Monday, April 02, 2007

BACK to BACK

With springtime comes the gardening. Weeds, planting, digging out all the things that didn't make it through the hard freeze. At some point my back rebels and I go back to other projects or pick up my knitting. Soon the heat will come so I push myself to get what I can done. The tomato seedlings are looking good and my pole beans have popped up. It's still cold enough at night that I'm keeping most things in the greenhouse for now. It's dry though. CA is about 40% below average for rainfall this year. We've already started supplemental watering. It's going to be a long, dry summer.

Friday brought a lovely package from The Yarn and Fiber store. I bought two types of Rowan: wool cotton and cashsoft. They are both delicious to touch and I love the colors. I've started up my checkerboard shell pattern in the cashsoft. It's splitting a little but I seem to have found my rhythm and the knitting is going quickly. I haven't received my copy of the Elsebeth Lavold shell yet but I have lots of other things to knit.

I am going to try very hard not to buy any more yarn this year. I have too many projects in the pipeline and too many "want to makes" rolling around in my brain. I've been loving the herringbone sock from CookieA. It glows like a stained glass window. I keep walking over to where it sits on the sideboard and admiring it. I went on-line and watched a video about how to hold the two strands of yarns when you are doing two color work. I had been doing it with one hand and having to untwist the two skeins frequently to the amusement of hubby. It seems to be working *except* I got off a stitch on my and I still haven't been able to figure out where I am in the chart (this is my first experience with chart work too). Things had been going so well! I've spent enough time frogging back a little and checking against the chart that I could have frogged and reknit the sock by now. Sigh.

OTIS (with a little help from Photoshop)

He's almost a year now and such a beauty. Such a wonderful change from the tick covered, almost one pound skeleton covered with fur that we rescued last June 1st. Our couch will never be the same though. Omar will be two in about a week. Hard to believe he's a grown up dog now. Our company over the weekend loved him to pieces and he's been having to cope with no longer receiving non-stop cuddles now that they've gone home. What a long suffering puppy. We continue to be concerned with the pet food recall but so far it isn't anything the furbots eat. The vet called today asking us to return a bag of high protein prescription cat food but it was eaten some time back. Thankfully, it seemed to be more of a "just in case" rather than a dear me, I hope your animals didn't actually eat any of this stuff. We worry and hope that pets everywhere are safe.






2 Comments:

At 9:33 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Otis looks quite grainy. I take it this is a photoshop effect? Nice picture though. Yarn Moratorium. Uh huh. Absolutely. But, of course.

 
At 10:33 AM, Blogger Valerie Polichar said...

What lovely yarn. I cannot possibly stick to a yarn diet. I have enough yarn for something like seven sweaters, now. At least I'm in the middle of knitting a couple of them! I do wear sweaters every day, and normally have about eight storebought ones that I rotate between and wear out, so this isn't too crazy. But I do need to finish one of these..

We've been doing the same checking-and-vaguely-worrying thing with our cat food, but the ingredients list for it shows no wheat gluten. I hope that means it's okay, because the contamination was with wheat gluten.

You are brave to do two-color knitting. I'm not ready to try that one yet... one of these days! Heck, I get tangled with ONE ball of yarn.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home