be impressed by this

I know no one wants to hear any more about my dumb phone and how I ruined it (and cost myself a bunch of money in the process) anymore, so instead I'm going to blog about a recent success that should impress the pants off you, imaginary readers.  For the sake of others, please don't read this in public.  I don't want to be responsible for your pants flying off and freaking anyone out.

I had to put my plarn mat project on hold recently to take care of a more time-sensitive crafty project.  My friend Mo is having a baby sometime soon and the Peeps threw her a baby shower last weekend.  Here's how cute it was:

There were some good eats too, and pregnant Mo is fairly precious (but her baby bump and the cheesy bacon bites are not the impressive thing).  Peep Amy made the perfect, perfect cake.

Peep Amy has a cake-decorating blog that she updates very sporadically.  Apparently working full-time and raising two of the sweetest boys in the world and creating the most amazing cakes doesn't leave her much time to write about them.  I'll forgive her if she'll continue to make me cakes occasionally.  The cake, while magnificent, is not the titular impressive thing.

 Here are the peep girls at the shower with Luke hiding his face but no Calla because she was having kind of a hard life right then.  This cute but poorly lit picture doesn't really have anything to do with the thing that's going to impress you, but I like us and we're cute, so I wanted to include it.

Technically these next few photos aren't the thing that's going to impress you either, but I do think these two delights are impressively cute.  I love them.

 I know it looks like she's just about to stand up and take off, but this is actually her method of not crawling.  She gets up like this and plants her bottom in whatever new direction she's trying to move.  It's awkward but effective.

I took roughly four thousand pictures of the tweeps on this afternoon, but in a surprising number of them, the more mobile Calla is blocking Luke. 

This face is hilarious.  She has a very skeptical brow sometimes.  And has been previously discussed on the blog, the Clintster would make a pretty, pretty girl.

So we're getting to the impressive thing just any second now:  My brilliant bit of creativity factors into the shower in the gift-opening.  Back in the fall, I made the tweeps wee striped hats since they were going to be cold-weather babies.  This baby is due in late-May and won't be requiring much in the way of warm head coverings, so I had sort of written off the idea of a knitted gift, until this book came into my life:

I was charmed by all the cuteness but intimidated by the intricacies of the patterns.  But since there were several animal projects that fit right into Mo's decorative scheme, and because I occasionally get confident (over-confident?) in my own ability to accomplish things, I ultimately decided to tackle a project for a lion that reverses to an elephant.  (Spoiler alert:  I don't think this is the last we'll see of projects from this adorable book.)

Like the irresponsible blogger/crafter I am, I didn't take pictures documenting the project, but here's what the finished project looks like:

 the lion side

 the elephant side

 the back views

 I know it's not polite, but if you look up the elephant's skirt, here's what you see:  a wadded-up lion.

 And if you look up the lion's skirt, the scrunched elephant.

 The bottoms of the heads are stitched together for some stability, so it can't be a two-headed beast, so this is the only way you can see both animals at once.

So that's how my most recent knitting turned out.  I'm just the tiniest bit proud of it, but since I learned this week not to have so much pride in my own accomplishments, I'm not going to make any promises that the little liophant won't fall apart tomorrow, but I do hope that it'll last for the next four weeks or so until the Raspberry is born.