The Shawl

A heads up: this is a long post about fibre craft. If it's not your thing, feel free to skip it, or just jump ahead to a couple pictures of Béla and the cat that I snuck in.

This year my mom's turning 60, and I thought it would be nice to knit her something interesting. I was pretty taken by the knitpicks pattern for the Chinook Shawl, which I suggested to her, to see if she liked it, and if so, which colourway she'd like it to be knit in. This was back in August, before Béla was born, and while I had some time off. My plan was to ship the kit to them in Canada, and they could bring it with them when the came to visit in September. She loved it, and opted for the Riverstone colourway, all natural whites, greys, and browns. And so I ordered it, and waited impatiently for it to come.

And I waited and waited and waited. It didn't come before my parents left for Germany, but we figured that Chris and Karen could bring it when we met them in France. And so we waited some more. Finally, Jer called to check the status of the order, only to find that they had no record of it. He then re-placed the order over the telephone. (I'd initially done it over the internet, and while I order stuff like that all the time, I'm willing to admit that I might have skipped some final confirmation step without noticing. I was going a bit hormone-crazy back in August.)

Then we waited and waited and waited some more, figuring that we could get the kit when we were visiting at Christmas. Well, it never arrived. Jeremi called again to check, and it seems that this time they had a record of the order, but that it had been cancelled without any explanation included in the record of the order. He tried to order it again, but they were now sold out of some of the yarn for the colourway I wanted, and in fact didn't have enough yarn for our second choice either. They were pretty nice about it though, and sent me the pattern anyhow for free.

So what to do with a really nice pattern but no appropriate yarn? Shopping for lace yarn in Jena would only be an exercise in frustration, and I really liked the colour gradations in the sample, which I knew would be hard to mimic if I ordered yarn from somewhere else on the internet, so I decided to do what anyone in that situation would do: spin and dye my own yarn!

Okay, so that might not be everyone's first choice, but it appealed to me. After another consult with my mom in February or so, asking for what colours she'd like now that she had her druthers, she said that she'd like greys and blacks. I refuse to knit lace in black, because unless you always wear it stretched tight over bare (pale) skin or something white, all that work is hard to see. And so I decided to go for shades of grey. I ordered some dye in from a weaving supply store in Vienna (there were no suppliers for Ashford dyes in Germany, and at least in Austria I understand the website), and waited impatiently for it to arrive. So impatiently in fact, that I spun half the yarn while waiting. The original pattern involved 6 colours, let's call them A through F, held double so as to form 11 colour gradations as follows: AA, AB, BB, BC, CC, CD, DD, DE, EE, EF, FF. Rather than spinning twice as much yarn and doing it the same way, I opted to just make a 2 ply yarn and work with 6 colours in that way, starting with only A, and then one ply of A and one of B. What this meant was that I could spin all the yarn for the AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, and FF while waiting for the dyes to arrive, and then dye that spun yarn along with the rovings for the singles of the mixed colours. (I'm sorry, this is getting a bit technical.) In any case, here are my six piles of fibre, both the weighed rovings and the skeins of spun yarn, just waiting for the dyes.
And then the dyes finally arrived! It's the first time that I've really dyed anything, not counting experiments with onions skins and sunflower seed shells after a visit to a pioneer village back in grade school, and these acid exhaust dyes were really easy to use. We went and bought a cheap pot for the purpose (in retrospect it should have been bigger, even though I was never dying more than 33 g of fibre at a time), and Jer even picked up some glass stirring rods and a better glass thermometer (here I'm using a meat thermometer rigged to stay submerged with an elastic band and a vegetable peeler).
The whole dying process was made more complicated by the fact that I was using a fibre that's 50% merino and 50% raw silk, and unlike pure wool, which you can simply leave to simmer, silk starts to degrade if heated above something like 86 C, so you've got to maintain it at around that temperature for a while, which isn't easy. Another thing that I struggled with was how much to stir. You're supposed to "turn" the fibre gently a couple of times to avoid blotches, but on the first batch I "turned" it a bit too much, which was a bit too much like stirring it, which resulted in the fleece becoming hopelessly felted, and the skein of yarn felting to itself somewhat as well. (Unwilling to lose all that work, I actually pulled it all apart and knitted it all the same.)

