Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I've been playing around a bit with kool-aid dyeing. So far, I've just experimented on a couple of random skeins of Knitpicks Wool of the Andes I had laying around. The firey skein was dyed over a skein of "cloud" which was a light cream color and the watery skein was dyed over a skein of "fog" which was light gray.

I'm loving the results and I'm anxious to order some undyed yarns to play around some more.

I may graduate to some actual commercial dyes if experiments continue to go well. For the moment, though, kool-aid is very fun and the results are great so far!



So, what am I thankful for this year?

I'm thankful that we have moved into a home that we love very much and is a huge improvement over the tiny apartment we were smooshed into for so long.

I am thankful that my kitty Nile is feeling better and very glad that she adopted us. Otherwise, she may have had nobody to help her through that nasty infection and likely would have died without the vet visits.

I am thankful for my family and friends. I am thankful for comfort and contentment. I am thankful for personal growth.

I am thankful that I met my husband and that we have each other to lean on when we need it.

Labels: dyeing, kool--aid

We have a very sick kitty on our hands this week. I've been to the vet for the last 4 days in a row to recheck temperature and re administer fluids. I'm a very worried little kitty mama and the stress is starting to really get to me.

So, I thought I'd cheer things up with some cookies.

Oatmeal Craisin Cookies

I left out the walnuts, used rolled oats instead of quick cooking oats, and I added 1/4 tsp of clove and 1/2 tsp of nutmeg in addition to the cinnamon.

Labels: cooking, food, recipes

We stepped outside and it was super foggy! I like how this picture turned out.

Labels: weather

This is my (not so) Noro Hat. I put some projects aside and cast on for this, focusing on this project only since Tuesday afternoon. I realized that the cheap Walmart stocking caps I had bought were really not doing a good job of keeping me warm, specifically my ears. I work outdoors and tend to get earaches regularly in the fall and winter if I don't keep them covered and warm.

Details:

Pattern - Noro Hat by Saartje de Bruijn
Yarn - Just under 2 balls of Patons SWS in Natural Denim
Needles - Knitpicks Options circulars, size 7

Notes:

This was, suprisingly, my first knitted hat. I don't really consider myself a beginner these days, but for some reason I've just never made a hat.

Patons SWS yarn is gorgeous and I have been in love with it and used it for several projects. However, it is equally as frustrating to knit with. It is splitty, has slubs and for some reason, I regularly find knots. The two balls I used for this project had at least two knots each. Ridiculous!

I used a 24" interchangeable circular. It didn't take long for the decreases to make everything fit too tightly on the circ, so at 75 stitches I decided to switch to DPNs because I don't have any smaller cables. Little did I know how utterly annoying it is to purl across needles with DPNs. I took the opportunity to try Magic Loop for the first time and I think it worked fairly well. I'm glad I added on a couple of longer cables when I ordered my Options set.

Labels: FOs, hats, knitting

Today was a beautiful day out! There won't be many of those left, so I spent a lot of the day working in the garden. Sometimes it's tricky getting into the right mood to work in my own gardens because I do landscaping for a living. Still, it's very satisfying when I do get a good day and a good mood for digging in the dirt.

I recently made this garden and it was full of gravel from the gravel drive/parking area. I spent a lot of time picking out as much of the gravel as possible today and then I added a nice layer of cotton burr compost mulch and planted some more pansies.

Pansies are awesome flowers, really. Plant them in the fall and they can actually survive the winter and bloom beautifully in the spring because they've had all that time to build their root systems. How the term "pansy" ever became an insult, I will never know.

As far as knitting goes, I've been working on my first sock and I'm already completely addicted to sock knitting. The Mystic Waters shawl is going quite well, although I'm very behind. I have a 6-day vacation coming up, so I'm hoping to do some catching up then.

Labels: gardening