BBB is 3 months old today!

Yay for BBB, AKA Baby Benjamin Bunny.  Pretty soon he'll outgrow the Bunny part.  Well, maybe not in the near future.  He's still a very little guy!

Happy 3 month birthday, little cutie patootie! 

By the way, the quilt he's on in the last pic, was made by moi.  Nuts and Bolts is the name.

llama llama

Do you love llamas with their long eyelashes?  I do, too.  So here's a cutie patootie small project bag featuring those adorable critters.

And because you need to see this, here's the Llama Llama Duck Song.  

Now doesn't that make you happy? 

Where?  Etsy, of course.

http://fritzl.etsy.com

Baby Benjamin Bunny

Almost 3 months old!  He smiles, coos, flaps, kicks, recognizes his parents and sister, and is coming along quite nicely.  He's beyond delicious.  Well I think so, but then I'm a gramma.

Flowerpot

Spring will be here.  It will be here.  Promise.  Enough of the snow and winter.  So, to celebrate, I made a little project bag, just perfect for a couple of skeins of sock yarn, needles, etc, etc.  

Last two pics show the lining. 

So now I'm thinking that maybe I should make a bag with the top trim as the main exterior fabric.  After I do the llama llama bag.  That's next in the queue.  No pics, 'cause there's nothing to see.

Where?

Etsy, of course!

Chickie Bag

Chickie Bag!  Goofy, dotty, and stripy chickens with a few daisies thrown in.  Is this not adorable? I love chickens.  Chicken fabric, chicken jokes, chicken dinners.  Cluck, cluck, cluck.

Stuffed Chickie

Chickie lining

Chickie opened up

Cinched Chickie

Stuffed Chickie at the food of my stairs

And on a non-Chickie note, here's one of my knitting projects.

What's this going to be?  You'll see.  It's a surprise.

I only frogged it 4 times.  3 times because I didn't like the size and then a fourth time because I was unhappy with how the squares came together.

I frog, tink, unpick because I am. A knitter, crocheter, and quilter.  Undoing is my life.

It's Here! The Annual Spring Poem.

Guess what today is!  Yep, the first day of spring. Time for the Annual Spring Poem

High up, over the tops
Of the feathery grasses, the grasshoppers hop.
They won't eat their suppers,
They will not obey
Their grasshopper mothers and fathers who say:
"Listen my children, this must be stopped.
Now is the time your last hop should be hopped.
So come eat your suppers and go to your beds."
But the little grasshoppers just shake their green heads.
"No, no," the naughty ones say.

"All we have time to do now is to play.

If we are hungry we'll nip at a fly,
Or nibble a blueberry as we go by.
But not now. Now we must hop.
And no one, but no one can make us stop."

Bag Lady

I love project bags.  I can never have too many of them, either.  I swear my knitting WIPs exist so I can make more project bags.  So take a peak at my latest two bags, both on sale in my Etsy shop.

http://fritzl.etsy.com

 This one is my Batik medium project bag, and it easily holds 4 skeins of sock yarn!

This one is Tea Party Small Project Bag, and it holds 2 skeins of sock yarn.

I cut out another medium one this morning.  This is a disease. 

Yippee, Scrappy Trippy!

I did it!  I actually finished a flimsy bigger than a baby quilt.  OK, it's a small lap quilt, but still, it's the biggest quilt yet.

I know everyone in the blogosphere is doing this, but if you haven't done one yet, go and play with it.  It's so addictive and fun.

Side view

Photographed on my kitchen floor, indoor lights, but not too far off from the real colors.

So the question is whether or not to put in a border.  I'm inclined not to; I like the integrity of the piece as is.   Now I have to get fabric for the back and for the binding.  I'm leaning toward a bit of aqua, since it figures in the quilt, but not as much as the oranges; I think it would make the quilt pop, but I'm not sure.

Thanks to Bonnie Hunter for coming up with such a neat and efficient way to make this quilt.  If I had had to stitch all those little squares together, I'd be working on this for the rest of my life.

And thanks to Judy Laquidara for hosting all these design wall Mondays; it's so inspiring to see what others are doing.

Now what to make next?  Such decisions.

Bollywood in New Jersey

 I just couldn't help it.  Had to dye up some vibrant, gorgeous colorways to counteract all the gray skies around here.  So here they are:  all the yarns in the Bollywood Collection!

Where?  Right in my Etsy shop!

http://fritzl.etsy.com

These are all fingering/sock weight yarns of varying kinds.  Just felt like using different yarns for a change.

And they are prettier in real life, as you can imagine.

Yesterday

Attorney in the morning,

Accountant in the evening,

Pizza at suppertime.

That was my crazy Monday,

And now I'm feeling fine.