The blotchiness was much more of a problem for the yarn that was already spun - any blotchiness in the roving disappeared once it was spun, plyed, and knit, so I really should have waited for the dyes. I'll know for next time! Besides, it's a homemade item, so the blotchiness just gives it character.

Here's a picture of some of the colours drying on a laundry rack. For some reason this picture makes them all sort of look the same colour, which I assure you was not the case. The first five shades are shown here, with the darkest not yet added to the group, and the two lightest rovings are missing, as they were being spun into the AB yarn at the time.
Then, of course, came the knitting. Somehow we don't have a single picture of me actually knitting it, so I'll include some pictures of my "helpers". Here's Béla chewing on the big 8 mm needle I used to cast off. I know, letting a baby shove pointy sticks in his mouth isn't the best idea.

There, this way is much safer.
And here's Aeris, making sure that none of those stitches get away while I left it on the couch for a while.
Finally it was finished. Here it is being blocked on the mattress in the spare room:

And finally us trying it out, offering some wearing suggestions. First, the classic show-it-off batman look:

As a classic old-lady-style shawl:

Or a more updated look (a classy silver shawl pin here would be ideal):
Or worn in front, thrown over both shoulders:

Or worn as a scarf, which would even work under a coat:

Or worn as a scarf in a way that makes Jeremi look positively Parisian:

Or like an old-timey pilot, complete with goggles (Fisher-Price blocks that Béla's trying to get back):

Or standing in as a skirt:

Or keeping your head warm on a cool day:
Or the ever-popular everything-looks-good-wrapped-around-a-baby look:



I hope my mom loves it! And while she knows I was planning on knitting it, she hasn't heard a thing about it in months, so it's sort of like a surprise. As such, this post is ready and waiting before my trip to Canada, but won't be posted until her birthday, April 21st, or slightly later. Happy Birthday Mom!

Easter, and our growing baby

One exciting bit of news over the past week was the arrival of Béla's Certificate of Canadian Citizenship. Because he was born in Germany, he doesn't have a Canadian Birth Certificate, which is most often used in Canada to prove citizenship. They gave him a passport in the meantime because he had to travel, but it's only good for two years, because he was lacking this most official of documents, which proves that he's a citizen. Here he is, checking it out.
Yup, that's right, the document that he'll have to use for his entire life to prove his citizenship has a picture of him when he was three days old, and states for all posterity that he's 49 cm tall and has blue eyes, neither of which is quite true any more. Hmm... All that writing on the back does look official...


And it smells like the real thing...



Now there's only one test left to see if it's legit...



Yup, just like a gold coin, it stands up to the bite test.


Note that throughout all this he's wearing a cute little outfit from Aunt Gail and Uncle Gilbert, sized for 9 months. We've been exploring a lot of his bigger clothes lately, as he suddenly seems to be getting too big for a lot of the 6 month items (but more on that later). This outfit is totally cute, and has a picture of a motorcycle on the shirt, with the year 1979, and the text "vintage ride". Seeing as I was born in 1979, Jeremi is quite amused by the idea of me as a "vintage ride".

For the Easter weekend we opted to stay home, which made for a relaxing four days of good food. We're leaving for Canada so soon that another last-minute trip somewhere just didn't make sense, so instead we just hung around here, cooking, among other things, homemade bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon, Bavarian breakfast (homemade pretzels with Weißwurst (a kind of sausage), sweet mustard, and wheat beer), a Middle Eastern feast, broccoli and shiitake mushroom stir fry, and, the main event, a gigot de sept heures, a leg of lamb slow cooked in the oven with wine, vegetables, and herbs, for seven hours, until you can cut it with a spoon. We didn't get pictures of most of it, but here's the lamb, being actively cut with a spoon:

And the whole spread, with roasted rosemary potatoes, and (green!) asparagus. Because of the sauciness of the dish, it would have been better served with something that better absorbed the juices, like couscous, rice, or polenta, but we really love these potatoes, so we didn't mind sopping up the juices with the bagels left over from breakfast.

