Baby items and my publishing debut

I thought this baby sweater would be done by now, the last stitch was knit a few weeks ago, but it's still waiting on a zipper. That'll have to be ordered online, I went to four fabric stores and nobody had a separating zipper in the right color.

The front:


I love the pointy elf hood

The back:



It's pinned together where the zipper will go. I'll probably seam the hood and stop the zipper at the neck so the baby won't have his/her head pressed against a hard zipper. Of course the colors look much better in person (more jewel like and vibrant), my digital camera kungfu is not the best.

Some knitters praise Plymouth Encore over Lion Brand Wool-Ease (both are 25% wool, 75% acrylic and OK to machine wash/dry) but they don't feel all that different to me. It still feels like knitting with acrylic, though not really gross acrylic. Encore is available in better colors, which is a definite plus, so for that alone I'd be more likely to use Encore again -- if I could buy it in local yarn shops. Maybe Encore wears and washes better than Wool-Ease. I'd much rather use a nice superwash wool but this Encore was so cheap, the jewel blue color is fantastic, and it'll survive multiple trips through the dryer.

Pattern is free, located here: http://knitting.about.com/library/blbabyswe4.htm
I don't recall finding any errors in the pattern, it's pretty straight-forward.

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Right now I'm working on a bootie using leftover Lorna's Laces sock yarn, here's the first one in this pair:



I'm knitting these on size 0 needles so they're smaller than the size 1 booties posted last month. The leg is also a lot longer (40 rounds) so they can be folded over or left up to keep the leg warm.

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I've been published! Apparently they'll give a book deal to anyone nowadays. I'm kidding, I didn't write a book, but my website made it into one. Some time ago Judy Brown asked permission to include my website address in her book so I said sure and promptly forgot about it. As a generous thank you (which I wasn't at all expecting) she sent the final product, a knitting journal titled Knitting Notes.



One thing I really like is the spiral binding, which makes it easy to cleanly tear out a ruined journal page. The full page size is an advantage over the smaller knitting journals I've seen in book stores. I also like the Canadian flavor, because I have a crush on Canada.

A knitting journal isn't the sort of thing I'd buy myself (I'd be more inclined to make one, I'm cheap) but now that one is in my hands I can see myself using it. I'm trying to decide if I want to start the journal with my current projects or backtrack by entering in data for projects completed years ago. It's nice to have that info in my blog but I can see the advantages of keeping it all in a paper journal as well.

Something Judy wrote struck a chord: "Use [the journal] well and it will be a treasured gift to hand down." She's right, I wish my grandma had kept a knitting/crochet journal, I would've dearly loved to look through it every so often. I have her crochet hooks and knitting needles, but I don't know anything about what she made with them.