…and for the first time in quite a while it isn’t going to snow this weekend. Figures, but who am I to complain. Check these babies out!
These mitts fit perfectly, are very cushy and warm, and I am so happy with how they came out!and they are lined!! I used superwash merino sock yarn for the lining.
These mitts are the Snowfling Mitts by Tanis Lavallee. The MJ Yarns American Worsted (the purple painted yarn) was just a little bit smaller in diameter then the Malabrigo Rios (black), so I carried the black yarn in my right hand and the purple in my left while I was knitting the pattern. Since the stitches knit with the left hand are a little larger it all worked out to make a balanced fabric. The American Worsted yarn had a little more twist to it and seemed to be denser, which helped make these mitts really nice and cushy inside where the stands are located. So happy with how it came out. There is just enough room for me to slip a hand warmer into the mitt if I need it.
In the middle of the week I mowed my lawn for the very first time this year and took out the lawn furniture. This is a major event; spring has arrived!!
Doesn’t this look promising? You wouldn’t know it to look at it but two days before this there was snow all over the grass… Tomorrow I may go to the nursery to buy some hanging plants for the deck. I’m hopeful that we are done with the snow, but it could still happen. I’m keeping those mittens out for a few weeks before I pack them away to wait the the fall’s first snow.Since it was so nice outside I set my drum carder up on the patio table and began working on an alpaca fleece that I’ve been wanting to spin. This fleece is just wonderful. It is sooo soft and the locks opened like a dream. It was a joy to feed it into the carder. MacKenzie likes it too!
I’m so happy carding this alpaca I was motivated today to go digging in the fleece stash and found two different wool fleeces that are just amazing grey colors. Wow, my spinning wheel is going to be really, really happy. There is some serious spinning coming his way. I hope that the nice weather holds so I can do most of this carding outside.
Have a great weekend everyone. Happy Mother’s Day!
It was a really busy and productive week. I already wrote two posts about parts of it (finishing the dishtowels and the cause of bad, bad kitties), but here is the rest of the highlights of the week.
Sorry for the quality of the picture. It’s cloudy outside but you can still get an idea of the glorious color of these mitts. While I was weaving this week I wished I had light weight mitts that hugged my wrists and stayed put above my knuckles while I was working. Here they are! My project notes on Ravelry are here if you want to make a pair too. 🙂 I also made stitch markers from some of the glass beads that I bought at the Interweave Yarn Fest a couple of weeks ago.I also got the first of the Snowfling Mitts finished (well, except for the top of the thumb…) this week. These mitts also are lined so there is a lot to still knit, but I am happy with what I have so far. I love that Purple Dragon colorway!! Here are the project notes.On Wednesday I went to knitting and discovered that the store had gotten in a big shipment of Madelinetosh. My friends helped me a little too much as I hunted for yarn for a new shawl. I’m so happy with my “Waiting for Rain” shawl that I am going to make another in the grey, and the colored yarn was too nice to leave but is still waiting for its calling. That shawl pin goes with both colors. Maybe I can make the pink shawl have lacy ruffles that will stick out under the grey one so I can wear both shawls at once. I’m drowning in possibilities here, people!! Feel free to make suggestions for the pink ruffly shawl…Then my friends convinced me that I had to make an Exploration Station with these colors…and then I found this little plastic case to carry knitting essentials. It has all of these little compartments to carry stitch markers, cable needles, sewing needles, etc.and it all folds up into one tidy little package. Just amazing!! Just what I need. It was hard to buy only one of these…Yesterday was Earth Day, and I went to my grandson’s performance of Goin’ Buggy at his school. Isn’t he the cutest thing as a Red Ant?On the way home I stopped by the nursery and got these flowers to put out front (it was Earth Day!!) and bought a burrito bowl at Chipotle. While I was eating I noticed the picture on the bag. Say, what? Soldiers, helicopters, buckets of fish?? How unusual…Then I turned the bag. There is a story here for sure, I told myself. Yep. On the other side of the bag I found this story about a young child eating his last dinner before leaving a refuge camp for America. It just brought tears to my eyes. You can read the essay by Fue Xiong called Two Minutes About Sardines here.
