wild card, or: bling baby bling

So the final KCBW topic is on your knit and crochet time. I can address that in about two seconds: primarily at the end of the day, sitting on the couch in my PJs. There. Done. Not that interesting. Certainly not photogenic. That's why I'm playing the wild card for today, which gives me another excuse to tell you about some previous un-blogged FOs. Yes, I finished quite a few things right before KCBW, so I hoarded them in order to keep these posts interesting.

The wild card topic is about embellishments, which is the perfect excuse for me to tell you about a couple baby items I knit recently. Some of you may recall my tale of woe about the buttons I bought for this little Angle sweater. To quickly recap: on a trip to Chicago's most adorable notions store I bought the absolute perfect buttons for two baby items I had been working on. It was just before Christmas. I put the buttons away "someplace safe," which of course meant I promptly forgot their location when I left town. Upon my return I couldn't find those little bastards ANYWHERE. The Angle sweater really needed to be finished up and given away so I got a replacement button for that at Loopy. Well the other baby item that required buttons was this pair of booties.

And behold - I finally found the buttons! And I've already forgotten where they were all this time! Check out those blingy buttons! I felt I had to go with all-out silly little jewels for buttons because these booties are made with 100% cashmere. They're the most ridiculously decadent booties ever made, and they needed a correspondingly ridiculous button.

These are Ysolda's Tiny Shoes. They are suuuuuper cute, but honestly, I absolutely despise knitting baby booties. I can crochet them just fine. It's just one of those weird crafting preferences I have. At any rate, the pattern is great, with one caveat: when you finish the i-cord for the strap and cast on a bunch of stitches to start the main part of the bootie, use a CABLE CAST ON. Do not use backward loop!!! If you use a cable cast on you'll get the nice firm edge that you see on Ysolda's sample booties. If you use backward loop you'll end up with a floppy top edge of the bootie, so the top part of the shoe won't flair out so much as descend straight down from your cast on, and it won't stay on a baby's foot.

The second knit item that went to this baby (so many new babies in my life!) was this adorable bonnet.

Oh how I wish I'd had an actual baby around to model that thing, because it is so much cuter on a baby's head than it is laying flat on a piece of paper on my dining room table. The yellow yarn is the very last bit of a skein of Spinning Colors Sock and a bit of Malabrigo Sock. The pattern is the supercute Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap, and I got a text message just the other day with a picture of it on the recipient's sweet little head! Few things make my day more than seeing my friends' babies wearing things I knit for them.