Bright Baby Knits

If I wanted to count how many pregnant friends and family members I know, I may just have to move past my fingers and count on my toes as well. Most of the projects have been small, quick gratification projects like these sweet little bibs and bunnies:

 Unfortunately I didn't realize that this picture was so terrible before packing some of them up and shipping them off to 2 of the 10 million babies that are soon to come.

 On a side note: you can see that Pep isn't particularly helpful when I when I want to knit.

But back to the point: my favorite recent knit was this Tri-Terra Cardigan that I did as a test knit for my friend Cosy. It was sized for a 6 month old but I messed up a bit on my measurements and it turned out a bit bigger. I am still in love with it though, especially the colors.

 I loved the pattern and was so happy that I was able to use some of Cosy's own Rainbow Chard hand-dyed yarn.

 The buttons were another great find and my new favorite St Louis store, Knitorious.

 This was also my first time knitting a sweater from the bottom-up. I was mildly terrified and had avoided anything but top-down like the plague but after finishing this super easy pattern, I can't figure out where my fear came from. 

You can see a couple of Cosy's other adorable baby sweaters that I did as a test knit for her last fall in this blog post. Sadly, those earlier sweaters never made from France to their recipients in Alaska so it is needless to say that whoever receives this sweater get it by hand-delivery.

P.S. For those of you who knit, this pattern is raveled here and will be linked to Cosy's pattern as soon as she posts it within the next few days.

Home Improvement Part 1

 You might remember our living room looking like this:

Cramped, smushed, and difficult to navigate. Unfortunately, if we wanted to make out anything on our tiny 17" TV, this is what we had to deal with.

Thanks to the untimely death (seriously, untimely. We were very lucky that we had been saving a bit.) of the 17" Samsung, our living room now looks like this:

While still not perfect, and not all in our style, this a serious upgrade from what we had been dealing with. 

On a slightly related note: I'm not sure if any of my brothers read this blog, but if you do, I just wanted you to know that I never expected that I would be playing Toejam and Earl on a 42" TV (the color is a bit distorted by the camera, but the picture quality of this TV is amazing!).

P.S. Blogger -- thank you for finally letting me post!

tea, kitties and wine

 Those three things are mostly what our weekend consisted of. Well, those and lots and lots of Netflix Instant View since our TV has been dead over a week now and the new one won't be here until Wednesday. It's not even like we are TV-aholics, we're still using an antenna, in fact! But we do like to watch the Sunday morning fare, the local realty show, and the occasional episode of Jaques and Julia on PBS (Jaques Pépin and Julia Child in one show = BRILLIANT, if you want my humble opinion) and we were a bit lost without them this weekend.  

 Back to the point of illustrating our weekend. On Friday I baked some scones for Michael to take to work to commemorate the Royal Wedding and so when he got home from work I made him eat some more along with a "spot-o-tea".

And, that was about it for the day. I guess we watched The Office too, but that's not very exciting to blog about. 

 On Saturday, Pepin practiced his rendition of "Thriller"

 And hid by the balcony door in hopes that we would open it so he could jump off of the balcony and attack the squirrel in the front yard. No luck for Pep though.

 On Sunday we actually accomplished something: we bottled some of this year's wine!

 At first, Pep was all excited to help.

 But he soon opted for a cat nap when he realized that you need opposable thumbs to work the corker.

Here are the 28 bottles that we finished yesterday (well, they still need labels, but they are at least drinkable). That's a little more than half of the wine we made this year. The plan is to bottle 6 more of both the Niagara (white) and Foch (red) then to blend the two for the last 10 or so bottles. Thanks again to my Dad for keeping us stocked up with grape juice and making sure that the partially fermented wine was well kept until we returned to the states.