There are no super-nice things to say about the person who made the item for today’s giveaway, since that person is me. I CAN, however, say a ton of nice things about my friend Megan. Megan taught me to knit, encouraged me to stick with it when I was frustrated and was unbelievably patient when it came to helping me undo my mistakes.

Megan taught me to knit almost exactly 1 year ago and this scarf is the first thing I ever finished. I thought it was the greatest knitting project ever. (Also, Little Evan totally wore those jammies last night. Time to go jammie shopping.)

And in March of this past year, one of Megan’s dreams came true and she opened a yarn store here in Connecticut.

Megan’s Shop: Mothers of Purl Yarns

As a gift for Baby Girl, Megan gave me what might just be the most adorable knitting pattern ever: Phoebe’s Sweater. Not only is it a knitting pattern for a little girl’s sweater, a stuffed mouse, a dress for the mouse and a mouse-sized sweater, it also has a very sweet, beautifully illustrated story about how Phoebe Mouse’s mom knits her a new sweater while she waits for her new baby to come, so even if you DON’T knit it’s a lovely children’s book. To go with the book Megan gave me enough yarn to knit 2 Phoebe Mouses (Mice? Meeses?) with instructions to give one away to you lovely people. And so I did.

Hi, I'm Phoebe

And then because I love knitting, I also made each Phoebe a mouse-sized jacket out of beautiful red tweed.

Your Phoebe will have gold buttons. It's embarrassing how long I stood in the button aisle picking out exactly the right ones for a MOUSE DOLL SWEATER.

But Phoebe really is cuter if you have the book (plus, if you do happen to knit you can make MORE dresses, in different colors! Or the little girl sized sweater!). So I bought a second one from Megan to give away.

You may win everything you see here! Besides the throw pillow. I bought that at Walmart. But you do get the jacket.

The book is even signed by the author and the illustrator. I can't be the ONLY person obsessed with signed books, right?

And in case you think this kind of thing is cute, your Phoebe Mouse will have been hugged by Baby Girl's Phoebe Mouse.

All you have to do is leave a comment on this post. THAT’S IT.

Tell me who you would give the mouse to (you can say you would keep her)! Tell me what you had for dinner last night. Tell me that even though I’m 32 weeks pregnant today I don’t need to freak out yet about having ANOTHER baby.

Giveaway open until November 7th, winner will be chosen using Random.org and notified via email so make sure you use a real one when you comment. I’m willing to send Phoebe and her book anywhere, so giveaway is open to EVERYONE.

Disclaimer bit: Megan gave me three balls of yarn and 1 copy of Phoebe’s Sweater so I could make a mouse for my baby and a mouse for you. Little Evan ruined the first book with…I don’t even know what. Something sticky. Plus I still need  a copy of the pattern to make Baby Girl a child-size sweater. So I bought the book I’m giving away. Plus I put in many many hours of knitting time when I should have been playing with my kid, so the giveaway is literally priceless. How’s that for the most unclear disclosure statement ever?

Day 1 is open until November 1st! Allora Handmade
Day 2 is open until November 2nd! Uff Da Designs
Day 3 is open until November 3rd! Taradara
Day 4 is open until November 4th! Peggy Ann Design
Day 5 is open until November 5th! aPearantly Sew
Day 6 is open until November 6th! Gussy

So, you guys, in honor of Baby Girl’s impending arrival and a year of owning my domain and the holidays and just my general love for blogging and the internet and YOU…I’ve got something exciting coming up.

This is all you get for now, but I can assure you it’s going to be worth your while to come back and take a peek every single day between October 25th and November 1st.

Although feel free to skip Sunday the 31st if you don’t like mouse dolls knit by yours truly. My knitting may not be up to the quality you’ll get from the rest of the participants. Seriously, I’m so out of my league in my own giveaway it’s not even funny.

I’M SO EXCITED!!!

