Surprisingly having a new born (well, he really is a month already, so he has opened his eyes finally) does seem to reduce my time on the computer, sewing machine, knitting needles,… a tiny bit. So, what I meant to say/post…

+ on the first Sunday of advent:I hope you are all having a lovely advent, getting ready for Christmas.

This is our advent wreath. I bought the wreath and put the candles and the ribbon on myself. I guess, one can tell 🙂

We have also put up the knitted wreath in the window (Note: I am reusing a lot of old pictures in this post. This year’s version had been put up in a rush – still took me two days in total – and therefore looks like a horse shoe with a bow, not worth a picture :))

+ on 1st December: Time to open the advent calendar:

This year, mummy got one, too. I thought I’d deserve it this year. I ordered it from VRENIding, a German online fabric and haberdashery shop. There was not only a choice of calendars but I could also give some information about the age of my children (as I went for the calendar “mum plus daughter and son”) but also likes and dislikes re colours, fabrics,….

I was very excited when the box arrived. I wish I could hang up my bags too. But that would be too tempting and there is simply no space.

Anyway, opening the first bag brought back some childhood memories 🙂

But I have to admit, I didn’t quite get what the first item was, until my daughter explained it to me. Cookie cutter ok. But what was it? A rabbit? An alien with two heads? And what has this to do with sewing?

It’s scissors, mummy! of course. Silly me.

When I ordered the calendar, I took a slightly risky decision. After all it cost around 75 Euro as far as I remember. From a shop I had never ordered before. But so far, I am really pleased. We are only on day 7 and I got already 3 pieces of fabric and one piece of ribbing. I would say, not bad at all. Of course the fabrics are not huge so it might not always be straight forward to choose what to use them for. But then, for roughly 3 Euro per bag, I can not expect a meter of nice fabric each day. And I guess, it is almost like buying lots of scrap fabrics to make lots of scrap projects for Scrap Sunday 🙂

+ any day really: I just wanted to post a picture of the trio of scrap cardigans as I have not only finished them but also given them to a special courier who will hopefully deliver them to the right babies.

First of all, the three blankets. Ours is the one with the red-orange border. It would have looked much better without the green centre. But I loved the green. And the two other blankets in our house have green in it. So it seemed like a clever idea. The purple turquoise one is my niece’s and the blue green one is my nephew’s.

For the cardigans, I used a slightly lighter blue than the dark one used in the boys’ blankets. I had ordered it as the second blue for ours but it was too close to the dark one. So it was enough for three cardigans and I almost completely used up the other colours. In fact, another orange stripe would have been perfect but I was short of half a row only and had to unravel to the last complete stripe.

And looking at the picture now, I realise that the contrast between the orange and the red is not quite strong enough. It would have been better to use the blue for the thin stripes, just as I did with the green version. Hmm. Never mind. He will never wear it anyway. He vomits far to much to be allowed a hand knitted woolen cardigan 🙂

And I would have preferred green buttons for the green one. Why are there no decent green buttons? Anywhere? This is something I am wondering since a long time.

I have made these mainly whilst waiting for an overdue baby. Since he is born I have managed this much (knittingwise):

I meant to knit a pair of fingerless gloves for my lovely midwife. Considering that this is only the first one, winter might be over before I manage to finish the pair. I also find it slightly too big. If it was tighter, the pattern would come out much better, no? So I am actually considering to unravel the whole thing. Luckily I have at least made her a neck warmer already which I will show in the next post. Probably. But for now. Good night.