this post is brought to you by grand theft auto 4 which arrived on our doorstep this afternoon. hallelujah!

thanks to everyone for your warm wishes and support for the launch of popknits. it’s been a labor of love for some time now and i’m really excited and especially nervous to see it live online and getting pattern proposals already! haven’t seen any sock proposals yet, hint hint, but you never know what’s going to come in the door in june.

anyway, let’s get back to blog business. i have a small amount of progress to report.

mmmm, i love this fabric

flair is coming along nicely. i had one hiccup and had to frog back a little but not much. i did end up putting short row bust shaping in…

and i think it was a good idea! it fits well and will be even better once it’s blocked (everything’s a little tight right now.) i’m feeling positive about it.

one leg done, the other started

the peanut pants are creeping along slowly. i was on leg island there for a while, but i feel a renewed energy to knit them. they seem HUGE right now but according to the swatch they will shrink considerably.

garter stitch cuff

i opted for an easy peasy garter stitch cuff. nothing big here.

in other crafty news, i hope to sew this weekend! i’ve been meaning to drag out my sewing machine for over a week now but it just hasn’t happened yet. i got some great fabric for skirts at brooklyn general.

new fabric

and i also have one from the stash that i’m using (sorry no pic.) tonight, i’m casting on for elijah (ravelry) as well. there’s a certain baby being born right now that will be lonely without it. hopefully i’ll have some pics later this week.

here are a few peanut pics to end the post.. i love shots of her eating!

cheesy!

this is what she looks like after eating mac & cheese. the hair! yuck. i can never give her mac & cheese for lunch. it always has to be dinner so that she can be bathed afterward.

messy

i gave her lentils recently. she sorta liked them but they ended up everywhere. next time, they will be mashed.

books!

and she could spend hours looking at her books. it’s one of her favorite activities!

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sorry about all the silence around here the last week or so. i’ve been sooooo busy getting my big secret project ready to go! and guess what? i’m ready to talk about it today!

i’m nervous about it so let’s just come right to the point. i’ve decided to start my own online knitting magazine, Popknits. it’s a little different than some of the other knitting mags in that it will specialize in vintage knitting, vintage knitting revived, so to speak.

i’ve been looking longingly at the vintage vogue knitting magazines i’ve had lying around for years now. so many ideas have been swirling through my mind on how to update some of the styles i see in them that i just couldn’t get them out. then with the popularity of nancy bush, elizabeth zimmerman, and the amazing thrift store finds (cool and fun pattern books and magazines) i’ve been seeing on other blogs, an idea started to brew. sarah pope pushed me in the right direction and i found focus.

you can read more details over on the site but i’d like to mention a few things here.

1. i’ll probably end up extending the pattern submission deadline for the first issue because it’s closing in on us so fast, but the sooner you submit the better! i have to tech edit most of the patterns myself so i need as much time as i can get. that and i still have to develop the patterns and articles templates in my CMS so i have a lot of work to do.
2. yes, i did the design and build all on my own (which is why i seem to get nothing else done.)
3. seems like my timing is good with the demise of magknits (though i swear [and you can ask the spiders] i’ve been working on this for close to two years now!] i just want you to know that i read all the forums on ravelry concerning magknits and have hopefully learned from them.
4. i’m timing my issue launches a little late for a reason. i don’t want to interfere with the launches of my big sisters, knitty and knotions. hopefully by staggering my launches a little later we can all get good traffic.

i’m sure i’ll think of more to say in the next few weeks but i’ll save it for the Popknits News blog. if you subscribe to the feed you’ll get all the information as fast as i can post it!

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so the bath puff was everything that i thought it would be. basically a complete failure.

bath puff

looks cute, right? it’s already been trashed. i finished it on sunday night and tried to put it to use monday morning. soap refused to lather on it so i was glad that i hadn’t thrown away my old puff. then 8 hours later, it was still frakkin’ wet! ugh. dishcloth cotton is really only good for dishclothes. maybe this puff would have been good in some acrylic blend? i have no idea. i’m certainly not going to make another one.

to distract you from the utter failure of the puff, i bring you food and peanut.

potato dinner rolls

i saw this recipe for potato dinner rolls in the veganomicon and HAD to make them. they were so good! i’ll definitely make them again but next time i’ll wait until we have mashed potatoes on hand instead of cooking some up especially for them.

standing!

the peanut is pulling herself up on pretty much everything now. walking is not too far off in the future, methinks. i was loading the dishwasher yesterday (she loves the dishwasher and the refrigerator) and i caught her standing up using the open door as a prop. then she lifted up one of her legs and tried to crawl in! had to put a stop to that quick!

here are two videos that we’ve shot in the past two months or so. the first one is of the two of us. i pointed the camera at us but flipped out the screen so that she could see herself on camera. her reaction is priceless. the second one is of her crawling. she’s pretty good at it now!

p.s. i’m almost through the raglan section of flair so i’ll post something about it later this week, i think.

the peanut sees herself on video from gleek on Vimeo.

peanut crawling from gleek on Vimeo.

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ok, i’ve got a spare 8 minutes before i need to get in the shower so i thought that i would throw this post up and be on with the day.

started two new projects last weekend. one i’m crazy about. the other i think that i was crazy to start.

first, the love:

the ming is lovely

started flair by knitandtonic wendy. full details on ravelry. the good things? the yarn. ming from artfibers is just luscious in every way possible. soft and shiny, and the colors are amazing! i’m enjoying knitting with it so far. the drape is going to be very serious so i decided not to do buttons/buttonholes. i’m going to do snaps instead. i have some large sew-on ones from joann.com and i’m going to back them with felt before putting them on. should work. we’ll see.

sorry about the overexposure

looks good in seed stitch too! happy day.

the not-so-in-love:

cotton hell

a bath puff (ravelry). boring and hard on my hand. i can’t believe that there are several people on ravelry who have made SEVERAL of these. i want to claw my eyes out and it’s only the second row. i’m going to finish it though and move on. i need a bath puff. if it turns out to be a horrible bath puff, i’ll chuck it and buy a new one for $3 at the pharmacy. no biggie.

i have good video of the peanut crawling but that will take me at least 15 minutes to upload. in the meantime, look who’s trying to stand?! good lord.

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