Now that the pregnancy is in the third trimester, we’ve come to the point when the reality of a “take-home baby” is starting to settle on us. However, we really haven’t prepared anything for the child at all. Thus far, we have an empty bedroom, 8 newborn-sized cloth diapers (gotta sew some more), 2 sets of booties, a breast pump, and a tube of lanolin.

In the next few months, we are planning on purchasing a crib, car seat, rocking chair, diaper pail, and some clothing. What else do we need to buy? What are essentials? What is nice to have but not totally necessary?

And just as important – what *don’t* we need to buy? I hear that changing tables are one of the items new parents regret purchasing (many seem to prefer laying the kid down on a soaker pad on the bed or floor for changes).

Thanks in advance.

I haven’t posted in a while because Matt and I took a 10-day “babymoon” to Rome (!!!) and just got back last week (we took 2 days for travel, 8 days for sightseeing.) It was my first time to Italy (and to Europe, in fact). Matt’s been all over Europe, but his last visit to Rome occurred when he was still in high school or early college, so he was ready to see it again, too.

We gave ourselves a pretty grueling schedule, but I feel like we captured most, if not all, of the major historic things to do and see. We walked every day until my feet throbbed with pain and my belly ligaments were straining from supporting the baby’s weight. We didn’t spend too much time/effort/money on food – I know it’s part of the culture, but really, who has 2 hrs for dinner when you have ROME to see? We did eat a lot of gelati and pizza on the go. (Yum.) Even though February is considered “off season” for tourism, the whole city was throbbing with visitors. Everywhere I looked, I saw people carrying maps and tour books; I overheard people speaking in Korean, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, British-accented English, you name it, although probably the majority of tourists still were Italian. The weather was marvelous – mid 50s the entire time, blue skies without a hint of rain – perfect for walking and walking and some more walking.

A few weird things happened on the trip – the hotel we were staying in forgot we were there and scheduled demolition of a wing that included our room. (I awoke at 6 AM on Wednesday to men rattling our doorknob and shouting, and I heard the sounds of drills and hammers next door. We were moved – to a much nicer room, actually – for the remainder of our visit, and they gave us 1 night for free. Yay.) The company we went with for a couple day tours was a logistics nightmare – they never picked us up for the first one, they booked us for a cancelled event and then refused to refund our money, they went to pick us up at the wrong hotel for a later tour, they tried to double-charge us for a replacement trip, etc. One of the tourists on our day tour of “Christian Rome” went nuts and spent 10 minutes screeching with rage at our guide. I have no idea what he was so angry about (he was shouting in Spanish), but wow, he was pretty pissed.

I took many photos. (I’m in the process of making a gallery, and I’ll be glad to share that URL when it’s ready to go.) Actually, there were many things that I wanted to photograph but didn’t because I either wasn’t allowed (eg, Sistine Chapel) or was afraid that it might be construed as rude (eg, pictures of people praying as they crawled up the Holy Stairs). The intensity of the art, architecture, religion, and history were a little overwhelming for me, but I absorbed what I could. Here are some highlights of our trip.

We went to St Peter’s square for the Prayer of St Angelus (delivered by the Pope and his [unseen] backup singers).

We toured many Roman ruins – this is the Forum.

Matt thought it would be funny to have a picture of me in front of the house (temple?) of the vestal virgins.

We climbed to the cuppola of St Peter’s cathedral.

From the top of the cathedral, we saw that St Peter’s square is actually mostly an oval.

The Pantheon is one of Rome’s best-preserved buildings (~2,000 years old).

The massive Colosseum supposedly could allow exit of some 50,000 people within 15 minutes.

We took a side trip to Pompeii (Mt Vesuvius in the background). It was amazing and sad. Learning about daily life for ordinary folks 2,000 years ago was probably the most interesting part of our entire trip.

I sent my father a birthday card from the Vatican. (Dad, did you get it yet?)

The market at Campo de Fiore was small but fun – we saw people selling fruits and vegetables (including “minestrone mix”), souvenir booths, and flower vendors.

The Trevi fountain was packed with tourists at all hours.

