The last weekend in June and it is raining and cold outside. June, June, June… when are you going to get with the program? The calendar has finally tipped over into summer and you deliver a weekend that makes me wonder if I am going to have to turn the furnace on again? Good grief!!
I don’t have any pictures of the garden flowers because they are just drenched at the moment, but the lawn is really happy to get all of this water after a couple of weeks in parching heat; I hope to get fertilizer and soil conditioner onto the back lawn during a lull in the rain early next week. This actually is a nice break for the plants. Hope my little bunny baby is doing okay with all of the wet.
Knitting
The big accomplishment of the week was finishing up the Mando mitts and getting them mailed off to my Knitworthy Niece in California. These were really a somewhat challenging knit, but the final product totally makes it worth the effort.
The mitts are knitted from a chart, which I prefer, so that part was good. The colorwork issues emerged early on as I had to figure out how to manage 3 or 4 different colors of yarn as I worked the mitts. I finally carried two colors in my left hand, twisting them as I knitted, and holding the third color in my right. I did catch floats and twisted yarn as I could, and still decided to just duplicate some of the details after the mitts were finished. The blue detailing on Mando’s helmet was added after the knitting was over as was the little blue object that Grogu is holding in his right hand. Whew! Then there was the issue of all the ends…
It isn’t obvious in the pictures, but the tips of the fingers used a new bind off for me that blends well with reverse stockinette and is nice and stretchy called Icelandic bind off. Perfect. Who wants to put in all that work to have fingers that are too tight, right? I’m thinking that I might use this bind off with garter stitch edges on sweaters and maybe on the cuffs of arm warmers.
I cleaned out the stash (again) this week after the mitts left on their journey west to the Great State of California (the land of my birth) and put together several kits of printed out patterns with the yarn to make the project. There are at least six sweaters waiting for me to get to them. I am down to only two unfinished projects so I pulled out my hibernating Ranunculus and got back to work on it. There is also a pair of socks to finish and then it will be all sweater knitting, all the time for awhile. (Did you want a picture of my ranunculus project? It is pouring rain out there, people!!! Maybe next week I will have something amazing to show off.)
Books
There isn’t all that much reading going on at the moment, but I did wander into a bookstore and looked at the books on the sale table. The first book was about a person who finds a special book that opens a new world to them. Then the next book I picked up was about a young person who found a transformative book. Then the third book was about… a book. Kismet, obviously. I bought all three books.
Have a great week everyone.
Read a little, knit a little, and garden like your heart can’t live without it.
Yarn, Books & Roses 
That’s good to know about a new cast off method. I’m not sure that one is in my cast on/cast off book. It has been cold here and our heating kicks on if it is below a certain temp in the house and so far its come on everyday for about 2 weeks but it’s been dry too. Grey and overcast and looks like it will rain…but doesn’t so my water butts are all empty already. I’m ready for some proper sunny days and a few rainy days…the gloom of grey skies ugh! Your baby bunny is cute. We have a wood mouse coming for breakfast on our peanut bird feeder everyday. He is very cute…and fast!
I had to use the link that I posted to learn the Icelandic method, but once I saw how it worked it became a new favorite. The weather has really been misbehaving for sure; there is a horrific heat wave building in our Pacific Northwest that will take temperatures close to 120 degrees which is just unheard of. I hope that you get some rain soon and blue skies. I had to quit feeding the birds in my yard because there were so many mice that wanted to move indoors for the winter… NO! to that!
I really like your bunny pics. I hope he stays
Me too! I have been giving him him dandelion leaves to eat and resisting adding treats from my kitchen to the pile.
I loved The Starless Sea in audio book format. I think that author writes The Night Circus which I enjoyed as well. I just finished The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and fell completely in love with all the characters and their letters. It’s a great book, post WWII, but manages to stay mostly light-hearted, without making light of the German occupancy of the channel islands…
I have the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on my bookshelf waiting for me. I’ll move it up my queue and park it with these books. 🙂 I was checking out with my books at the café in Barnes & Noble and the barista was so enthusiastic about The Night Circus that I ended up buying it too. She actually called for someone to bring me up the book and the two women were so enthusiastic about both books (The Night Circus and The Starless Sea) that I just had to get them both. I miss having the book club at Barnes & Noble and it was uplifting to be exposed, even if so briefly, so other people who love talking about books and the impact they have on us. (The barista told me that she read The Night Circus the last year of high school and it changed her life. I was a high school teacher: how could I walk away from that?) There I was with three books about the impact of books on lives in my hand… kind of serendipitous in a good way.
I’m glad you got The Night Circus as well. I can’t take full credit…Nicole from Costuming Drama (you-tube) recommended it and I was searching new books to check out at the library when I found it. I enjoyed both very much.
Very nice mittens and sweet little visitor!
Thank you.
Hope your bunny sticks around – s/he is adorable! Those gloves look great – your niece will love them 🙂
What a darling bunny! Really nice mitts, too!