Baby Gifts for Cora

My childhood friend is having her first baby within the next week! Which gave me the perfect excuse to make some awesome baby gifts, I used my new sewing skills and pumped out quite a few sewn pieces before the baby shower.

All the fabric was purchased from the shop where I work and all tutorials were from Pinterest and Ravelry.

Links to the projects/tutorials are at the bottom of the post!

Taggies Toy
Elephant
Bunny Lovey
ABC Book
Puppy Book
Baby Sweater
Baby Pants

All The Memories.

It's Done! My sock yarn scrap blanket (after almost three years!) is complete! All the ends are woven in and I slept with it on the bed last night!

I absolutely love looking at all the squares and reminiscing about the projects that came from certain yarns. I have a fantastic group of friends who also added scrap yarn to the pile so its been great fun seeing them look for their yarn in the blanket.

I have no immediate plans to start another mitered square blanket but I do have a few granny stripe blankets started.

My squares "formula" was a US 3 needle, casting on 32 stitches. Slip the first stitch, knit to the last two before your marker, K2Tog, SM, SSK, knit to the end. The second row is Slip the first stitch and then knit across.

The randomness of the colors and textures makes me so happy! Thanks for appreciating!

Still enjoying Man in the High Castle and joining Ginny and Frontier Dreams in their "Alongs" this week. 

The Heel Report

Previously I talked about how ill fitting I find most afterthought heels and wanted to try a few to see if they worked better for my feet. I found Lara Neel's heel from this sock pattern and it fits perfectly!

YAY!

I'm So Excited!!

This heel is constructed similar to the top of a hat decrease. It comes out very round in comparison to other afterthought heels.

Lara has a formula that you follow (it's super easy) where you use the length from the tip of your thumb to your first knuckle joint. Sounds weird but it totally works! I only used the info there and how to space the decreases, I didn't do the provisional cast on.

I followed the instructions from Susan B. Andersons SOS pattern for adding in the afterthought heel but followed the instructions from Lara's to actually shape my heel.

I am one happy camper, if you've had trouble with the fit of afterthought heels please check out Lara Neel's pattern. I did find that the pattern decreased to too few stitches and became kind of pointy on one heel; I resolved this in the second sock by pulling the stitches through when there were a few more stitches. Ta Da! Instant fix!

(Good on the left, too pointy on the right) 

Very excited to work this heel again! I'm joining Ginny and Frontier Dreams in the Alongs this week. I'm currently still working my way through Man in the High Castle, but the shop I work at is starting a book club! Our first book is The Friday Night Knit Group so that will be cracked open soon (I've already read it but for the sake of the group I'm going to read it again).