog) ,I knit the first 3 stitches in pattern then knit2tog, turned and slipped the first stitch then knit back in pattern. I turned again back to the right side of the knitting and repeated until I reached the last 4 stitches and kitchenered those together. A nicely finished rounded edge was mine.

I didn't have 8 matching buttons so I used four sets of two. It's pretty snug, someone put on 2 pounds since moving in with us according the the vet, but both of those things are perfectly fine in this weather.

Upcycled Cage Comforters!

I've become a bit obsessed with cleaning bed linens, especially using a strong cleaning solution of hot, hot water with washing soda, borax, dishwasher powder and bleach to get rid of the yellowish stains that build up. A few weeks ago I intended to give the mattress pad a good wash and unfortunately, it started to disintegrate after going through the machine. Bah.

Luckily they aren't expensive to replace, and the pad wasn't so badly damaged that it couldn't be remade into something useful! Cage comforters for shelter pets, an item needed by the Mayor's Alliance for NYC's Animals. I cut pieces from the mattress pad in both of the requested sizes (14"x 20" and 12" x 18") and used a sheet I thrifted a while ago to make covers.

For some I doubled up the layers of "batting" because one layer seemed a bit thin. Then I had excess sheet fabric so I made a few more of the thinner ones. Ten in all.

 That's quite a stack of comfort I'll be dropping off at the Mayor's Alliance tomorrow after work!

 

Chinso, as per usual, took some time of his busy day of napping to help me sew :) He is now no longer our foster pup, we adopted him last week!

A hat for A

On New Year's Eve we went out to a Brazilian BBQ place in Astoria. A came in with his hat and when it came time to leave.... no hat! The hat was a brown cabled, fur lined ear flap hat with a short strap and snaps to either hold the ears up over the head or under the chin. And it was gone.

To be honest I wasn't the biggest fan of this hat since I think certain shades of brown aren't so flattering on A's Omar Sharif complexion (he's half Egyptian), and it was a touch too small and left marks on his forehead. So! I knit him a replacement!

I chose a free pattern from Drops (Rocky Mountain) and knit with the very, very last two balls of Filatura Lanarotta Chaco in a tweedy purple (purchased in 2006!). I held the yarn double and went up a needle size to get gauge. The construction is a little odd on the hat; you knit a strip that goes over the crown front to back, then pick up and knit two strips on either side and finally seam into a kind of open box shape. 

For the fur lining I bought four balls of Lion Brand Lux Fur from a Ravelry destash, eventually using the camel color. The pattern calls for just a few rows of crochet around the edge of the hat plus the panel in front, but I also crocheted shapes to cover the inside of the ear flaps so that they could be pinned up. I need to tack down the left one a little bit because its a touch too "sticky-outy".

 I added a couple of purple snaps on the sides so that the flaps can be held up and away if necessary. They aren't the most secure on there, I might have to add a circle of felt on the inside if they come loose and need replacing.

A's verdict? Well, he has worn it but I'm not sure it will ever replace the brown hat in his heart :)

Pup in Knits

We are still happily fostering our little rescue pup Chinso, who is currently doing something very similar to this:

... while occasionally letting out little grunts and sighs of contentment.

Fostering is a very rewarding activity, but obviously comes with much potential for heartache. I'm not going to go into the hows and whys of how I cope with this and please don't ask, because for this particular pup it's going to be very difficult when he is adopted. We are currently trying to arrange a meet and greet with potential adopters and it pulls my heart in two.

Chinso is most likely an Italian greyhound chihuahua mix, with heavy emphasis on the greyhound. He has legs that stretch on for days, the classic narrow but long body, and a big chest that rapidly nips in to a tiny waist. And he's fast!

I'm not really a person who takes pleasure in anthropomorphizing animals, but this little dog needed a sweater to cope with the cold. He was underweight when he came from the shelter and his undercarriage is all but bald! I bought a sweater for him that fit in terms of length but didn't fit anywhere else and was chaffing because of his shape. I cut, sewed and added snaps to adjust it but I still wasn't happy.

So this week I knit him his own custom fit sweater!

He was extremely patient and tolerated multiple fit session during the knitting process, and at least two attempts at figuring out where the button loops should go. This was a fast knit holding two strands of worsted together and knitting 2x2 rib on US10.5mm needles. I did increases and decreases as I saw fit to hug his curves, added a button hole for attaching the leash to the harness, then added slip stitch crocheted button loops for fastening. I blocked it a little bit too much so it's a touch loose now over the harness, but it should snug up on a second wash.

Chinso happily pushes his head through and lifts his front paw whenever the sweater is presented and seems to like this sweater much more than the store bought one! For one thing it isn't acrylic so he no longer gets wickedly static charged during walks and it doesn't chafe anywhere. It's warm too.

It snugs up nice and tight on his belly, but importantly is out of the line of fire of pee. I ran out of yarn or I would have made this a little longer and rounder at the bottom end, but hey, it covers a lot as it is.

Gratuitous chihuahua-face.

Gratuitous cute :)

Lucky Find

While out walking my foster dog this afternoon, I spotted a very familiar color partially buried in the snow in a garbage pile a block from my house. I thought it was probably too good to be true and carried on with our walk. Once we got back home curiosity got the better on me and I walked us back.

O. M. G.

That, my friends, is a 9 quart cast iron LE CREUSET pot. Filled with snow, moldy peanuts (?) and burnt on crud. A quick wipe with paper towels told me that most of this grossness was surface, and very easily scrubbed off.

I have some Le Creuset enamel cleaning fluid for my other two pots, which incidentally are exactly the same color, which made short work of the few last burnt on bits and the oily patina.

Even more miraculously? The first hit on eBay was for the lid in exactly the same color for $26 including shipping. This is a $360 pot. Holy crap. Today is a good day!