Holiday madness

Db is very small and I am still on paid leave; therefore, it was actually possible to knit her a fine Christmas ensemble in less than one month:






















Yes, I should have been editing my manuscript rather than knitting this. And yes, db does have a neck somewhere under those jowls.















The dress is the Ravelry freebie Kaia Babydoll knit in the 6 month size for my 85th height percentile 5 month old daughter. I knit it in Zara (red) and Aurora 8 (gray); the red was held doubled and knit on 9 dpns; the gray was held single and knit on a 7 circular.















Modifications included knitting long sleeves. Basically, I followed the pattern but put the sleeve stitches on a holder; after I knit the dress I picked up and knit the arm stitches, picking up 8 stitches in the armpit and knitting in the round. I also did a k1p1 rib on the collar because it looks neater than a single garter stitch edge. To make it long enough, I also did one or two more skirt increase rounds than the pattern called for.















The necessary soaker is another free soaker pattern on Ravelry, searchable as Wool Diaper Cover by Cynthia Combs. Obviously I didn't pick the pattern because of its pithy name.

Todd's family has a disturbing tradition which involves the family patriarch (or whoever has had enough holiday wine to be suggestible) putting on a Santa suit and scaring all the babies and small children at the party. The small children receive awful plastic gifts to compensate them for their trauma; tiny babies, however, receive nothing more than a crippling blow to their developing subconscious.















Db looks annoyed, which of course makes me proud. The crying baby on the left is db's new cousin - the lucky recipient of the flower hat, pirate hat, and nautaloid toy of blog posts past.
















Db's adorable mary janes were also knit by me using the Tiny Shoes pattern by Ysolda Teague. Perhaps my daughter has exceptionally narrow patrician feet or perhaps I didn't quite pay enough attention to the gauge, but the medium size was immense. I knit one on December 23rd and despaired; on the morning of the 24th I did a little emergency surgery, taking a pair of scissors to the bottom of the bootie, frogging the bottom half, and then doing a three needle bind off after the 5 rounds of garter stitch called for in the pattern. I then knit the second bootie in a mere hour and a half (including all finishing) and wove in the ends of the dress while Todd loaded the car. Rock star finish.

Creepy materialism-teaching visit from Santa notwithstanding, it was actually the least painful Christmas Eve party ever because of db:

knitcrit: baby baby baby baby baby. babybaby?

annoying libertarian relative: baby babybabybaby baby!

knitcrit: baby baby.

strung out on Valium relative: babybabybaby babybaby baby. baby?

knitcrit: baby baby baby. babybaby! baby baby baby.

Babies - the new, non-alcoholic way to survive the in-laws' annual Christmas Eve party.

bottoms, tops, and a disturbing bustier

We haven't been so much with the blogging this past month here at knitcrit mission control, though there has been a fair amount of knitting and also a fair amount of criticism, the latter mainly taking the form of yelling at the TV whilst helplessly watching the public option die a slow, painful death. The former, a much more pleasant subject, involved knitting a soaker to go with Topaz out of the leftover light green - baby girls don't sit like ladies (the bulky diaper gets in the way, I suppose), so one way to help them pull off the dress is to provide a coordinated underlayer. In this case, the soaker I knit to go with Topaz also looks very cute with db's monkey onesie.

This was a freebie on Ravelry, searchable under the name "Fancy Pants." I had no idea what a soaker was before about three weeks ago and it turns out there's quite a range of soaker patterns out there, so I can't say that I had any reason for choosing this one - I can't even remember how I found it, actually.

For the past few winters, Todd has worn an embarrassingly ugly black knit hat emblazoned with the ASCAP logo (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers). In some ways, this is the type of hat that one can indeed get away with wearing on the northern fringes of the Upper West Side, but I finally got sick enough of looking at it to make him probably the millionth Koolhaas to be worn on the streets of New York City. No matter - it looks great, of course - it's really a bulletproof pattern.

Db wonders why her dad gets the cool hat.























And finally, as I begin to contemplate my return to work at the end of January, I find myself looking at this this lovely image and wondering what exactly I find to be profoundly wrong with it. Besides everything.