Sheep and Wool and Stuff

In 1982 there were 22 sheep per person in New Zealand.  As of March 2016 the ratio went down to six sheep per person.  My brother-in-law, who lived in New Zealand for two years, brought me a couple of mondo skeins of baby weight grey wool yarn.  By the way, Danny is the best gift giver ever.  He knew I liked to knit and brought me yarn.  What a wonderful and thoughtful surprise!

Knowing that not-easy-to-care-for scratchy wool yarn would not be the best choice for a baby sweater, I made a baby sweater.  I guess I was ready to start a new project and the sample swatch I knit up with this yarn worked out perfectly for the bobbly sweater I had been wanting to make.  I love making bobbles and it's a good thing because there were plenty of them in the pattern.  At one point, I taught myself to knit backwards so that I wouldn't have to turn the knitting three times for each of the five thousand bobbles.  Anyway, here's the sweater.

I used a pattern from Classic Knits for Kids by Debbie Bliss.  At the time, she was my all-time favorite knit designer!  A picture of the sweater is on page 29 and the directions are on pages 65-67.

I saved the sweater forever and ever - for when Danny and his future wife would have a baby girl.  Danny eventually married and he and his wife had two boys, and it seemed that their family was complete.  Then, one day when their youngest was four or five, they surprised everyone by announcing they were having another baby - a girl this time.  I was excited to finally send the "yarn" back to Danny.  That was just a few years ago - probably at least 20 years after I had made the sweater.  Surprisingly, there were no moth holes in it.  Yeah, mission accomplished!

Remembering Bill

It's hard to believe that my stepdad passed away 13 years ago.  At the time, he and mom were living in San Diego and Howard and I were living in Needham, Massachusetts.  Bill stayed in a nursing home for nine months after having a debilitating stroke.  My mom had already retired and was able to be at his side constantly.  She would visit him twice a day for several hours to make sure that he was being taken care of properly.  I never saw him alive after his stroke because we lived so far away.

Bill always called me the human loom because I was always knitting something different every time he saw me.  In Needham, I continued to knit but also started to quilt.  After Bill passed away, I helped mom go through his clothes and discovered a bunch of blue flannel pajama bottoms and thought they would make a great quilt to remember him by.  He was obsessed with flying and airplanes so I backed the quilt with some airplane fabric that I found at the Franklin Mill Store in Franklin, Massachusetts.  I can't believe that I remember that! (Confession, I remembered the location of the shop, but had to look up its name.)

I created a plane template out of a manila folder and traced it with quilter's chalk in the non nine-patch squares.  I quilted each plane separately and back stitched the heck out of each starting and stopping point - hoping that it would hold through multiple washings.  Time will tell.

Here's the plane fabric that I used for the backing.  Also, I used my favorite technique of pieced binding.  I love the "scrappiness" of it.

PS  The interface on blogger has not changed one bit in my three-year absence, which is both a blessing and very disappointing.