For some reason, we haven't had pizzeria pizza in a few months.  Maybe we were watching sodium, fat, and  calories, maybe we were lazy.  Who knows?  I have made homemade pizza a couple of times, and it is beyond delicious, but there is something about pizza that comes from Rocco's in Madison, NJ.  Mmmmmm!!!!  I can't remember when I've loved a slice of pizza more.  Wow, was it good.  Just regular old tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese pizza.  The Hubz sprinkled some oregano on top of both our slices and we scarfed them down as if we were starving.  OK, we were starving, but we inhaled those pieces.

Good pizza doesn't come from the big chains.  Forget Pizza Hut or, heaven forbid, Pap John's.  Yep, they have dough, and tomato sauce and cheese, but it's not the real thing.  For that, you need to go to the best pizzeria in town.  Frozen pizza will fill the tummy, but it's not good.  Domino's is for desperation.  If you are a poor benighted soul living in an area without good Italian food, then you are truly bereft. 

Now I think I need to make my own homemade pizza.  Got the pizza jazz here.

Oh, and yes, that slice was salty.  When you restrict your sodium, you really notice it when you eat out.  But once in a while, you have to have the real pizza.  Good for your soul.  And then you spend the rest of the evening drinking water.  Worth every glass of water I consumed.

No pics of anything; I was too busy with lawyer and accounting to do anything at all.

Quilty matters

My Scrappy Trip is coming along very nicely. I don't even mind the occasional corners not meeting up; it's my signature style.

Fri, I was noodling around on the web looking at quilty blogs, and found this great Virtual Quilting Bee.  So I dug up a pretty layer cake, and actually made my very first star.  It only took me 3 tries to almost get it right.  Not too bad point matching (for me).  Yep, I gave it a very severe press, so that's why you see the seam lines, but after it's quilted, nobody will know,  and if they do and complain about it, well, Piffle upon them.  There will be a new block in a couple of weeks again, and I'm looking forward to it. 

Stash Enhancement

Not my fault.  The Hubz made me do it.  He insisted that we stop at Aardvark Quilts in Morris Plains  yesterday.  Insisted, I tell you!  So I forced myself to buy some lovely fat quarters with the idea of making ? with them.  Who knows, but they were calling to me.

What's on my needles

Lots of stuff, including 2 mystery projects that just resurfaced.

Here's the first mystery- a sock.  There it was, hanging out in a project bag that turned out to be pretty dopey.  The bag, not the sock.  I have the chart, so I'll make a second one.  I have no idea when I made this, but it was in the last couple of years.

And the second mystery - a shawl.  I totally forgot about this baby.  I have the chart but no written instructions.  However, I'm pretty sure I can figure out what I did. I don't know where I was going with the pattern, but that's the fun part of knitting; I can design whatever strikes me at the moment.

The Elsa Shawl, named for The Mommie.  The Mommie's given name was Elza.  An uncle of hers (Hillel Bacsi - pronounded as bachee - aka Uncle Hillel) called her Esti (her Hebrew name was Esther).  Her aunt (Cili Neni - aunt Celia) called her Estelle.  My father called her Elsie.  In her later years, I would call her Elzele (little Elza), just for the fun of it.  She'd give me "the look" when I did that.

This is all finished, and I'm writing it up, but here's the same shawl in a different colorway.  I'm reknitting it to make sure that my instructions and charts are accurate.

And finally, here's another sock that I'm knitting for Elder DD, she who got smart this year while slogging throught the Sandy mess in Manhattan, and discovered that my woolly socks kept her feet mighty warm.  Yes!  A convert!

I love knitting patterns like this, the kind that wave right and wave left.

So that's keeping me occupied, along with all the quilty projects, a crochet scarf, and general stuff.

What's in my life Monday

Forget design floor/wall, there are just too many things happening here in Chez Yarnarian.

Scrappy Trip is now up to 9 blocks.  7 more to go.  I must be the slowest quilter around.  Not that I'm in any hurry; slow is good.  The process is fun, and when I get bored with it, I go onto something else.  I get bored easily, so I muddle my way through all my projects slowly.

Card Tricks is also coming together at a snail's pace.  The funny thing is that when I look at the blocks in the photo, I prefer the one at top left, the traditional Card Tricks.  In real life, I like the modified blocks better.  "tis slow work, my dears, but perfect mindless sewing.

I just finished a huge (for me) dye up for Sock Madness Forever on Ravelry.  My poor Etsy shop is practically empty, but that shall be remedied.  Doing a little bit of dyeing today.  A couple of the Tulip Combo yarns for SMF, and then onto some new yarns.  Pics tomorrow.

AND, I now am about to write up a brand-new pattern for my brand-new Lyric Yarn.  I'll leave you with that teeny bit of info.