The end of the semester is always so chaotic and hectic. Those of you who teach can relate to the issue of whiners and last minute deal-makers who suddenly appear in class after skipping for the past two months, trying to negotiate their way to a passing grade. Grrrrrrr!!!!
I have two more stacks of papers to get through by Monday p.m., so not much knitting or writing til then.
No Saturday Sky because we’ve had nothing but overcast, cloudy days. Earlier in the week we had non-stop rain. The river was tumbling over its banks; streets were closed due to flooding; the few undeveloped areas around here looked like bogs.
The very scary thing about all the rain and standing water was that the temperatures were supposed to drop below freezing, which would have caused some really dangerous conditions, including electricity outages due to the heavy ice that would have formed on the lines and the tree branches.
Thank goodness the temps haven’t dropped that low yet!! We’ve had some VERY strange weather ~ fall-like temps in mid-December and snow and freezing temps in early October.
The other scary news is that Christmas is almost here, and I’ve made little to no progress on gift knitting. Another grrrrrrrrrrrr!!! Too many half finished projects laying around.
Plus, I am definitely not Lene (a production knitter if I ever saw one) in either speed or talent. (Really, you should see her work ~ more knitting beauty than you ever dreamed of!! And she knits faster than Santa’s reindeer fly!) Nonetheless, I am bound and determined to get at least one gift completed before the New Year. That gift is the fir cone scarf. The giftee doesn’t read this blog, so I’ll try to get a shot of the scarf later this week.
Here is the teensy-weensy progress on my socks. Good grief, is it even worth showing?
You may recall that the color looks more like this but perhaps not so bright:
The green that can be seen in the first pic can only be seen in very bright light, so it is deceiving that it shows up in the first pic, which was taken indoors during the day on a bright background with a flash (remember the cloudy weather). The second pic was taken a month ago, maybe more, outdoors at around 3:00 a.m. ~ the deep of night, very close-up with a flash. Sometimes the green looks like taupe, sometimes like green. You know the problems with yarn, cameras, and light.
For years I have been looking for a pattern for a hat with earflaps. Last year I saw one, I thought in Knit Picks, Schoolhouse Press or perhaps Patternworks. I dilly-dallied and didn’t order it, and now I cannot for the life of me figure out where I saw it. I contacted Meg S., and apparently the pattern I saw is not one of hers or EZ’s, as the hat I remember also had mittens with it and was a green fair isle. I also looked through all the Knit Picks catalogs I have taking over and cluttering up laying around the house but to no avail. I spent no small amount of time online at Patternworks with the same result. Zip. Nada. Nothing. Double grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!
Recently I saw this cutie in one of the million catalog house’s catalogs we get, so I ordered it lickety-split. From the sales pitch info in the Petermanesque ad it is supposedly made in South America somewhere, Peru or Bolivia ~ can’t remember which.
When it arrived, I was a bit (or a lot) unhappy with the way the cables above the colorwork were all smushed down, so I promptly gave it a bath, hoping the alpaca would spring back to life.
But no. See. They are still smushed.
Too bad, because the detail is quite nice, and the hat has the best fit of any knitted hat I’ve ever worn. It has a helmet-like fit that adequately covers the ears and back of the head without coming down to my nose and over my eyes in front. Most of the hat patterns I have suffer from this decidedly dangerous design flaw. It's a bit difficult to see when driving with a hat that keeps sliding over one's eyes. If I ever have spare time, I’d like to see if I can reverse-engineer the thing to get the pattern. Yeah. That’ll be the day.
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