So we are sitting there with a fire going, drinking beer, talking, and listening to music. Just a nice relaxing Saturday night.

Then I notice headlights shining across the field. Someone is at the house. Walk around the barn up towards the house and see that it’s a man in uniform knocking on our door.

My first thought was oh crud, there is a burn ban on and he’s here to give us a ticket. But no, the deputy sheriff walked down to meet me in the yard and said that some hikers were lost and from the GPS they were down the hill from us. Could he drive closer to that little valley? Sure.

He drives down and starts doing his siren, talking to the hikers on a cell phone. Can they hear that? Yes they can.

So he leaves with his flashlight, and I told him which way to go to find a path rather than a steep bluff.

Ron and I took the jump starter and our spot light to help things along a bit. Ron could hear them calling back and forth, and then pretty soon here came a girl scrambling up the side of the hill. It’s pitch black, no moon and pretty cold, too. I offered one of my jackets, but what she really wanted was a cigarette from Ron.

After a few minutes another girl came climbing up the hillside. She has a little puppy that she’s carrying. The deputy was close behind and we herded the girls around the pond to the deputies’ car. He gave them a bottle of water and moved stuff out of his backseat so they could get in the car.

It was 8 pm. I don’t know how long they’d been out there hiking, but they were definitely heading in the wrong direction! They’d started from Lincoln lake, which the entrance to is about 2 miles north. The lake itself is closer but it’s pretty dense woods down in that valley to be stumbling around in. Good thing they had a cell phone and could get a signal down in there… and really good that it had a gps signal. 21 year old kids, underdressed for hiking, and lost in the dark but they keep walking, sheesh!

The deputy could have shone his headlights and spotlight into the woods better, but he didn’t. The girls headed for our spotlight that they could see.

After they left, we sat around for a couple more hours talking about it. When you are lost, you aren’t supposed to keep walking… especially in the dark. That’s a good way to get hurt. If they had gone any further south from us they wouldn’t have been rescued as quickly, no good access from the road and no houses for a mile.

Anyhow, it’s not every day we get to be involved in a lost hiker rescue. :)

hugs,
Vyx

If anyone cares to comment pro or con… please do! I don’t always post links to FB, I don’t tweet… and I’m not even sure I have an RSS feed set up, lol!

Comments, please! Let me know!

hugs,
Vyx

This time changing up the pattern a bit, make the purse a bit larger and different colors.

I decided on pink and black. Had to mail order the fun fur, as no one carries it locally. Managed to find wool in the right colors at Hancock Fabrics… the only local store with a good selection of wool!

This is going to be my last knitting/felting project for a while. I need to do some stamping as I’m way behind on rak backs.

Anyhow, before and after photos…

Before felting… and then the bottom before felting, so you can see that this one is rectangular rather than square.

Just out of the washer!

And finally… with the little blue purse. Quite a size difference!

I guess I’m going to have to take it to work with me Monday, to show it off… then call Candice to come get her new purse. :)

Hugs,
Vyx

I couldn’t resist. I got a package of 5 stargazer lilies and two packaged peonies. I KNOW the darn things will be growing in the bags since they were in the store where it’s warm…. but it’s better to buy em now while the stuff is still alive.

Yesterday I was out digging holes. I planned to put the lilies out in my flower bed and the peonies up by the fence in front of the garage where we have another peony. So I started out digging one hole for the first peony. Not really that much digging… more digging the grass out and getting the rocks out. The dirt up in front of the garage… aside from the part we drive on… is WONDERFUL soil. Thick black dirt, not all clay… and not that many rocks, either. I love it when there aren’t a lot of rocks. The few I found I pitched through the fence to the cow pasture side. Ditto with the sod. But I dug up a huge piece of hinge… solid steel and pretty large. Plus a couple huge nails. Must be from the old farm that used to be here… the old farmhouse is in pieces slowly rotting away down at the bottom of the property.

