I was ecstatic when I found out that my beautiful friend, Laura, was pregnant for the second time. Watching her parent the Amazing Stella, it was obvious that she was a wonderful mother and would love to have another child.
In February, after dinner at PF Chang's with a table full of my Birmingham friends, we all got our cookies and opened them to play the silly game of reading the fortune and adding "in bed" to make it funny. (Yeah, we are easily amused, especially after a few bottles of wine.) As we each read our fortunes, we realized that they all said the same thing. I will probably be in trouble that I can't remember the exact words, but basically the fortunes all said that something special was happening in October. True confession time ... I was the last one to figure it out. I blame the wine. The something special was a sibling for Stella.
A few months later we all gathered at Los Arcos, my neighborhood Mexican restaurant, for the big unveiling. (Gathering in restaurants is a common theme for us.) Laura made it fun by bringing eggs that she had hollowed out and decorated. We each received one and on the count of three, cracked them over our heads. I'm sure the restaurant staff loved all of the blue "It's a Boy" confetti they had to clean up.
Bless his heart, this little boy will be surrounded by estrogen. Cruz is entering a world of sisters. There is the aforementioned Stella, and the beautiful Anna, Marisa and Tavi. They are all not only beaurtiful, but smart and funny and creative and fascinating. Martin has brought some wonderful girls into my life. I love them all dearly.
Once we knew the gender, Laura was able to decide on the theme for a room. Martin had been in the USAF, so they decided on an airplane theme. This was going to be the first baby in my life since I had started knitting, and I really wanted to make him something special. I poured over website after website looking for a pattern that had an airplane. I didn't find a lot.
Finally I came across a free pattern for this from the Knit A Little Store.
http://knitalittlestore.blogspot.com
But somehow just doing one dish cloth for a baby didn't seem that great, so I decided to do a few of them, add a "C", and sew them together to make a little cuddle blanket. I found patterns for all the letters of the alphabet on the same site, but had to modify the pattern to make the border and reverse the stitch to duplicate the stitch on the airplanes.
I am a firm believer that more is always better. So the "C" became "CMJ" and the few airplanes became 22 airplanes. (Can you say crazy?)
I had several skeins of Paton's Organic Cotton blue yarn.
http://www.patonsyarns.com/ , but I knew I would need more and ran to my local Michael's
http://www.michaels.com/ to pick up more. I guess you can bet where this is going. After an exhaustive search through all the local arts and crafts stores, fabric stores, yarn stores, and finally the Paton's site, I realized that I had started a project with yarn that had been discontinued.
Thanks goodness for Google search and online shopping. I finally found a site called Do It Yarns
http://doityarns.com/. They had enough of the yarn left in stock to see me through to the end of the project. They were incredibly nice and helpful, even crediting me back for some of my shipping costs because they were able to ship if for less than they thought. How often does that happen?
I could do a square in about a day, if I didn't have anything else to do. Those days don't come around often, so this took me a couple of months to finish. It was tempting to just leave it stacked up and take the squares out to lay them out every once in awhile. But babies can't wrap up in a stack of dish cloths, so I had to face my fear that I was going to ruin it when I started stitching the squares together.
Once again it was You Tube to the rescue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3rvJx3-9Xs This woman gave me lots of options. I made a disaster of most of them, but finally was able to do a decent backstitch.
Now my dish cloth blanket is just waiting for cool weather to keep Baby Cruz all cuddly and warm. See, he is smiling just thinking about it.
Jeannie
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