Ready to pop

Hello all!! Thanks so much to every one of you for the lovely comments last time - so wonderful to know I'm not posting into a void here, despite my hiatus! I missed you all while I was gone!

My FO parade is definitely slowing...for which I blame both end-of-semester grading and my increasingly enormous girth and weight (I've gained 35 lbs and it's ALL in front!) But I did finish two more items recently:

The Little Sister Dress:




The Violet Sacque from Vintage Baby Knits:



This may be it for my pre-baby knitting, except maybe for another cap or toy and maybe some burp cloths. My mojo has nearly dropped again to first trimester levels, and I've been busy as a bee with last-minute errands, checkups, shopping plus the grading pile, which never seems to get any smaller no matter how much I work on it. But there's another reason. Next time I have a moment for crafting (after making the much-needed curtains and swaddle cloths) I'm going to WEAVE!!

See my new loom????



It's a Schacht Flip-n-Fold, from Beth's shop. I luuuurve it, though I haven't actually woven anything yet. In bits and pieces of time I've been educating myself and digging out some appropriate stash to experiment with, but I haven't yet had the time and space available to warp it, which is the first step and not something I want to interrupt, at least the first time I do it. I hope to be able to do that before the little one arrives!

Announcement: said little one will henceforth be known on this blog by one of the two nicknames she's going by most often right now: Papoose, or Junebug. So you know.

The Junebug is BIG and the midwives have told her she can come whenever she pleases as of now:



And now before I go...some EXTREMELY belated pictures from last August! Apologies for not posting these in an even remotely timely manner, but now that I've dug them up again, I didn't want to let them go unseen. We had such a wonderful time at the Allegan Fiber Festival and stash-building at Beth's shop in Howell! And I managed to talk my college friend K into coming with us to the fiber festival and guess what, she learned to spin while there! ha. She was a crocheter already from way back, so I knew she'd be "hooked" pretty easily, har har.

Here's me and Kari at the fiber festival, being awed by soft yummy fluff (was I ever that flat-bellied??!):



Then Hubbus drove me over to Howell for some serious stash-building at Beth's shop, the Spinning Loft. You may recall how I posted last time that Beth had to give me one of those gigantic ziplocs to hold it all? Ahem...





Here's Beth demonstrating that it really will fit in the suitcase:



I may have mentioned before that my friend Beth is a very dangerous temptress? I can't recommend her wonderful shop enough, but - beware! It's a dangerous place. Here she is with her bouquet of spindles.



Also, remember last time I showed the Maggie batts I had spun up, from batts made by Beth's daughter Maggie? Here's what they looked like originally:



Now take a closer look at those tags:



Too adorable to resist, even if the batts weren't beautiful in themselves, which they certainly are:



Through all this fiber diving, Hubbus waited more or less patiently, since Beth let him use her laptop to check the news (this was last August, during the Russian-Georgian conflict)



What a very sweet Hubbus! He attended the fiber festival, too, as he did the year before. Of course, he got promised a handspun sweater in return...that was August, and I still haven't started that spinning!