Are you there, blog? It's me, Alison

I've been thinking for a week or two about how to make a drama-free return to this little corner of the Internet that I've got here. I lost interest in the whole thing last year (obviously), but I never did say goodbye or officially shut things down, just so that I could come back if I wanted to. I'm still not sure whether I'll start blogging again with any regularity, but I have been finding myself wanting to post certain things, and this seems like the most appropriate place to do that. So hello to anyone who may pop by after all this time!

I'm not going to try to summarize the nine months that have passed since I last posted, except to say this: I'm still living in Montreal and working on my Ph.D. (writing the dissertation draft). In news of the new, I'm expecting a baby in early December -- and that’s what brings me back to the blog. Yep, I'm 25 weeks pregnant and, I must say, feeling excellent.

For me, Ravelry took the place of knitblogging. I could put all the info and photos about knitting projects there, and I no longer felt the need to duplicate that stuff here. But now that a baby is on the way, I'm doing a little bit of sewing and bookmarking a lot of stuff online, and I don't have another place to keep track of that stuff. Also, I probably want to talk about baby stuff more than my friends want to hear about it, because -- let's face it -- stuff can be boring if it isn't about you. I'll be the first to admit that when knitting bloggers had babies and started talking about the babies instead, I often tuned out. If you're not interested, you're not interested -- and I wasn't, but now I am. Life changes like that, doesn’t it?

All this is to say that I might start blogging a bit, and it's probably going to be about babies. OK, about my baby. (But I'm more interested in yours now, too -- I promise.) And I'm jumping right in with burp cloths. What could be more fascinating?

A couple of Christmases ago, I made flannel pillowcases as gifts (a big hit, by the way), and I had some flannel left over. With more than a yard of one print, I made a simple receiving blanket: trimmed off the selvedges, cut about a 40-inch square, turned over a hem all around and sewed it. With smaller pieces of leftover flannel, I made three burp cloths:


I looked at several patterns/tutorials online and settled on this one. I cut out six pieces, paired different patterns together for each cloth, sewed the pieces together, and topstitched. Easy -- once I figured out the tension on my machine had to be set at 1 for the topstitching (only 1!?).


Et voila. I'll probably need dozens more. Several patterns recommend layering a cloth diaper inside the burp cloth because some babies barf that much. This, along with about 273 other things I've read in the last five months, terrifies me.