Maisie is a month old today! She is already so much bigger and more interactive than she was when we brought her home. She spends a lot of her time practising making different faces. This is one of my favourites. She does it when she's wiggling around while sleeping. I hope sometime I'll be able to catch it in beautiful focus with my big camera but for now this slightly blurry cell-phone pic makes me smile.

This week I started knitting again for the first time since Maisie arrived (last week I realized I could read books … my life is so exciting). I was going to be leaving the house and I just feel kind of naked and unprepared without some knitting in my bag. It's a plain vanilla sock - simple, portable, relatively mindless - in some exceptionally springy yarn (here's a better picture of the colour). I'm in the Tanis Fiber Arts Year in Colour club this year and this was the March shipment. It came with this beautiful pattern and I briefly considered working the yarn in the matching pattern but decided working charts may be beyond my capabilities at the moment. I've only really worked on it at home - with Maisie sleeping on my chest - but I feel like myself to have it in the diaper bag when we go out.

Just before Easter a friend sent me a link to this super cute little jacket. I knew I didn't have time or energy to make anything like that for Maisie but it got bunny themed clothing on my mind and very shortly after that I realized that this was Maisie's first Easter and she really needed an Easter bonnet … every little girl does. I hunted around for quick knitting patterns and considered a few different sewing patterns I had in my library but didn't find anything like what I had in mind. Then I remembered Alicia's Storybook Woods bonnet pattern and knew I'd found the perfect base - all I had to do was add ears.

I cannot speak highly enough of this pattern. It's extremely cute, very well written, comes together beautifully and was simple and quick enough for me to make in the odd bits of time I got with a three-week old baby and a long weekend. I mocked it up in some scrap cotton before embarking in wool and liberty lawn. The mock-up let me confirm the size I needed (Maisie is wearing the extra small) and decide about the correct size and placement of the ears. The end result was so sweet I made a second one for her older cousin Hannah who, at a little less than a year old, was also celebrating her very first Easter (The medium size fits Hannah). Don't be surprised if you see a Christmas version of this sometime. This pattern is too good to make only once (or even twice).

p.s. To make Maisie an Easter outfit I added a matching skirt: I cut a rectangle roughly 12" wide and 30" long. Sewed the short edges together. Hemmed up an inch on both ends and left a gap in the hem on one end. I threaded 17" of elastic through the opening and sewed the ends together with ½" of overlap to fit her 16" middle. With luck this little skirt will fit for a while provided I open up the casing and put in a longer elastic when needed.

This is her sweater and these are her socks.