What an end to the week. This refuge/immigrant story just meant so much to me. Over the years I have taught many refuges to this county, but during one of my last years in the classroom I taught all of the “sheltered” biology classes at my high school. “Sheltered” classes are for students who are acquiring English as a second language, and the students are all mixed together. They were from Somalia, Congo, Mali, China, Myanmar, Peru, Syria, Mexico, Viet Nam, you name it. They were all a little shell shocked, earnest, hard-working, respectful and determined to survive. They were caring and supportive. They learned English and biology from me, and I learned so much more from them. I still have some of their labs and writings. They all made me a better person and appreciative of how many things I have that would be easy to take for granted. Earth Day, indeed.
What a nice end to the week. A special morning with my grandson, a great lunch and some food for my soul at the same time.
Here is my crazy week with a lot of picture support.
Last Thursday I went to the first appointment with palliative care. On the way in from the parking lot I had to walk under blooming trees. Look! The first bee of the season. 🙂 You know, it was hard to get this shot with the phone camera… I think that I entertained some of the other visitors to the clinic while I chased this little guy around.
I’m pretty sure I’ve flunked out of palliative care. Here’s the problem: I need someone to help me manage my overall medical care (since I have six different doctors at this point…) but they don’t really do that. They do help people with serious end of life decisions and provide medical options to ensure their comfort; I got some great advice and then they kind of turned me loose back into the health care stream. I’m kind of a catch and release palliative care patient: they will call every three months to check on me, but basically I’m doing pretty well. I have a serious illness, but I’m not yet seriously ill enough to really justify taking up their time. I’m already doing a lot of the things that they encourage patients to do (and so do all of you, too.) It’s really important to do something that helps with stress like meditation (or knitting, spinning, and weaving!) and they told me to start keeping a journal (Oh, you blog? Never mind! Just carry on with that, they said.) Really, it was encouraging. They told me to use the inhaler as much as I want and to go to more frequent appointments with my primary care doctor. Check. I can do that. 🙂
It is good to think about end of life decisions, though. Here’s how I reacted: I called my kids (and grandson) and told them that we need to all go to Walt Disney World for a fun vacation. We will ride the Monorail, buy Micky Mouse ear hats, go to the Star Wars attractions, and it will be wonderful. I’m also systematically cleaning out all of my junk from cupboards and the garage. Does anyone want my Great-Aunt Alice’s set of crystal platters? How about a classroom set of homemade DNA models? A well-used heavy duty 3-hole punch? Right. All those things are out of here!!
Friday I decided to go wild and made homemade chickpea hummus using the recipe from fellow blogger Ros (Cooking Up The Pantry). I cooked the chickpeas in my crock pot for 6 hours on low, and then everything went into the food processor. Oh, my goodness! Several days later I am still eating it with veggies and warmed flat bread. Yumm!! All of the food Ros has in her blog is to die for. Seriously. I would knit for her for food.I’m still weaving on the dishtowels. I’m getting towards the end of the warp: this is the fifth towel in the set. Weaving is really quality time for me. I worry about the plot of the book I’m reading, come up with my grocery shopping list, and dream up new patterns for fingerless mitts. Once I’m in the zone it is like magic.The last two days have been warm and I’ve started clearing out the flower beds. Look! Pansies that survived the winter!and of course the Phlox has started blooming. I have a big bed of this and it keeps sending out satellite colonies of phlox all over the yard.Not only did the phlox start blooming, I got the Waiting for Rain (by Sylvia Bo Bilvia) shawl finished. The colors in this yarn look just like the phlox to me. This is a perfect springtime shawl! Here are my project notes on Ravelry.Isn’t the yarn yummy? this is LYDIA sock yarn in the colorway Garden Party. I added a picot edge to the bind off. Tonight I’m working on my Snowfling Mitts again and reading my current book. The suspense in the book is just killing me. Every few chapters I have to take a little knitting break. 🙂 If you can’t read the title that is Every Fifteen Minutes by Lisa Scottoline.
It has been really nice this week; warm and sunny with blooms and bees. However, this is Colorado; we have a winter storm warning posted for tomorrow because a humongous storm is roaring in to dump huge amounts of moisture for the next 5 days. Seriously. I’m wondering how many inches of snow is made by four inches of water. The storm is the big story on the news and each update reports it to be building in intensity from the last report. Yikes! Maybe I should pick up speed on the mitten knitting.
That’s OK. I have hummus, books and yarn. I am all good.
Have a great weekend everyone. If you should happen to see a snow shovel, think of me.
This was such a fun week. I think that I’m just going to throw up some pictures of the main events because, well, don’t you just want to see what I’m making? Of course you do! Here we go. Hang onto your knitting needles and crochet hooks because I am moving fast!!