You would not BELIEVE how many perfectly good, brand new wool sweaters I’ve ruined in my washing machine. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Until I started knitting and learned to actually appreciate fiber I always saw those “HANDWASH COLD ONLY” and “LAY FLAT TO DRY” rules more like…guidelines. I was too lazy and forgetful to separate stuff before throwing it all in the wash. And yet I was always shocked and devastated when my previously human-sized sweaters came out of the dryer doll-sized and stiff.

That shrinking process is called “felting” and this week I did it on purpose so I could turn wool sweaters into crafty felt flowers.

Since all the sweaters I’ve ruined recently are black, I went to Goodwill to hunt through the racks.

Score!!

Cardigans are a double score because you can repurpose the buttons in your flowers.

The trick is to find sweaters made of 100% WOOL. Not 70% acrylic, 30% wool or some other synthetic blend. You also want to watch out for items that have “machine washable” on the tag or say anything like “Super Wash” or “No Shrinking!” That sort of defeats the whole purpose here. In theory, you could use other animal fibers – the light pink sweater is actually 100% cashmere – but I found it didn’t felt up as nicely as the wool ones.

I did pretty well with what I bought – the white one in the front didn’t have a tag and I suspected it wasn’t real wool so I wasn’t shocked when it didn’t felt. But it’s clearly hand made and was only $3 so I’ll just wear it. The scarf didn’t felt either, but again, not big loss. New scarf for me!

Now you’re going to shrink the sweaters on purpose to make felt you can craft with.
Follow these steps:
1. Throw sweaters in the washing machine with a little detergent.
2. Set machine to Hot Wash/Cold Rinse and push start.
3. Walk away.

And you’re done.

I found a lot of instructions online that wanted you to put the items you were felting in a mesh bag or pillowcase or toss in a tennis ball or some other heavy item but I had the best luck with the straight up washing machine. Since the goal here is to make the fibers as dense and stiff as possible so you can cut it up, you can even toss the whole mess in the dryer on high when they’re done washing. If you’re not happy with how felty they look after 1 wash, repeat the cycle.

If your sweater wasn’t wool to begin with it will become very clear right about now, because they will not look like this:

Post-felting. You can see how they've shrunk.

Now comes the crafty part. If you’re creative on your own just stop reading and go do something awesome with your new wool felt. The rest of my project isn’t that impressive. But if you want some ideas, read on.

My first thought was to cut out actual flower shapes and sew them together. I found flowers to use as templates online, traced them onto cardboard, and cut out the cardboard shapes to trace onto the felt:

Why yes, that is the box from a cereal that is kid tested and mother approved. It was the only thin cardboard we had in the house.

Unfortunately, tracing the shapes onto the felt was WAY too much work for me, especially with a toddler trying to crawl across the table every two seconds. If you can think of an easier way let me know (Maybe I should pin them? Maybe I can cut with an X-acto knife to avoid the tracing?) but I recommend stick to shapes you can free-hand. I have the cutting skills of a second grader so flowers and stars come out as lopsided blobs – but since you’re a grown up you can definitely do better.

Luckily, I can do a lot with just one or two fancy shapes and a few easily cut circles and leaves.

It helps if you have some buttons hanging around - these are all from the Goodwill sweaters or my stash of lost buttons on the dryer.

Cut out different shapes in different colors...

Stitch them together with a little thread and one of those buttons...

If you're feeling lazy, just stick to cutting out circles...

Or if you're feeling REALLY lazy, use a little yarn to make a loopy flower on a leaf (the button makes it fancy!)...

And you're done! Now you can glue them to pins, barettes, headbands, or sew them right onto a boring purse or scarf.

I’m sort of ridiculously pleased with my flowers. For the record, I made all these from just the bottom part of one sleeve from each sweater – I still have a LOT of felt left over. You can use it the same way you’d use acrylic or nylon felt from the craft store, just remember it is wool so it might be a little scratchy on bebeh parts.

