My daughter turned three last Friday. Her party was on Sunday. It’s just a small get together of us and a few friends so we can eat cake and give her some presents. It’s really no big deal. There was only one other kid there (who she has never met before) since her best friends moved to California last month. We’ll put up some streamers, some balloons and make a banner that the kids can color that says "Happy Birthday!" (The banner was a flop. they colored on it for maybe 2 minutes. Note to self - ditch the banner idea next time).

Katie requested that her cake have white and pink and purple flowers on it. Easy? Yeah, but I have to make things complicated.

I’m in the process of discovering a whole new way to frost and decorate a cake. Last year I bought one of those cool Wilton dye sets with the frosting tubes and funny ends that let you make flowers, leaves and all sorts of overly fancy stuff.

This year I’m inspired by a picture I see in, of all things, a kid’s food recipe book. Basically the frosting (which is called "Fondant") is made by boiling copius amounts of sugar and water until it reaches a certain temperature and then kneading it. So far I’ve made what looks like to me the worlds largest sugar cube! I managed to find some premade fondant in the store, and here’s her cake:

And in the knitting arena
Since I can’t manage to finish any of my own projects lately, I’ll cheat and use someone else’s project for blog fodder :) This is a beautiful sweater my friend Rebecca made Alex. She made it before he was born and was guessing a bit on the sizing. Who knew I’d have a gargantuan baby? Anyways, here it is blocking, with the width hopefully widened enough that it’ll fit him a little looser. When I tried it on him, there wasn’t hardly any ease in the body. Since this is such a cute sweater, I’d really like him to be able to wear it and I’m planning on taking pictures of the kids in 2 weeks for our xmas cards in their handknit snowflake sweaters.

At the end of last year, I test knit a sock for theknitter.com. It was a really cute snowflake pattern in pretty thick yarn. While working on the cuff, someone asked me if I was making a sweater. I told them I wasn’t, but that started the wheels in my head turning. After getting permission from the original pattern author, I took the snowflake & cuff pattern and designed a simple toddler sweater from it. Here’s my daughter dancing about, refusing to take the sweater off despite the fact that it’s over 70 degrees this day:

I hadn’t washed or blocked it yet, so it’s still curling up on the bottom too much. I washed and gently blocked it this morning, and it stretched quite a bit. I was a little suprised to see that the color bled in the water - I was just washing it in the sink despite the fact that it is done with superwash yarn (Mission Falls 1824 Wool). The white snowflakes now look a bit purplish to me. What does one do with your yarn if you know it’s going to bleed?