knitting interlude (for more knitting)

This past Sunday my husband had to do some school work, so I stayed home with the baby and stared chopping, mixing and sauteing in the kitchen. This is a recipe that I've had pinned on my recipe board for a few weeks - red lentil soup. I subbed sweet potatoes for the regular potatoes, otherwise I pretty much followed the recipe. It called for smoke paprika, cumin and fresh ginger. Really yummy.

My knitting interlude is this little baby cap. This is my third one. I just love the pattern, it's so simple once you get the hang of it. Just increases and decreases and it looks so cool once you've knit a few inches. The white yarn is some fingering weight yarn of my mom's and the variegated yarn is something I picked up a few years ago for the barn raising blanket that I'm slowly making out of all of my leftover sock yarn. (The third photo from the top shows how that yarn knit up into one of the squares for my blanket.)

I love the contrasting stripes in the baby cap. I'm giving this one away so the next one I knit will have to be for Logan, because it's really striking.

I'm hosting book club this month, so that means I really need to read the book we selected. It's got a sheep on the cover, so that's a good start :) :) So far I'm liking the narrator, he has a humorous voice. The book seems to be part memoir, part travel writing (set in Spain), part mystery. It's also about artisan cheese, so I'll be learning something new. I think this is going to inspire my cooking and make me want to have a good piece of cheese and a nice glass of wine.

Hope you are all having a good week. The outdoor photos are from a walk that my husband, Logan and myself took with my mom (Grandma Julie) when she came down to visit us this weekend. The temperatures were in the 50s on Saturday.

I felt like I'd been turned loose after being confined to the house with a newborn since late November. I forgot there was an outdoors. The air smelled beautiful and the sun felt great.

Looking forward to more mild days.

xo Jill

handspun hat

The baby is sleeping in his little monkey bed as I write this. We ran some errands today, to the grocery store and to the fabric shop. I found a background for the star quilt that I'm working on. Now I have to sew it all together. I hope it goes well, quilting isn't my forte, but I really love doing it. Some of my blocks for this quilt are misaligned, but I think only an experienced quilter would notice that sort of thing, so I'm not going to worry about it too much.

As long as there are no large holes we're good.

Logan's wearing a hat that I spun and knit for him this past July, when he was just a little flutter in my belly. I can't believe his head has grown enough for him to fit into it. I pulled it out of the drawer today as we were getting ready to dash out to the store, I didn't think it would fit, but it was almost a little too tight.

Is this how fast a baby grows? Faster than their mamas think they should? Too fast.

I finished two books this week and already started another. I wrapped up "A Curious Beginning" which I wrote about last week. Then I sped through "Red Queen" which reminded me of "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent." The book I'm reading now has already had me laughing out loud. I know a lot of people who have liked it. It's fun because part of it is set in my home state and it's about home grown food and cooking. I'm already craving fresh tomatoes from the garden.

Have a good week everyone.

Jill

yarn along (02)

I think we got about 8 to 10 inches of snow through the afternoon yesterday and into the evening. It's been blowing around, eluding the shovel of my husband and our friendly neighbors who have all put an effort into digging the neighborhood out.

It's fun to see snow of the rooftops as I snuggle in the house with our little one, but one cannot always stay indoors in February. I had an appointment at the clinic this morning, so I had to dash out of the house quickly this morning to clear the snow off the car (even though my husband did so at 6 am) it was covered with snow again.

Our baby has been such an exciting blessing that I haven't even mentioned some of the hard parts about being a mom. (Like having a c-section after 59 hours of labor and then having a blood clot in my leg a few days after being released from the hospital.) All of these things are seem really minor and very manageable after struggling with infertility. Other people deal with and have to overcome a lot more, so my husband and I have been very grateful that my recovery from my c-section has been good and that my blood clot is responding to treatment. I'm on blood thinners for the rest of February, thus my appointment at the clinic this morning - to make sure my blood is in the right range. Modern medicine is a miracle.

I am loving every moment of knitting this little sweater. The pattern is "Flax" by Tin Can Knits. The yarn I'm using has such a spread of color and color combinations that each new row makes an interesting contrast to the one before it. I couldn't stop taking pictures :) :) :)

What am I reading? I started this book last night. I saw it on Julie's blog this summer. I really liked the cover (I'm a bit of sucker for those things) so I decided to give it a try. I'm about 20% into it and I'm still now sure how the plot is going to develop, but it is a curious beginning indeed. I'm also thinking about finishing this quilt that I started a few years ago, so I have a stack of quilting books beside my piles of yarn. Jenny's star quilt has inspired me. I'm also eyeing the Freckles quilt out of Scrap Republic, could this be the next quilt that I make (that takes me three years to complete)?

Only time will tell.

Lots of doing and dreaming this week.

xo Jill

yarn along (01)

This is my first ever post joining Ginny's Yarn Along. I'm excited to be a part of this group, not only do I love seeing all of your projects, but I also need all the book suggestions that I can get. I'm currently out on maternity leave from my job, so I have been reading more than I ever have been in the last five years.

I'm currently reading a few books in tandem: "The Luckiest Girl Alive" by Jessica Knoll and a remake of "Sense and Sensibility" by Joanna Trollope. I must say I'm reading Jessica Knoll's book much faster than Joanna Trollope's. There's an element of mystery that I want to discover and plus the narrator is absolutely entertaining. Sometimes I can't believe what she says and thinks - it's definitely on the darker more risky side of things. I read "Gone Girl" a few years ago and I have to agree with other reviews that I've read about this book that this story is similar to that book. Readability wise they are both page turners. The subject content is different though. (See a few previous posts for my thoughts on Trollope's "Sense and Sensibility."

Still knitting away on my tweed baby blanket and I cast on the toe for my second striped sock. Magenta is my favorite color. My sister made the quilt featured in this post as a shower gift for my son. You can check out her blog here.

Keep reading and knitting everyone!

xo Jill