Happy Crafting!

p.s. These are the stretchy cuffs from a couple of the sleeves. I’m thinking they’ll make great headbands for a tiny baby girl – especially with a little felt flower sewn on.

To be continued...

I owe a major apology to everyone I made fun of or rolled my eyes at when they started talking about BlogHer’10 AGAIN. Like, GOD, come ON, it’s just ONE WEEKEND out of your life, WHY do you need to KEEP talking about it ALL THE TIME? I now realize the error of my ways. Going places and doing things is fun, even if you do spend the entire week before waking up at 5 am in a panic that you will forget your camera or the hotel will have lost your reservation or that every single person you meet will give you the “pregnant or fat” once over and decide “no, just fat”. It’s exhausting and totally thought-consuming and I am smack dab in the middle of it.

Right now I am probably hauling my pregnant butt through an airport somewhere, pinching myself and trying to comprehend just what it was that fooled ANYONE into thinking I deserved to attend a conference as cool as The Creative Connection. I will be making sparkly things and listening to some of the most amazing women speak and sweating through my shirt with nervousness and generally having a totally amazing time. I may even get up the courage to hand out a business card or two, although it’s probably better if none of the super-talented, cool, artsy people ever find there way over HERE.

It would have been even better if I didn’t put the word “crap” on my business cards.

Or the words “bodily fluids”. But hey, hindsight is 20/20 right?

And just because my mom asked me to post it, here’s the 250 word essay that won me my scholarship:

How will attending the Creative Connection Event impact your creativity and/or creative business?

Creativity has always been something I thought was innate. Either you were a creative person or you weren’t – and I definitely wasn’t. I can’t draw to save my life, my poetry sounds like “There once was a man from Nantucket”, my paintings look like they were done by a first grader and as far as style goes…let’s just say I fall somewhere between a 5 -year-old and my grandmother.

But then I did create something, the most amazing something ever, the kind of something that changes your whole life from the second you see those two pink lines. After my son was born in April 2009 I realized creativity isn’t about talent, it’s about the love of making things, whether those things are stories or clothes or art or music or feelings. I stopped being afraid to create and took up knitting and photography and cooking and writing and loved every second of my triumphs and laughed over my mistakes. I learned when you create things you also create joy.

Attending the Creative Connections Conference would be an amazing opportunity to expand my creativity and learn new ways to be joyful. The chance to network with so many amazing and talented women would be a great opportunity for me as a blogger and as a person learning more about her creative side, as untalented as that side might be.

This week I took Baby Evan into the pediatrician for what should have been an easy visit that ended up being incredibly stressful and annoying and bad-mother-guilt-inducing.

Then I had a visit to the emergency room that was the most relaxing part of my weekend.

Doctors are weird.

Because of the weight-loss between his 12 and 15 month check-ups, our pediatrician scheduled a quick weigh-in on Friday for Baby Evan. I knew he’d been eating more and had definitely gained, so I expected a nice “You’re doing great and clearly not neglecting your kid” visit. That’s not quite what I got.

After the nurse weighed him – up almost a pound in 1 month –  the lady pediatrician, one I don’t think I’ve met before, came in to talk to us about what we feed our kid. Want to feel bad about your parenting skills? Try honestly answering that question. Peanut butter, bread, Goldfish, pita chips, cookies, french fries, fruit leather, cheese…yeah, I win mother of the year for sure. I didn’t even bother explaining it’s whole wheat bread! And organic fruit leather! And homemade cookies! And I offer him TONS of fruits and vegetables, I just haven’t figured out how to make him eat them!

Surprisingly, the ped didn’t seem to care much about the totally lack of color in my kid’s diet. She was more concerned that I get him to drink at least five cups of milk a day, offer him even MORE food and having us come back again EVERY MONTH for another weight check. When I went through my list of what caused the original weight loss and why it wouldn’t happen again, she made the same face my mom used to make when I came home late for curfew. The “I don’t care about your excuses” face. The “I doubt your ability to do the right thing” face. It was AWFUL. I’ve been thinking about that face constantly since Friday – every time my kid tosses his cup on the floor, every time he feeds his sandwich to the dog, every time he sleeps through a snack time. Today at the grocery store he ate a whole piece of cheese the deli lady gave him and I almost cried with joy, knowing the doctor would have approved.

