FO Friday -- Bulky Baby Blankie Edition

Great news, y'all!  I finished the baby blanket I'd been working on at breakneck speed last week!  And only 5 days after the baby shower!  Oops.  I tried.  I really, really did.  But apparently I brought some sort of exotic cold back from Costa Rica with me, and then had to ship Mr. Right back off on the Business Trip That Never Ends (...it goes on and on, my friends!) and all of it slowed me down just a smidge.

But!  All flimsy excuses aside, here it is:

I loved knitting this blanket.  For reals.  It was fast and easy, and the pattern was both well-written and very intuitive.  After a bit, I only had to glance at it occasionally.  And that doesn't happen for me very often.

If you're interested, I modified an afghan pattern to shrink it down to baby-size, and knit it in Knit Picks Brava (acrylic!) Bulky.  Details on my mods are here.  And I gotta say, the yarn was surprisingly soft and squishy.  I'm not a fan of acrylic at all, and I'd totally use this again for something like a baby blanket that needs to be both washable and generally mistreat-able.

It's an all-around Woot! project, I'd say.

In other news, I'm still waiting on the rest of the wedding pictures so I can write up a proper post or two.  Soon!  Promise!  I did find one picture I wanted to share with you all:

Remember Wendell?  He's my ridiculously adorable and incredibly reliable wedding assistant, sent by Kathleen to help me wrangle all the details.  He totally came to the chapel with me and hung out in the dressing room while I was getting ready.  He stood watch over the bridesmaids bouquets and just generally made me smile.  Wendell rocks.

Speaking of things that rock... (smooth transition, no?) Go check out FO Friday and Fiber Arts Friday for lots more yarny goodness.  They're all kinds of awesome.

Work in Progress Wednesday v.109

Dudes!  I'm totally home. And totally MARRIED! (Eep!)  I have oodles of stories to tell about the last couple of weeks, but we're only just back from our honeymoon and haven't even managed to put our houses back together or open our wedding presents yet.  Scandalous, no?

Anyway, I wanted to pop in to say Hi!  I SO missed y'all!  (really), and share the little bit of knitting that I managed to do on planes over the last couple of weeks.  Behold, the Bulky Baby Blankie:

I'm 2+ repeats in now and it's about 15" long.  Baby shower is this Saturday and I need it to be about 36" long, so hold your breath for me.  It's knitting up pretty quickly, and the pattern is actually sort of fun so I think I have a decent shot.

My Nympheas scarf is still hanging around too, but the only action it saw while I was away was to have its Addi Turbo needles angrily ripped from it by a VERY unhappy Costa Rican security agent.(More on my career as an international criminal later.) Yikes.  I'm hoping I'll be able to salvage it, but haven't been brave enough to take a  peek at it yet.  We'll see.

I promise to be back in the next few days with lots of posts about the rehearsal, the wedding and the honeymoon.  Pics, too!  Until then, I'm going to concentrate on growing my little blankie and catching up on all my blog reading -- especially with my WIPW peeps.  See you there!

To help tide you over until then, here's my favorite picture of our ceremony...

And one of my incredibly handsome groom...

*sigh* 

Work in Progress Wednesday v.104

Sometimes, I think, "I really have this whole wedding planning thing under control.  I could totally take on another project or two and be just fine."  Then I go volunteer for something fun and cool.  Then I come to my senses and feel an overwhelming urge to go smack my over-confident self upside the head.  You ever do that?

Such is the case with the whole Ravel-whatever Games.  What a fun idea!  And so many really awesome events that I have no time to complete.  Guess what?  I signed up.  Yep.  And not for just one event.  Two.  (See head-smacking, above) 

Ah well, there are worse things, right?  At least these are both wedding knitting and have to be done anyway.  First up are Mr. Right's wedding socks.  Last Friday after work, sock #2 looked like this:

And today, it looks like this:

 (Top pic is closest to actual color) Given all the working and planning and commuting that's going on 'round these parts, I'm pretty darn proud of myself for knocking out so much sock.  Almost done with the gusset decreases now, then a mile or two of foot (why do boys have such ginormous feet???), and then it's Toe City baby.  I'm really hoping to be done before the weekend.

The other event I signed up for is the Modular Relay, in a half-hearted attempt to knit another dozen puffs for the wedding.  At the moment, I have 12:

Apologies for the wonky photo, but it's stormy here today and there's no good light to be had.  Really, they're light blue.  Promise.

So if I can knock out another 12 in the next 2 weeks, I should be all set.  They're not bad to do and go pretty quickly, but my favorite thing about puff knitting is seeing all my fun sock yarns turn into a puff or two.   And let's face it.  By now, all the mystery's pretty much gone from the red and blue puffs.  At least they'll be cute on the tree.

And, since I have *cough* so much spare time on my hands, I have a baby blanket to knit.  Yarn just arrived this week:

I'm planning on modifying the Bas-relief Blanket pattern down to baby size, so it should go pretty quickly.  I'm really excited to get started on this, mainly because it's bulky yarn on biggish needles instead of fingering weight on size 1s.  The shower is scheduled for something like 4 days after we get back from our honeymoon, so I'll be hauling this baby to Costa Rica.  I don't expect to have much time to knit while we're there, but I figure I'll have plenty of hours where I'm freezing to death on the plane and so a blankie to keep my lap warm will be nice.  I hope.

In other news, it's officially 25 (!) days til the wedding and this weekend one of my very best friends is flying in from California to throw me a wedding shower.  How cool is that?  I'm really looking forward to having a house full of girlfriends to hang out with.  Honestly, I'm pretty excited about the whole thing.  Until then, I'm going to spend some time freaking out about the wedding, and when I'm not busy doing that I'll be checking out all the WIPW peeps over at Tami's.  See you there!