Of Dinosaurs and freshly spun yarn

I can post this now.  It's a dinosaur made of handspun and dyed yarn.   It was a wedding shower gift for my soon to be daughter in law, who when asked what the dress code was for the wedding was to "wear whatever makes you feel awesome, even if it's a dinosaur costume".  Then she said she kind of hopes someone wears a dinosaur costume.   Since I couldn't do the dinosaur costume,  I figured I could make her a stuffy to keep the fun going.   It's a free pattern on Ravelry and was actually for a dragon.  I left the wings off.  I was going to put a little tulle veil on it, but it didn't quite work with the spines on the back.  It didn't look finished without the spines, so I left off the wedding veil.

I'll have to admit, I do like the partners my kids have chosen.  

I just finished spinning and plying up 450g of Blue Faced Leicester top.   It went pretty quickly and I need to figure out what I'm going to do with it.   It still needs to be wet finished and dyed.   It's a light Worsted/DK grist before wet finishing.   I'm guessing it will bloom a bit and be a worsted yarn when I'm done.

I have some more of the Dorset fleece which still needs to be washed.   It's supposed to be a Dorset /Friesian cross, which actually works with the Dorset, making it a bit softer and nicer to work with, although Dorset is a fairly nice mid-grade fleece to begin with.   I also have some Icelandic that I need to wash up before the May long weekend.   It's an absolutely lovely fleece. It has a great colour, a defined Tog and Thel.  And I rather dislike actually spinning Icelandic fleece.   I'm using it for a class to get rid of it.

I attended a wedding shower this weekend.  It was lovely.  It was held in an old building, now a distillery, with old stone walls, wooded floor and a few antiques scattered around.  The atmosphere was great.  There were treats, a few activities but no actual games.  One activity was making bouquets (the wedding theme is wild flowers).  There were bunches of flowers and greenery, and little bags with tiny vases in them.   Most people made lovely bouquets, trimming the flowers to fit.   However, because there was no water for those vases to make transporting easier, I made a scraggly bouquet and just sort of put the flowers willy nilly in the vase.   When I got home, I trimmed them up nicely and popped them into the now water filled vase.  They are pretty now and now looking wildly over grown.    

The garlic is coming up in the garden nicely.   Some of it is about 8 inches tall already.   Garlic is an early sprouting plant to begin with.  Having been planted in a raised bed may help because the soil often seems to warm up a bit earlier.  As well we've had crazy amounts of rain so maybe all the conditions have aligned.   It did snow yesterday, crazy heavy flurries on and off.  I had to scrape ice off my car this morning too!  Which I find an unhappy task at any time during the winter, but more so in April!

 

Still winter here..

 

Finally the Great Lakes are frozen enough that the constant lake effect snow squalls have eased off.  Despite it still being stupidly cold, we've had a couple of sunny days and a couple of sunny-ish days, where it was bright, although there was cloud cover and those lovely white/grey wintery skies we get here.   We've also had hoar frost, and icy fog which is both beautiful and odd at the same time.  

This was first thing this morning, just a bit after sunrise.  A few minutes later, I was heading into town and had to put my lights on because that little layer of fog, became a heavy, almost engulfing fog, which lasted until about 10 minutes after I got home  an hour and a half later.   Literally 10 minutes after I'd gotten home and made some tea, I looked out to see no fog, and sunshine.   A happy surprise for sure, but a surprisingly quick switch in the weather.

At least it wasn't -23C when I left the house this morning.  It was a balmy -17C and had actually warmed up to -14C when I got home.  The local groundhog has predicted an early spring.  Realistically, even if we get 6 more weeks of winter, that's doing pretty good. 

 I remember the year we got the sheep.  They arrived in March and it was -25 during the day and much colder at night.  They were about to lamb and did so before the cold weather broke.   With the birth of the first lamb, I ended up routing through the kids cast off sweaters,  found a couple and cut the arms off to make little lamb sweaters because I worried that these tiny babies with no body fat wouldn't survive the cold.  I slipped them on after mama had finished cleaning them up and they'd dried off.   Neither the lambs nor the mamas cared and a few days later, the babies had outgrown the sweaters, had nice fluffy coats and were thriving.   I don't think they actually needed the sweaters, but it made me feel better!   

This is what I made during the past couple of evenings.  He's a free pattern from Ravelry.  The yarn is some of my early spinning, that I dyed with woad that I'd grown.   The green is leftovers from the green shawl I'd just made.   The yarn is a bit uneven with some thicker and thinner sections.  It's been in my hand spun bin for years.   I believe that beginner handspun yarn should be used, even if it's years later.   He's cute.    I use safety eyes on some of my knitted stuffies.   To make sure those eyes stay put, I cut a square of felt, cut a tiny slit or x in it.  I put the eye through the knitted fabric, then I put the square of felt over the post of the eye, and then put the safety back on the post.   It pretty much holds those eyes solidly in place.

Afterthought lifeline

simple shawl with handspun yarn

I'm using up a bunch of odds and ends of handspun yarn to make a shawl.  I've been dyeing much of it as it was various shades of white.  Most of it is a merino/silk blend but there are a couple of skeins of plain merino yarn as well.  I didn't date these bits and pieces but some of the skeins may be over a decade old, just sitting, waiting to be used.   It's the problem when you get 100g or 200g bags of fibre to try.  It's a great sample but what do you do with it afterwards?  It's not enough for much other than mitts or hats.   So I've been saving it and looking through a bin or two, I realised that I had a lot of it.   I'm hoping I have enough to make a reasonably good sized shawl, since I like a more functional garment rather than a decorative one.   It's a simple pattern, with stockinette stitch stripes, with a yarn over pattern between them.  It's slower than the last couple of shawls that I knit that were garter stitch, but easier to keep track of since the front and back are different, and increases are all on the back.    

lifeline added picking up stitches from back

I've knitted almost to the halfway mark, and my fingers are crossed that I don't run out of yarn.  There is a lot of pale green, grey and that peachy pink colour but not so much of the darker greens.   I tried some blue which I thought was the same weight, but turned out to be totally not at all.  I didn't like the way it felt, being so much thicker, so after 3 rows I decided it had to go.  I couldn't imagine frogging each stitch individually since there are already almost 200 stitches per row.  The problem was that I was going to have to rip back to a yarn over row so picking up the stitches from the front was going to be more difficult.   A quick search showed a method of picking up the stitches from the back and for the yarn over row, this was perfect.   It took only a few minutes to take a darning needle threaded with crochet cotton to pick up all the stitches.   I did a quick check, found one missed stitch, but it was only 7 stitches from the end of the row, so I slipped them off the needle and re-picked them up.   I checked again, decided it was good and I will admit that I did hold my breath a bit while I pulled that lifeline out.   Success!  It looks good.

needle threaded through the stitches on lifeline

I'm ready to knit again.   I'm not sure I like that peachy colour, so may need to over-dye it to tone it down a bit.   I don't have enough grey to alternate stripes but the pale green looks like it works as a lighter colour as well.   I'm still wondering how come it turned out so pale, while the other skein with it, was so dark.  Looking at the photos, I'm really glad I got rid of the blue.  I'm also really happy about the technique of picking up a lifeline from the back of the work.  It was so easy.