A Kid's Corner, Baby Gifts and Ugly Knitting

What do these three things have in common? Not much, except that I have completed all three recently.

Let's start with the kid's corner, my daughter's writing corner to be precise.

A few weeks ago, I made a fabric covered memory board for my toddler's room. I wanted to make one for Emma so that she'd have a place to put pictures of her friends and family and maybe a few Emma-made artwork pieces. The plan was to hang it on the wall low enough for her to put pictures on and pull them off too. The project was simple, quick and took inexpensive materials to make: 1 yard of fabric, 2 spools of rick-rack ribbon, 1 yard of felt, pushpins, one cork board, a hot glue gun and a staple gun.

I still intend to hang it up on the wall, but have not gotten around to doing that yet. So for now it is resting on her little table (which used to be my table and before that my aunt's table). This has turned into a writing corner for her (or should I say scribbling?). Above the memory board hangs a few of the surviving butterfly decorations from her birthday party.



Now let's talk baby gifts.

It seems like everyone and their sister is pregnant these days. It must be my age, or perhaps something is in the water. When I was pregnant with my son, I knew (good friends and family members too) a whopping TEN women who were pregnant! Now I think I'm down to five or six (all different from the previous ten). I'm sure you know what this means for me... lots of handmade baby gifts.

Yesterday, I sewed a few burp cloths using this tutorial. I selected two cheerful prints in red and orange for my friend who is having a boy in July. I also made two for my friend expecting a girl in August (purple and pink prints for her). I didn't get a chance to photograph the boy ones, but here are the girl ones.

You may recall how I recently made the ABC fabric magnets from the Purl Bee for my kids. Well, this morning I made another set using the same fabric prints and (this time!) sticker-backed magnet sheets. Man, these were so much faster to make than the last round. What a difference it makes to have the sticker-backed sheets. These are going to my friend expecting the baby girl in August.

Now on to the ugly knitting.

Why? Why would I ever dream of knitting anything so ugly or so painful to create? Oh, yes my friends, there is one very good reason to do this. Yarn bombing. Huzzah!

So this was my task: to make a cozy for a little tree. Essentially, it is a scarf. A really, really, REALLY ugly scarf. This item is made up of old stash yarn (a little Encore, Swish DK and Wool-Ease) and really old novelty yarn (mystery sparkly pink yarn and eyelash yarn). Yes, you see eyelash yarn in there.

I swear I have never purchased eyelash yarn in my life. This was given to me during a yarn crawl. I vow to never EVER buy eyelash yarn or knit with it again. It was such a painful experience (painful to my knitting psyche) and irritating to make (I have never dropped so many stitches or accidentally knit into the wrong loop in my life).


It is done. Thank heaven for that. Now, back to happy knitting...