Baby Dress, part 2

With a lot of help from the knitting shop, it’s done! The neck band wasn’t as bad as I thought – it went pretty quick. It took longer to dry from blocking than to do the neck- and armbands. As you can see, I decided to knit a little flower for the waist. The pattern calls for threading a thin ribbon through the eyelet holes, but since I messed up the pattern, and there are no holes, the flower will do.

The back has a button closure with a real shell button. Ain’t it fancy?
I bought a onesie to go underneath, in case it fits her before it gets warm. It has cute little pink flowers to match. Aw.

On an optimistic note, I have a new project on the horizon with the below yarn. The yarn came from my grandmother’s stash, and is handmade from West Virginia at Greenbrier Art Colony. Cool. I’m going to be knitting a lace scarf.

El Pan

So I decided to make bread today. Last time, the dough hardly rose. But this time, lovely, poofy, doubled-in-size dough. Punching the dough down is my favorite part.

Hey, and the loaves rose, too!

Nice crusty bread. White bread on the left, cinnamon swirl on the right. Yum!

No, it’s not a pile of lettuce between two buns.

Well, it is a pile of lettuce between two buns, but there is also a burger in there, somewhere. This is how my husband eats a burger. There is literally half a head of lettuce on this thing. It was so amazing that I had to take a picture of it to share with you. I mean, that’s a good four inches of lettuce there! I don’t eat that much on a salad!

See? Burger.

The White Giraffe by Lauren St. John

Synopsis: Martine’s life turns upside down when her parents die in a house fire. She is sent to live with her grandmother (a person she did not know existed) on a game reserve in South Africa. Martine immediately falls in love with the wildlife and countryside, but maintains a stiff relationship with her grandmother. Things get mysterious when she learns she has “the gift” – what it is, she’s not sure, but it somehow seems connected to the white giraffe she spots in the game reserve.

Rating: Good in parts; overall, enh.

Opinion (SPOILER ALERT!): I was much more interested in the story for the first half of the book. It petered off after that – even though the action picked up in the last half. Martine is a likable character, but her gift, which turns out to be a gift of healing magically, seems out of place in a story otherwise firmly placed in modern society. Likewise, her destiny that she be reunited with the giraffe (at the cost of her parents’ lives) just doesn’t seem to work with the realism in the rest of the story. I’m not sure why these magical elements don’t seem to fit, unless it’s that the other parts of the story, like the scenes at school, are so very realistic and familiar to the reader, that it’s like trying to mix oil and water.

At times, the writing seemed trite and unrealistic. Near the end, Martine frees the white giraffe (named Jemmy) from a ship in the Cape Town harbor, and on the way out, knocks down Alex, the game warden, who has been involved in a conspiracy to capture Jemmy. Then, Martine rides Jemmy triumphantly back from Cape Town to the game reserve, and sees Alex being arrested. How did he get from Cape Town to the game reserve (a two hour trip)? Why wouldn’t he have been arrested in Cape Town? There is no explanation. Martine’s triumphant ride home is complete with crowds chanting her name and a rainbow over her house.

There were interesting parts to the book, including the parts about wildlife in South Africa, and Martine herself, but overall, I came away with a dissatisfied feeling. Perhaps the target age (9-12) won’t be so discerning.

Here you see a dress in progress for my little niece. The only thing left to knit is the neck band and arm bands, for which I am going to have to consult someone more knowledgeable. The instructions are a little confusing. Especially for a book called Baby Knits for Beginners. When I knit the eyelet row (you can see it in the photo here), I didn’t understand the instruction “k2tog, yf, skpo.” It was the yarn forward that threw me. I was doing it all wrong, and while writing this post, I just discovered that they fully explain it on page 79 in another pattern. The only place they note this in the pattern for the dress is in the little blurb at the beginning of the dress pattern that describes the dress. I skipped it because, at first glance, it doesn’t seem to have any important information. Augh. That’s my gripe about this pattern. I didn’t have too much of a problem with anything else, except that my gauge was off vertically, but not horizontally. I have too many rows but the right amount of stitches. I really want to know how that happens!

Pattern: dress with eyelets, p 116
Baby Knits for Beginners by Debbie Bliss