You know that feeling you had when you left the hospital with your tiny newborn, the one where you couldn’t believe the staff was just letting you TAKE A BABY without any sort of instruction manual or rules or scheduled home checks to make sure you were doing it right?

This is the opposite of that. This is the feeling that just when you thought you were finally doing everything right and really getting the hang of motherhood someone comes along and tells you you suck. It sucks.

——————————————————–

On Saturday morning I noticed I had had some bleeding the night before and called my OB to see if he wanted me to come in for a rhogam shot. It was an exact repeat – almost to the same DAY of pregnancy & the same OB doc on call – of what happened when I was pregnant the first time (hint: certain grown up activities are apparently a little too much for my cervix to handle after the 22 week mark) only this time around I wasn’t a freaked out mess. I knew what it was, I knew what caused it, I knew the baby was fine. If I had an OB checkup scheduled this week I wouldn’t have even bothered to call on a weekend, but my next appointment isn’t until September and I could just imagine the doctor’s face if I brought up bleeding a MONTH after it happened, especially because he had JUST reminded me to have any bleeding checked out because of the rh-negative thing. O- might be the good blood type for donating but it SUCKS for pregnancy.

The doctor wasn’t super concerned, but said I could go into the ER for a shot “if I wanted”. I told him no, I didn’t really WANT a painful shot in the ass, so I’d just skip it. Of course, then he decided what he really meant was “You should definitely go in for a shot” although why didn’t he just say that in the first place? So I left E and Baby Evan at home and popped over to our very nice local ER for my rhogam.

It’s a funny place, the emergency room. There was an old lady with a broken hip who kept yelling “I’m peeing! I’m peeing! I have to go!” even though the nurse kept coming in to explain it was ok, she had a catheter and was supposed to pee. There was the kid laughing his head off at the doctor’s jokes even though he was still strapped into a car seat – they had been in some sort of fender bender and the paramedics brought the whole thing in on a gurney. There was the tearful family in the room next to me who cried as the doctor explained the definition of a DNR. There was the male nurse who kept saying “This is why people need a primary care physician” and “I wish more people would call their doctors before using the ER as a walk-in clinic” and “Well, the doctor doesn’t KNOW you so he might not just give you whatever medicine you want” despite the fact that I said my OB was right upstairs and said I needed a shot and he could verify my non-drug-seeking status if anyone wanted. Like rhogam is some sort of narcotic that gets you high instead of just making your thigh hurt for a couple days. DUDE, YOU’RE TOTALLY ON TO ME. I’M A JUNKIE FOR SURE.

Like I said, weird place. Happiness and sadness and noise and quiet and fast and slow at all once.

Because everyone has to check with everyone and everyone’s mother and then do a bunch of paperwork about what was said before they could treat me for my non-condition, I spent a good 2 hours just waiting around. I had my knitting with me and managed to finish a whole scarf plus catch up on everything in my Google reader on my iPhone. There were no babies climbing on me, no food being thrown, no dogs running in circles, no loud noises. The doctor was totally cooperative and happy to get out his fancy ultrasound machine to print me some pictures. The paperwork admin lady came in to chat a few times and we talked about kids and babies and pregnancy. After he realized I wasn’t a drug addict or a crazy person, my nurse was very nice and didn’t make me stay for the required 30 minutes post-injection so I could get home and enjoy the beautiful day.

I left feeling like I had taken a mini-vacation. Although next time I’d like one that didn’t involve quite so many needles. Or blood. And maybe included a massage.

But hey, I can’t really complain when I got enough quite time to finish knitting a whole project.

So to sum up: I’m much better at caring for babies that haven’t been born yet. Maybe I’ll just stay pregnant forever.