Babies, knitting names, and used book sites!

Hello Knitters!

As seems to be the case lately my week was a tad crazy! My sister Karra's week however has been quite a lot more crazy! She had her perfect baby boys last week, and after getting her permission I get to show off their sweet baby faces! Are they not the sweetest little things! I may be a tad biased on the whole situation, but oh my goodness I just want to kiss them!

Born at 35 weeks, she unfortunately has not been able to take a little loves home just yet. Something I imagine to be one tough situation. While her biggest baby, Grant, is doing perfectly well and is no longer in NICU, her smallest, Bennett, is having a little bit tougher time adjusting to the outside world.

He had finally gotten to the point where he didn't need a heater to help regulate his body temperature when the little man stopped breathing for 20 seconds. That doesn't sound like a very long time in the gist of things, but last night as I lay in bed worrying, as I do, I realized that 20 seconds is a very long time to go without breathing even for an adult, and I presume that it would be even worse for a tiny not even 5 pound baby. This little stunt of his understandably booked him another week at least stay in the hospital.

Karra is one of the strongest people I know. It makes me teary eyed a bit to think about how much I admire my sister. She is my best friend, and a younger sister all rolled into one. We joke about how we are like each others mother as well. We take care of each other. It's what we do.

Any way you may be asking, what Kyla does this have to do with knitting? I swear it does. My sister brought something to my attention while we were talking over the phone.  Apparently in the NICU they provide knitted or crocheted hats to the babies, but there is a clear shortage of hats and blankets for boys!

While I don't see anything wrong with a little pink on a boys hat, if you think about it, even babies have personalities at birth, and some times you just want a little blue hat for your little one. So I felt like I should bring this to the attention to all you charity knitters out there. While yes it's a lot of fun to knit little girl items and boy does it sometimes feel like there are more knitting patterns for girls than boys, lets not forget the boys too! I know I'll be knitting up some boy hats and sending them up there as soon as I can!

Speaking of little hats, my sisters boys are identical and after seeing this picture I was inspired to knit them little hats with their names on them!

Now this is not something I've done before so after some research and a lot of time spent trying to graph out different letters on plain paper.

It quickly became clear I needed some sort of graph paper, so I ran to Joann's and found graph paper that quilters use. It was exactly what I needed.

Let me tell you, It's not always easy to think in squares! It took me quite some time to get it right! However I finally got to a place where I was pleased with the end result. I actually plan on making quite a few more patterns this way. 

As you can see Bennett is missing the last two Ts, I promise they are there, they just had to be added to another piece. While I could have just popped the two Ts above, I'm a very visual person and needed to make sure that everything matched up.


After all that work I was terrified that it wouldn't work out once I actually applied it to real knitting, so I quickly cast on my stitches made a brim and knit Grant's name into it.

Oh my gosh I was so relived when it came out the way it did! I only just got the name and brim done this morning and I'm so excited to finish the hat and go on to Bennett's! I plan on getting these done by next week! So hopefully next week's post will show them finished and done!

Before I end this post, I wanted to bring another awesome site to your attention. It's not exclusively a knitting site, in fact it's a book site. A used book site in fact.

Thrift Books is a wonderful place to find inexpensive knitting books! I swear I have nothing to do with them in anyway, I just wanted to share the good news!

I was able to get five knitting books this last week shipped to me and it only cost me $18. That's amazing! Yes the books are used, however I've never gotten a book from Thrift books in bad shape, and if you love knitting books the way I do, you know that $18 is usually around the cost of just one!

Most of the books I bought were under $4, with one under $5! I think that's an amazing deal, especially if you're like me and love having a book splayed across your lap while you knit away. I have a feeling my knitting library is going to grow by leaps and bounds because of this site!

Until next time! Happy knitting!