At least the strips were mainly serendipitous. I don't usually bother with making matchy matchy striped socks when I use self striping yarn. There tends to be a lot of waste with the yarn, trying to find matching points. Smaller bits and pieces of leftover yarn are harder to keep track of. Then sometimes the balls are wound with the stripes going one way on one ball and the other on the next, or there is a knot in the middle, changing up the pattern and making for more waste. Once I even found the striping pattern reversing it self part way through the skein and I couldn't find a suitable starting point on the second skein, so matching would be a horror with that one. Toward the end of the foot on the 1st sock, I hit a knot. I untied it and just kept knitting because matching wasn't going to be an issue I was worried about.
When I got to the toe, I grafted off and started the second sock. I decided to use up the rest of the first ball of yarn because it's easier to keep track of one larger leftover ball rather than two smaller bits of leftovers. It sure surprised me when the stripes just started matching of their own accord! So much at perfectly matching, that I rewound the second skein to get the strips running in the right direction and then forwarded through the yarn to what I'd hoped would be a good matching point to continue on. Even when I came to the knotted point, I realized that the small ball of yarn I'd wound off was almost a perfect starting point to match up the oversized grey stripe on the toe. In the end, I used up the entire smaller bit that I'd wound off to finish up and have only the one leftover cake of yarn left. Not my normal, lazy, everyday sock routine, but they do look nice.
Some of our kids got together and sent us to the big city for a couple of days. We got a set of train tickets, we were met at the train station, taken out to lunch, and then went back to my son's for a visit. After the visit, we were ensconced in a downtown hotel, taken for dinner and then to see Les Miserables! It was an awesome evening. The next day we spent more time visiting and then went to the Bata Shoe Museum, which was cool although the modern sneaker exhibit was much less to my liking that the historical shoes. My sweetie realized afterwards that we could have gone to the Hockey Hall of Fame instead and was a little disappointed at his timing at that thought. Oh well, next time.
My son lives just a couple of blocks from Romni Wools, which meant I'd had to visit. I'd not realized it was their Boxing Day Sale, which was 25% off everything. I found this lovely combo of Merino roving - just standard Louet offerings, but it's so nice to work with. If' I'd realized it was such a huge sale, I'd have probably bought more but I got what I needed for a project which has been simmering in the back of my mind, so all is good.
I'm tired of the bitter cold. The bird feeder has been emptied every single day until the Crows came back. They tend to keep some of the Blue Jays and Mourning Doves away. Considering we've been feeding 8 Blue Jays and over a dozen Mourning Doves, along with dozens of Juncos and dozens of finches, sparrows and wrens, it might not be such a problem. Before we put the wire fence around the garden space, a small group of Crows would come and clean up the fallen seed, mainly uneaten millet and strut around the yard, following the buried rodent trails I found out later, during the spring melt. However once the fence went up, they stayed away. This extreme cold has them back though. First just one, with 18 of them standing guard. Now the whole family of 4 or 5 is back, still with the rest of them standing guard. They are pretty wary but after a couple of days of watching them, I was able to get my camera out and take their photo through the window. I don't mind them hanging around though because they do clean up what the other birds don't eat, which means much less waste and less weeds in the spring, from the germinating bird seed.
The degreaser (orange Zep) comes with all sorts of horrid warnings, like keep away from sparks and to let sit for 1 minute on surfaces before removing, among them, but I put a small amount in a sink full of hot water and put in my handful of greasy fibre. I left it about 1 minute and I could visibly see the water get cloudy and icky. When I pulled the fibre out, there was a noticeable change. I washed it 2 times normally afterwards, with 2 rinses. The fibre is perfectly clean! It's soft, not overwashed and brittle. There isn't any felting at all. While I still despair at having to pick out the tons of VM, I'm thrilled with the fact that this fibre is clean and not sticky at all.
