The Circle of Life

Woohoo! I finished my Thujas last night! So happy. They'll have their first outing tomorrow - I'll be wearing them to school. And yes, I will lift up a foot every time I pass someone to say, "Look what I made." What? I shouldn't do that? It would seem odd? You guys are no fun.

And so . . . when one project comes to an end, another project begins. 'Tis the great circle of life. Here's my next Baby Cuteness Cardigan. It's for the boy half of a set of twins due to arrive in February. I know I have plenty of time to knit this, but after seeing the twins' mom on Wednesday night and taking note of the size of her belly - already, I thought I should get things going. It's the same Bernat Softee Baby yarn I've used before, this time in Dreamy Blue. In this photo, it appears to have girlish undertones, but it really doesn't. It received the Official Boy Stamp of Approval from my very own 14-year-old boy. We're good.

I got a nice little surprise in my Ravelry message box yesterday. Another knitter is now knitting the Baby Cuteness Cardigan. She saw my finished project on Ravelry and found the pattern using the link I'd posted to my blog post and she's knitting it. Here's what she said: "My philosophy about baby knitting is that it needs to be cute as a button, able to take hard wear and machine washing, and be quick and fun to knit up. It's such a delight, having given up my 20 year tradition of baby blanket knitting in search of sweaters, to find patterns like yours."

Isn't that something? I really don't feel that this is my pattern - it's a modified version of the Mason Dixon Knitting Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimono. I NEVER could have come up with this pattern completely on my own. Never. I just think it's wonderful that this woman is knitting it following my modifications. It makes me feel so . . . smart. Boy, do I have her fooled!

In other happy news, I am the proud owner of a new milk frother. My electric hand-blender with the frother attachment was just teasing me the other day when it gave me one final frothing. It's dead. After searching high and low on the internet, I ordered an Aerolatte from Amazon.com. I threw a couple of knitting books onto my order to reach the free shipping minimum and sat back to wait for it to arrive. No dice. Although everything was "in stock," the order is due to ship on December 17th. Couldn't wait. Back to the web, checking the sites of several stores in my area. I finally just had to get in the car and go look. I found a Hot Chocolate set (!) that had a frother in it. $20. Done. Mine.

I'ts battery operated and quiet. It uses the same rechargeable batteries that I use in my camera, so it won't cause me any battery grief. Look what it does:

This frothy goodness was made from 1/3 cup of skim milk with a little squirt of chocolate syrup. Amazing. You might be blinded by this next photo, but it shows the amazingly thick froth made whipping a ton of air into skim milk.

Emmie is happy, too. She's a fellow frothy milk lover and she always gets a blob of it before I add the chocolate syrup. She knows good stuff.

I've been doing a whole lot of knitting and frothing this weekend. Knitting. Frothing. Frothing. Knitting. Knrothing. Fritting.

Oh! And my boy cleaned his room! Shhhh. Wait. Did you hear that? It was the angels singing.