Walking and Weaving

We had a lot of rain a little while back, which was on top of snow.   If the snow pack is deep enough,  it will absorb a lot of the rain and hold it.   It wasn't though, and the temperatures were unseasonably mild, so a bit of rain made the snow heavy with the extra moisture.  Then the excess rain started collecting and running in little streams on top of the frozen ground.   Then, because it's been above freezing the snow melted, creating more water running.   The water ran from the fields beside our house, through our back yard and into the chicken coop soaking their bedding and then out to the neighbour's fields on the other side.   This is now the second time this winter we've had to change out the wet  bedding.

  Usually we use a deep bedding process in the chicken coop, where the chook droppings mix with the bedding and slowly start to compost, giving off a bit of heat in the cold. We just toss in a bit of fresh shavings periodically to cover eveything.  Not this year though.  Luckily chooks are pretty hardy animals.   They don't like the winter, that's for sure.  I let them out to free range and if there is no snow on the ground, they run to the bird feeder to see if there is a snack for the on the ground.   If there is snow, they barely peek out of the barn and they won't leave the area to feed anywhere else while the ground is cold.   

We went for a walk down one of our favourite trails a few days ago.  All this rain has left the area rivers and streams running high and in low areas there has been flooding.  This part of the trail was impassible due to the flooding.   You can see that the water level has already started dropping by the dark, wet marks on the tree trunks.  The water is flowing quite quickly too.  

Today we were at another trail, which has a much higher elevation.  There were a few muddy bits and one shady area which was a bit icy because the sun hasn't reached there yet.   Mostly though, it was easy to traverse.  We had sunshine today (gasp!), which was lovely.  We don't get a lot of sunshine here during the winter, so the trail parking lot was full of people out enjoying the weather.  The little lake is still mostly frozen.   There is one area that is open and another where you can see it starting.   It's not safe to walk on or play on although it can look deceiving. 

 I bought some pretty yarn a few days ago.  It was on sale for a good price.  It was purples and blues, with a silver metallic sparkle running through it.   I got only 2 balls because I'm pretty sure this won't sell or be a hit, but I really wondered what it would look like woven up.  The yarn is good acrylic and has a lovely hand: soft and drapey.    I separated all the colours and did a stripe to make a checky pattern.  I think this might have been better served leaving it as it was and just having random stripes as the amounts of each yarn varied.  As well some had a clear demarcation between colours and others had a long transition with the colours blending.   There was only enough of the teal to do those thin stripes, while there is tons of paler purple left.   I'm doing random weft stripes of the light purple and the darker blues, with a couple of the purple/red colour in between.  You can't really see the purple red stripes in the busyness of the other colours and all that freaking sparkly silver.  There is so much of it.  It sure didn't look like that in the skein. I'd be all over this yarn if it didn't have the sparkly ply because it's so easy to weave with.  I think so much sparkle takes away from the lovely colours and how they work together, and the softness of the yarn.

SO MUCH SPARKLE!