And of course, the requisite picture of Béla enjoying it all. He really does well with slow-cooked meat, which makes the whole absence of molars a non-issue.

We also dressed him up for Easter in this cute little outfit that makes him look like a little Easter Egg (or so I think at least), playing with his maraca that also looks like an Easter Egg. I had visions of taking this picture on his spring-like activity mat on a patch of grass near here that's completely covered with crocuses in the spring, but (a) the crocuses were already dead by the time Easter came, and (b) Easter weekend wasn't as warm as the days before or after, so I didn't want him out in public half-naked.

In this picture he's not really smiling, and he's not even holding the maraca anymore, but I think he just looks too sweet, so I'm including it all the same.

In other news, we were at the doctor yesterday for the last of his shots for a while, and it seems that over the past four weeks he's gained a whopping 920 g (over two pounds), and grown 3 cm. This has moved him from below to well above the 75th percentile for both height and weight, breaking what seemed to be reasonably steady trends. Yup, he really had a growth spurt, which I suspected based on the clothes he was outgrowing, and the truly prodigious amounts of food he was eating, seemingly without nursing any less. It seems he's starting to grow into those giant hands and feet of his!

And here's some evidence: Check out how he fills out this cute 12 month sleeper that Melanie and Ruthanne got him? All stretched out...

...and all curled up too.

And finally, because it's hard to see in that picture, here's photo evidence of his first visible bruise, after a worse-than-usual head bonking while attempting to pull himself up on the coffee table. It took two days to show up, and is already almost yellow, so it really isn't so bad. (It's probably hard to see in the smaller format on the blog, but it's on the upper right hand side of his forehead in this picture - actually his left hand side.) I'm sure it's the first of many. I'm just impressed that we've made it more than seven months without any visible bruises so far!
And, for those of you who know him, how much does Béla look like Jer's cousin David in this picture?!?

Up to his seven month birthday

It's been a bit long since I posted, I'm afraid. Lots has been going on of course, but somehow I haven't managed to organize it into a blog post. The big news, especially for those of you who might be living in or around Toronto, is that we're going to be visiting Canada very soon - Béla and I from the 13th to the 24th of April, and Jer from the 17th to the 24th. My Baba is very sick, with a large tumour in her brain, and we're coming back for a visit while we have the chance. We had planned on spending the week of the 17th-24th in Italy, meeting up with my parents in Rome, where they were going to be celebrating my mom's 60th birthday on her dream vacation, and spending some time together before my dad's surgery for prostate cancer in May. Because of the severity of Baba's condition, however, they've had to cancel their trip, and we're going to meet them in Canada instead, where we can all celebrate her birthday there. To be honest, my family is having a pretty rough year health-wise.

Okay, now I'll try to lift the mood with some cute pictures of Béla. I still find the extra time and processing of the videos a bit daunting, so I'm going ahead with just a few pictures, and I'll leave the videos for another day. I'm also not doing one giant post with all the latest stuff, but rather just the stuff up to about his 7 month birthday at the end of March. There's big news coming after that (he can crawl! and pull himself up on his crib and on the couch!), but these feats are better served by video, so I'll stick to a nice easy post for now, which somehow involves a lot of pictures of him eating. He does eat a lot, but I think it's also because it's an easy time to take a picture of him, as he's confined to a chair and basically stationary.

