The Cookie's Coat

I made this a month or so ago for the Cookie to protect him against cold weather. It is 100% merino wool. And because my mom is chummy with people who raise sheep, I happen to know that the wool I used is from a ram named Mikey who lives in the Texas hill country. My mom scoured the wool for me, and I carded, spun, and knit it.

When we go out in public, we always get the nicest compliments on this coat. The rest of the family at our reunion in November thought it was the height of cuteness. My Sister-in-law said I should make them and sell them. "Lots of moms will want this exact thing for their babies!" (This won't happen any time soon, since this took me a month to make; I had to take frequent breaks to nurse the Cookie and to keep the Squeaker from having raisin and cracker withdrawals. Luckily I finished it before the weather got too chilly.)

Today alone, three separate people stopped The Husband to comment on the coat while he was at Sam's Club with the kids. One woman wanted to know the whole story of its manufacture.

I am very flattered, of course. I always like it when people ooohh and ahhh over my various projects, but I have been slightly baffled by the response to this one. It's not my best work, you see. When I went to make this coat, I went over to ravelry.com and chose a pattern that required the thickest possible yarn so it would knit up quickly. (You can take a look at it for yourself here.) And I purposely carded and spun the wool as sloppily as I could so I could just get it done and over with. You can even tell in the picture that it is bumpy and slubby. My ultimate goal was not to create something cute, it was so that my kid could be warm. I expect if you were to compliment some prominent chef on his execution of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, that chef would feel much how I do about this project. "You...you like this? But it's nothing!"

Babies grow so quickly, anyway. I estimate he'll be too big for it in another two months. When that happens, we have an old coat of the Squeaker's he can grow into.

Now, I'm currently working on a sweater-shawl like the one featured in this blog post. I am in the process of spinning more yarn for it. I am using some nice nice silvery-gray merino/ silk blend that I bought from the woolery about a year ago. Since I'm not processing the fiber myself, it's going a lot more quickly. Mind you, I've already spent about a month just spinning this second skein of yarn. It's lace weight and so it's taking forever and I haven't even filled up the bobbin yet.