Introducing.....

Aahliyah Louise, born 29 July 2008 at 10.56pm and weighing in at 4180g (9lb 4 oz). Our first grandchild.

#1 son and dil are over the moon, she is a beautiful baby girl. We spent the day with both of them in the birthing unit along with DIL parents. We talked, we laughed and we cried throughout the day. There were calm times and there were times of shear agony.

Aahliyah was born by caesarean after a long and hard labour of going nowhere. It was something to watch my son walk up the corridor of the birthing unit wheeling his baby girl towards us. We stayed and watched her be weighed, had her hair washed, needles given and wrapped up and put in her crib.

We then stayed with her in her room waiting for her mum to join her new daughter. Just beautiful. Then is was time for us 4 new and first time grandparents to leave the new mummy, daddy and baby girl together. It was nearly 1am this morning.

One more sleep....

Grandchild #1 is nearly here, her mum was induced around 3pm today, #1 son has been with her, nothing happening yet, and as she is in the maternity part of the hospital, he can't stay passed visiting at 8pm. When she is taken to the birthing ward then he can stay with her, so a sleepless night here in our home waiting for the call back to the hospital. The nurse doesn't think anything will happen tonight.

I am knitting a hat for her in the same colour as this jumper I finished yesterday. It had been knitted for a couple of weeks, but needed to be stitched together and the buttons put on it.

I am still knitting on the shawl, it probably has about 50 hours more knitting to go. My fingers have been giving me hell and I wake at around 4am with terrible pain as if they are going to break off, so I can't knit at much each night as I would like. The knitting doesn't seem to hurt while doing it, but oh boy through the night is pure hell.

Paint Brush Dyeing - Knitters Retreat

Thanks to Metal and Knit I have photos of my paint brush dyeing, which was knitted in 4ply pure wool, dyed, unravelled and knitted into the hat in the previous post.

I had a flexi day from work yesterday and caught up on knitting the shawl, while knitting I thought I was one stitch out, I looked back, counted stitches, no seems to be right, but still thought it looked like one stitch out. Well.....6 rows later (1 hour 40minutes knitting time for every 2 rows), it was out, I did think about keep on knitting, DH said you can't notice it.....but I could.....so you know what that means.........ripped it back. DH asked if I could take it off the needles and pull it back would save time......not with 3ply lace knitting you can't. So 4 hours last night and I have 1 and a half rows to still unpull before starting to knit it back.

And to top it off, the baby is going to be 2 or 3 weeks early, that is right, she will be here in the next week and a half. Her mum has pre-eclampsia and has been hospitalised. After a week in hospital she is ready to come home, but she is going to be there until baby is born and they come home. #1 son has quit his job and moved them back with us so he can be close by.

So the shawl has over 80 rows to go and at the moment as 1080 stitches which is taking 1 hour on pattern row and 40 minutes on plain row. I guess the good thing is that it is in the round, so no sewing up at the end, now that has got to save a bit of time.

Here are some of the dyeing, and then sitting outside knitting (I am not in these photo)

Hand Painted Original Baby Hat

Here it is....the very special baby hat, the one and only original hand painted/dyed by me.

A square was knitted with white Shepherd 4ply pure wool. Then I hand painted the dye onto the square in bright pink large dots, then with a brigh blue painted large dots between the pink dots, it looked great when out drying in the sun. When all dry I unravelled the yarn (yes you read all this in the previous post), and knitted it with a 'feather and fan' pattern. And isn't it just gorgeous.


Today I went with the kids and the mother in-law for the 34 week ultrasound. Everything is going great with the baby, she is a biggen, at 34 1/2 weeks she is 6lbs 9oz, hopefully she won't get too large in the next few weeks. She wouldn't play well though (must get that from me) when it was time to get a 3d picture, she had turned away, so we only got an ear. It is so nice to see her tumbling around in there, and to see that everything is as it should be. On the other hand the mum is bordering on pre-eclampsia and needs to take it easy. Back to the knitting, I still have heaps to do on the shawl, which I haven't touched in nearly 3 weeks, and the baby jumper in the bright apricot colour I started on the weekend.

See the nice baby shawl as the backdrop......that was mine when I was a baby, it is nearly 49 years old. It needs a good wash and some mending, which I will get done before grand daughter is born.