The first couple pictures are from his first supper of spaghetti bolognese. It wasn't actually spaghetti, but rather a thicker, wavy-edged noodle, that I thought (rightly) would be easier for him to manage. On websites of people practicing baby-led weaning (the idea of giving babies regular food instead of spoon-feeding them purées), photos of babies eating spaghetti are pretty well compulsory, just because it can be so very messy. Many advocate letting them eat in just a diaper, so it's easier to clean up, which we tried...
...until he got goosebumps, so we threw on a dark-coloured shirt to keep him warm. (Now we have a couple of bib-shirts, so it's not such a problem.) And yes, it was messy, but not as ridiculous as I'd expected. Maybe if we'd given it to him his first week, but now his skills are such that most things do make it at least close to his mouth.
The Thursday of this week (a week before Maundy Thursday) was incredibly warm and beautiful, so everyone was out in the city. I'd met up with some women from my prenatal class, who meet up weekly to let the babies play together, and we took a walk by the river to enjoy the sunshine. Afterwards, I wasn't ready to go inside yet, so I met Jeremi at work for a drink on the market square before I had yoga at 6:45. The plan was to hang out with him, and then pass Béla off so they could go home and I could go to yoga. But then we met up with our friends Calin and Susanne. Susanne was waiting to get her haircut, so Calin joined us for a drink, and then we all went out for supper at a new-ish Italian place we hadn't tried yet. The waitress loved Béla and wanted to take him home, and he was very spoiled with childrens' books in Italian, and his very own plate of watermelon for dessert. They were very impressed with the way he ate too. Here he is, going after some spinach pizza:

...and here I am, recounting how Béla grabbed another baby's head with both his hands and tried to bite it, like one would an apple, at the play group. Yup, he really does love to eat. (As an aside, I was out in the park with another mom and her daughter yesterday, and he pulled the same move on her, but settled for just chewing on her hat.)
Here we all are, enjoying our meal. We also went up to Calin and Susanne's place that Saturday for Calin's birthday, which was really fun. They made a pork loin wrapped in seasoned ground pork wrapped in puff pastry. It was fabulous. Unfortunately they're going to be leaving here soon, moving back to Copenhagen at the end of June, which is sad for us. At least now we'll have an extra-good reason to visit Copenhagen!
The day after the Italian restaurant was even warmer and sunnier, so before I met up with some other moms downtown for lunch, I went shopping to buy Béla a sun hat. (Oh, and before that, I brought in a sample of his urine for analysis, because it was two days after he'd finished his antibiotics, and he got the all clear. Hooray!) Unfortunately when I got to the store Béla was fast asleep in the carrier, so I couldn't exactly try the hats on him. Luckily they were all sized by head circumference, and his head had been measured two weeks before at the doctor's, so I had a rough idea of what size I needed. Of course, his head is so giant, that of the 10 or so varieties of summer hats they had at the store I went to, only one came in his size. And so, by process of elimination, here's his adorable new sun hat!
Okay, so the hat itself isn't really that cute, it's really the baby wearing it. (The hat's okay, but when the brim is folded down he looks like an old man out playing golf.)

And finally, on the Sunday of that weekend, we had another French brunch at our place, with the theme of eggs. Unfortunately not many people were able to make it, so it was only four of us (plus Béla), but the food was incredible! Here Béla's playing with me and Julia on the couch.
The spread on the side board, with (starting from bottom left, and skipping the blatently obvious things) a baked apple pancake, raisin buns disguised with mascarpone and apricots to look like eggs, two flavoured butters (one with corn and chili, the other with zucchini and garlic), some cheeses, and Grüne Soße, or green sauce, a mixture of several herbs, hard boiled eggs, and some combination of yogurt and/or quark. Julia brought this, as it's a traditional food on Maundy Thursday in her region of Germany (near Frankfurt).
And the spread on the table, with fruit salad inside a melon cut to look like a cracked egg, and marinated eggplant. Not pictured was two cheese souflés, a few baguettes, and crêmes brûlées for dessert. All in all, the food was ridiculously good, and we ate far too much, for both brunch and supper.
Here's Béla tucking into the grüne Soße with some baguette for supper. It looks like he loves it as much as his mom does!