Over the weekend, I was off to Pittsburgh to visit my family and celebrate my nephew’s first birthday. Really, despite being a child (and therefore very sticky), he is quite cute:

I had decided to make an Easter basket for him but my overly ambitious plan to knit a giant felted basket has since fallen apart. I went to my parent’s house and set out to find a basket that I could combine with some knitted fabric to make a cute Easter basket. My step mother collects baskets. There were baskets in all corners of the house. It was like a big treasure hunt. My parents also collect large fluffy yellow dogs. They have four of them. I assure you that the one on the sofa is not dead. He had just grown weary of drooling all over me and my knitting and simply passed out.

So I finally settled on this one and set out to cut the horizontal pieces out of it so that just the vertical supports remained. This required a pair of wire cutters. Not too difficult.

Here is the finished basked with the yarn that I will be knitting the fabric strips out of: Shepherd’s Wool from Stonehedge Fiber Mill.

I have 4 inches of height to fill on the basket and plan to have three different stitch patterned strips that will be woven into the basket. I will weave them in before determining when to bind off for each strip. My patterns: Double moss stitch, Six Stitch Cable and Broken Rib. Because my gauge is 4 stitches per inch, each strip must be only 4-6 stitches wide.

In other news, I just realized that there is only a day left in this month and I haven’t finished seaming the sleeves into my March sweater. shoot!