How did it get to be Sunday already?

My lovely employers (there is not a hint of irony in that phrase) have given me some extra time off to go with the longer hours I'm now working. I used some of it up on Friday, did nothing in particular yesterday, and I really can't work out what happened to my weekend. Apart from two meals in restaurants in two days, which was fun, if not wonderful for our current attempts to get rid of the physical evidence of Christmas.

This afternoon I decided I needed to conquer my fear of the new (to me) sewing machine, which has been sitting untouched since mum handed it over in early December, simultaneously removing my old trusty machine, that clonked a bit and couldn't entirely cope with denim, but whose workings I understood, and whose bobbin I could thread. I didn't do anything exciting, just edged a couple of pieces of embroidery fabric that I may not get to for several years, but I left the machine set up on my desk. Seeing as how I don't need the desk for dissertationary purposes any more, and seeing as how I have Plans for sewing this year. I also found the copies of Ottobre and a certain Burda special edition that I had been looking for, which was a relief.

The same Plans caused me to spend several hours on Ravelry, browsing patterns for Very Small Garments, and pondering softness and machine washability and gender neutral colours. You can tell where this is going, can't you. It's baby time.

Not ours. Not this year, and maybe not for several years. But at the end of June we're having a Niecephew, and as the keen maker of things that I am, I want to welcome it with handknitted and machine sewn (I'm no Luddite) goodness. I've been browsing and contemplating since we heard at Christmas, but last night I was able to ask the Niecephew's mother, my lovely sister-in-law, what she had in mind. Yellow, green and cream, apparently. "Purple?", my mother-in-law (also a knitter) and I asked hopefully, but purple was too feminine. At which we all laughed, since we had two Church of England priests at the table, and in the Church of England purple is for bishops, and bishoping is for men only. Fully machine washable (ie not a delicates cycle only) is also important. That's fine. It's not my baby, so it's not my job to say what it should wear. So I'm researching cottons and synthetics, and going through the several Debbie Bliss books I seem to have accumulated. The stash isn't helping (it's all wool, and precious little green in there), so I am going to have to buy yarn as soon as I'm allowed (oh hardship). In the meantime, I really ought to have enough 4-ply for these somewhere.

(For the record, should it be my turn to reproduce someday, I think purple is completely gender neutral, likewise red, and I'm more likely to dress a boy in pink than a girl. I also think wool, even hand wash only wool, is fine for babies, so long as it's soft, but I also think I own more hand wash only garments of my own than my sister-in-law does, and therefore already live with a pile of garments in the bathroom to be washed one at a time when I have a spare ten minutes).