More crafty birthday presents!
My little brother Jake turned 26 last week and we celebrated with a festive dinner at my parents' house. My present to him, knitted this month in down moments and sometimes while playing legos, was a fair isles hat using the remnant yarn from his sweater vest.
night owls demand flash photography
This is my first 'completed' project involving fair isles technique... I've done my share of color stripping in other projects but not until recently did I feel confident enough to attempt carrying two colors at the same time. I'll admit, it's both easier and harder than you think. The knitting part is fairly easy switching between colors (especially when you throw the yarn like I do in the fashion of gaudy Americans), but just like everyone says you gotta get serious religion about passing the second yarn LOOSELY in the back. You can see the hat is a bit tighter in the snowflake part, evidence of my failure on the latter point. Oh well. A learning experience, certainly, and a fun break from the HEAVY DUTY two-color project I'm working on for Dan.
I was afraid the night-time flash photos might not come out, so I made Dan model the hat for me earlier in the day. Look at what a cutie he is! He just might need his own earflap hat some day, even though he swears he doesn't want one.
my winter woodsman
(Pay no attention to the state of our living room unfortunately also picutred.)
It was also my father's birthday last week, but thankfully for him he didn't need to submit to my knitting whimsies. Instead he got some wine (not homemade... we're not quite up to that yet...) and a set of homemade candles, which is to say some old candles re-melted into baby food jars and fitted with new wicks. This project seemed a bit of a cop-out to me, a little more recycled than upcycled, but whatever. There's new candles and a few less baby food jars in our basement. Hopefully with the next baby I won't be working full time come solid food stage, and I'll have more opportunity to make my own baby food. Then I won't be sitting around saying to myself, what can I do with all these jars?
candles in baby food jars
All in all it was a big weekend for birthdays, which is rather satisfying for me seeing as birthdays and holidays are the only thing that gets me finishing any projects around here.
breathless anticipation
up on the rooftop
We're told there's yet another storm headed our way. Usually by this point in the season New Englanders would have become blasé about snowfall, but this hasn't been anything like a normal winter, and the constant succession of blizzards seems to have keyed us all up to the point where news of the latest prospective snow has sent everyone into a frenzy of frantic preparation. Me, it sent up onto the roof of the porch.
nice view from up here
Actually, as it happens the frenzy is far from being entirely due to psychological reasons. There's an awful lot of snow around here already, and no one is really sure where we're going to put the next load; or, as it happens, if our roofs will be able to handle it. Breathlessness, then, comes both from excitement (or fear, depending on temperament) and from all the work we had to do to clear some room for the next few days of snow removal.
snow I get to shovel twice
Actually, the caption to that picture doesn't even go far enough: in fact I had to move some of that snow three times. First I chucked it off the roof, then I cleared it from the steps; then this evening I spent some time rearranging the piles and pushed it off the top of one of them. I was so proud of the elegant way I prepared my heaps of snow to be added to that I wanted to take a picture of that too, but it was after dark. Oh well, it'll only get more impressive tomorrow.