I guess most of these pictures don’t mean much to people who haven’t been to Rome or studied its history, but hopefully they brought smiles to people who do have good memories of visiting the city. As for us, it was a great way to celebrate our marriage and have some special time before life turns upside down with the baby (due in late May). Next post – back to yarn, an FO, and some more destashing.

A couple weeks ago, Nicole at Baking Bites wrote about recreating my absolute favorite Girl Scout cookie, the Samoa. (Her recipe is here). I read through the instructions and thought they looked a little complicated, but at the same time, they didn’t seem to be beyond anything I could handle.

Essentially, the cookie is assembled in layers. Bake shortbread cookies for the base. Toast shredded coconut. Melt purchased caramels with a little milk and salt, stir in coconut. Spread coconut-caramel on the cookie. Melt chocolate chips. Dip base of cookies in chocolate and drizzle some more on top. Easy, right?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha….

Holy crap, these were the most complicated cookies I’ve ever made in my life. I said to Matt later that I think I’ve prepared entire Thanksgiving dinners in shorter time periods – I started toasting the coconut ~10 AM and put down the chocolate piping bag ~3:30 PM. Granted, I took a 45-minute nap in the middle, but this was a crazyland time committment for cookies, no matter how you look at it.

Some changes that I made to the recipe:

- I used a 2″ cookie cutter but still had way more cookies than the recipe indicated (I had more than 5 doz, far more than the predicted 3 1/2 to 4 doz), maybe because I rolled the dough too thin. I had about a dozen plain cookies leftover because the caramel-coconut mix coats about 4 dozen.

- I had to freeze the dough after rolling it out or else the dough wouldn’t separate after I cut out the shape.

- I skipped making the hole in the middle of each cookie.

- I added a little more milk (maybe ~1 tsp?) to the caramel to keep the topping spreadable.

- I used milk chocolate chips instead of the recommended dark chocolate.

- I used the back of a fork to spread chocolate under the cookie instead of dipping – I had less control with the dipping (uneven application).

Other things to note – if you go with the recommended Werther caramels, it’s 2 (5.5 oz) bags plus 5 candies from a 3rd bag to make 12 oz. The bag of Baker’s shredded coconut that I used claimed to have 5 1/3 c of coconut on the label, but I measured it anyway and came out with 3 (slightly packed) cups.

I brought the cookies to work, and they garnered more compliments than anything I’ve ever baked before in my life. I guess with all the layers, the amount of work involved was self evident. (Another humorous comment that I heard a few times was that I would not have time to bake like this after the baby was born.)

Matt and I had to run out the door to meet with some friends immediately after I had finished piping the chocolate on the top. When we came back, I saw that he had piped decorations on a few of the leftover shortbread cookies after I had stepped into the garage.

I was clearing files off my camera and found another Mr Bento lunch:

Milk (for cereal), red globe grapes, carrot bits, and napa cabbage and beef stirfry (takeout from a restaurant in the cities) over rice.

I haven’t been making dinner lately, so I’ve not had leftovers to bring to work. Hopefully, I’ll rectify that situation soon.

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I had the freakiest dream over the weekend. A lot of women report having vivid dreams during pregnancy, and I guess I’m no different. (Well, I always have vivid dreams, pregnant or no.) Anyway, I dreamt that the baby was born, but instead of a baby, it was a tiny pig.

It had 4 little hooves, a curly tail, and a snout. I stammered, “But… the ultrasounds never showed a pig! The ultrasounds looked like a baby!” Matt looked on, stunned and wordless. The umbilical cord was still uncut, and I followed it back to my body, and yep, it was attached to me all right. I tugged on the cord, and the placenta fell out. It looked like a red, rubber, hot water bottle.

The piglet was all slimy and was squealing. The nurses pushed it toward me and said I had to clean it. I asked for a towel, and they said I had to lick it clean. I was incredulous. “Lick it clean?” “Yes,” a nurse replied grimly. “That’s what mother pigs do.” I think I woke up then.

For the past month and a half, I worked every weekend on sewing a pair of pants. I was revising a commercial pants pattern to make a pair of custom-fit pants with plenty of room for the baby. (My belly circumference – 38 inches right now!) I started with Vogue 8157 as the base.