My Vanilla Dragon socks are done! These are knit from the toe up with an after-thought heel. The pattern is Vanilla Socks, and the yarn is MJ Yarns Simple Sock in the colorway Purple Dragon. Ravelry notes here. This is a free pattern guys!That Purple Dragon is fun stuff! I started a pair of Snowfling Mitts using the worsted-weight version of the MJ yarn with some black Malabrigo Rios. Hey, it is good practice before I knit these mittens out of my homespun yarn.I have finished weaving my first dish towel and started on a plaid version. . This towel is going to my cousin Ruth Ann. I need to have all the weaving done and off the loom by Easter so I can deliver her towels to her. My scleroderma support group meets tomorrow so I also got some more mitts finished to give away.On Wednesday I found the yarns that I needed to put together the kit to knit Exploration Station by Stephen West. The two yarns that aren’t wound yet (the newly found ones) are lace weight. I plan to just knit them double. How about that for a yarn hack!While I was at the yarn store one of my friends gave me a bag of Golden Retriever hair to spin for her. Hmmm… doggie yumminess. I’m going to try to convince her to blend the dog down with some soft wool to give the yarn a little bounce. This will be fun. Really.and look what appeared while I was knitting the Purple Dragon socks! I guess spring is on the way.OK, I know that this is a little over the top, but I was so anxious to see how this yarn would work up I cast on last night and started the Dream Club slippers. Fun! They are really cushy because of the Eye of Partridge stitch.
That’s it! That was the week. I also got some beads in the mail to make stitch markers, but you don’t really want to see an envelope from China, do you? I’ll just save that piece of cuteness for the post about those stitch markers. I also had a surge of energy/empowerment that led me to drive two hours in the middle of the week to a hospital up north so that I could get my medical records from all the lung and heart testing I’ve gone through the last two years. I sent an email to one of my doctors that set off a series of phone calls and now some new tests are ordered and I have a referral to a pulmonary specialist. As soon as I go to the clinic this afternoon I can pick up a shiny new inhaler to help me breath. Empowerment is a good thing!
Have a great week everyone. If you find yourself knitting at midnight, think of me.
I am still fired up with creative energy. I have been knitting mitts like crazy (boring… I keep making the same mitt pattern over and over in different color yarns. I’ll post a picture when I get a stack of them done!) and got the warp all wound for the dishtowels that I want to weave (yeah – that is another basically boring picture so I’ll just skip post it too…) and even pulled the loom out. I had to move the (sad, neglected and agitated) spinning wheel to get to the loom, and it was hard to not notice that the bobbin on the wheel was half full. I’d started spinning this yarn in early November but put it away when Christmas makes got in the way. The fiber is pretty cool; it is from one giant batt that I had bought last year at the Interweave Yarn Fest. No wonder that wheel is cranky! The batt was his birthday present and I never took the time to finish spinning it.
I sat down yesterday and finished spinning and plying the fiber from the batt. It made two big skeins of worsted weight yarn.
Looking good!! This yarn is pretty hardy – the fiber is a little on the coarse side. The upper skein is a little more orange then the lower one, but they both have a lot of character.See what I mean. I just love the play of the different colors in the final yarn.
I decided that it is a good yarn for outerwear. Since I just froze my fingers while shoveling snow after the last storm (The Snowpacolypse) I am really focused on warm mittens and mitts for my hands. Last week I bought several mitten/mitt patterns on Ravelry, and looking at this yarn I decided that it wanted to become Snowfling MItts. Seriously, that happy color would make rocking snowflakes against a dark background!! Off to dig in the yarn stash I went.
I found three different colors of grey homespun yarn that would work for the project. Here they are:
Contender #1. A nice charcoal yarn made from a sheep named Misty. It is a pretty good match in size but not as crispy a yarn as the colored one.This light grey yarn is extremely soft and squishy. It is from the last fleece of a special sheep named Lily. I love the color, but it won’t work for the background against the bright yarn. There is a big difference in the feel of the yarns too.Bingo! This is it. This black yarn is pretty crisp and hardy feeling and is almost the same weight as the colored yarn. The sheep was the Grand Champion at the Western National Stock Show one year. Beautiful color, long locks of wool, but not as soft a fleece as was expected. It is, however, the exact match to this colorful yarn.
I just put the spinning wheel away. Today he had lots and lots of exercise. Tomorrow I will wash the new yarn (maybe it will soften up a little?) and get the loom pulled out. Time to warp! Hopefully I’ll get the loom ready for weaving before that yarn is done drying.
Yarn, Books & Roses 