I used a flexible ruler to copy my crotch curve. It’s wildly asymmetric because I stopped measuring where my belly started expanding (on the left side).

I traced the pants pattern onto butcher paper and adjusted the front and back pattern pieces to my curve.

See, it matched fairly well:

I made a mock-up garment out of cheap cotton muslin and pin-fit it following the directions in Pants for Real People. I narrowed the back width by at least an inch and shortened the leg under the knee by 2 inches. I lengthened the upper portion (the hip area) by 2 inches because I was raising the back side.

The pants still showed a lot of bagginess on the back thigh. I followed Ann Rowley’s genius instructions for a “flat seat adjustment” and made a fisheye dart. Here’s the flat pattern piece after I made all of the adjustments:

I cut out the pants from a stretch cotton woven fabric.

I pin-fit the fabric. Because it was stretchy material, I had to make the side seams deeper than what I had done for the muslin. After adjusting the crotch curve a little more, I was fairly pleased with how it seemed to fit.
Over the next few weeks, I slowly assembled the pants. I marked new seam lines, basted and double-checked the fit, trimmed the excess fabric, sewed the seams, established the waistline, added the waistband, and…

I tried the pants on today, and they are distressingly small. One might say that they fit… but every ripple and roll showed prominently through the too-tight areas. The look was, ummm, decidedly unattractive. I was embarrassed to even wear them around the house. I tried to salvage the pair this morning by narrowing the side seams, but it’s no good, a wadder. (“Wadder” = a project that you wad up and throw out.) I don’t know if it was because Baby and I have gotten considerably larger since I test-fit the pants, or if the stretchy material tricked me, or… I don’t know. I just don’t know where I went wrong.

*sigh*

Sewing humbles me like nothing else. It seems straightforward, easy to understand, and… I find it nearly impossible to do well. I’m not sure where to go next with this. I know sewing, like any other skill, gets easier with experience, probably every novice sewer has wadders, blah blah blah, but this is so frustrating. It’s been a long time since I ran into something that just seemed beyond my grasp (uh, food engineering problem sets, anyone?), and I’ve forgotten how to deal with total failure. What a waste of fabric, too. At least I didn’t pay a lot for it.

I guess I wanted to talk about this because, in a way, it seemed disingenuous to blog only about successful projects. I don’t pretend that I’m good at everything – I make mistakes, I try to learn from them, I move on. I’m not happy about how this has turned out, though. I’ve put the sewing machine away for now, at least while I ponder the next step.

I bought 3 skeins of ecru laceweight alpaca yarn a few months ago. I dyed it last weekend using the resist-dye technique. Dyes were Washfast acid dyes, Terra Cotta over Pumpkin Spice.

I had leftover color in the dyebath and put in some “mop-up” fiber – in this case, it was a 4 oz batt of grey Icelandic wool from Misty Meadows, a local producer.

Although I have no plans for the batts, I am thinking about making a triangle shawl or perhaps a rectangular stole from the alpaca. I theoretically have 1311 yards of yarn. I found a pattern that I liked, but it calls for 1300 yards. Would you risk it?

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More destashing – up next is a 100% wool roving. The fleece was purchased at a Massachusetts Sheep and Wool show ~4 years ago. It originally was a light brown and grey mix, and the uncovered animal that grew this nice fleece is a Merino-Romney cross. I dyed half of it purple, the other half orangey-red. The wool was carded into roving by Spinderellas – Lynn, as usual, did a wonderful job.

The downside – I think this fleece had some tip weakness. Also, I felted it a little bit during the dyeing, and that likely contributed to a little bit of tearing when the wool was picked during processing. You can see here that I needed to pick some bits out of the roving as I spun. (The picture in that link shows the amount of stuff in 4 oz of roving – too much trash to be “mindless spinning,” but it still makes a very nice yarn.) I recommend spinning this somewhat tightly.

ETA – Roving has sold

The fiber has very little VM, no bugs, and no smoke or funny odors. It has been around the cats, but it was stored in a bag during that time. This is 11.7 oz (332 g) of wool. Because of the neps, I’m asking $10 for the lot, and I’ll split the priority mail shipping with you if you’re in the US.