Then I went over to my flower bed. I had Ron till up a strip a couple years ago… and he pried out a LOT of LARGE rocks. I added a few bags of good garden mix to it and planted brugsmansia and datura the first year. Last year I went with bags of clearanced glads. Tossed about 1/4 of what I bought, moldy or just dried up. I did have good glads last year, though. I ought to have better this year. I =thought= I was digging just outside of the strip and dug up some huge glad bulbs. Probably about 3x the size I planted. Great! I stuck em back in… hope I got em right side up, lol!

So I move over and dig some holes. It was a bit damp, but not muddy. I got a few lilies in and then went back to my peony hole to plant one of those. Surprise! Instead of just one peony in the package, I had two! Well, no problem, I’ll just put the extra one over in my flower bed. It can go where I had some sunflowers last year that didn’t get mulched. I stick my spading fork into the ground and pry… and up comes this whole yard of metal. Dig again and I get what looks like more of it. I’m not sure what it is… it looks like part of a rusted farm implement, something that would be dragged behind a tractor. What it’s doing under a fence and in between posts I don’t know. A bit of it had been sticking out, but I never tried to dig that deep last year in that spot. Good steel, just like the hinge piece… hardly rusted at all.

The trash that is at the bottom of the property is crazy… you can see pieces of roof with shingles. Old fridges laying on their sides with the doors hanging open… sheet metal… old pressure tanks from having to get well water out of the ground. Just lots of junk… and all covered over in summer with wild things growing and piles of brush getting tossed in. It’s actually great for wildlife.. the bits of roof make nice covers for animals that don’t actually dig burrows. Piles of brush left alone eventually break down and become dirt. We don’t really notice all that stuff in summer, it’s grown over. But winter… ugh. Could be worse, though… and I’m sure it would be if it didn’t have piles of old sticks and stuff thrown over it.

This is life in the country… and where no one outside of city limits had trash pick up until fairly recently. If you had the land… Just shove it over there, eventually it’ll rot away hopefully. Of course it doesn’t… My Mom’s property had trash pits all over it. When she had her pond dug, we were picking up plastic milk jugs for years. Plastic is forever. My Mom was good, though… she composts everything that can be, and then even before trash pick up would sort stuff out and save it up and haul it out to where the county would let rural customers take trash. Now she has trash pick up… she still composts. She does, however, still burn paper stuff. I’ve found that most people that live out in the country still do that. At least it’s just junk mail and cardboard from packaging… not trying to burn plastic milk jugs. That’s illegal here now, any burning of trash…. but I’ve also found that most people that live outside of town never heard about it. Probably the people that lived in town and had trash pick up voted on that, lol! There are the idiots still… people that don’t want to pay for trash pick up because they never have. They have DUMPS in their yards somewhere. Sometimes multiple dumps. Ugh!

It’s not nice digging up a bit of the yard for a flower bed and coming up with bits of old tin can and broken glass. Or pieces of old farm implements. From what we know, the previous owners of this property never had a vegetable garden…. too many rocks is what they said. That’s pretty unusual around here… everyone has a veggie garden, you did it because it was cheaper than buying food. If you had rocks… you picked them out, along with your children helping… because that is what people did. I’m still trying to find the old farm area where the garden was, though, lol! Ron did his picking up of rocks… he says that he thought he was going to end up with another pond. If you saw the pile of rocks you would understand. It’s HUGE. Perhaps the garden area was that section over where the peony is… NICE dirt. There is always a spot somewhere on an old farmstead where the dirt is good.

Anyhow. Today it rained most of the day and watered in all my new stuff. Now it’s going to flurry and then freeze again. Hope the peonies survive. Hope my new grapes survive. If not… well…we’ll see.

hugs,
Vyx

We don’t usually get this much snow in one winter. I won’t drive in the stuff, I’ve become a weather driving wimp in my old age. Seriously, though… I’ve gone to work only to find that my car won’t stop because they have ice and all we had was rain. So, when it snows or gets icey here, I stay home now. As long as the local schools are closed they won’t count it against me. (or so far, at least!)

Got up at a bit before 4 am this morning planning on going to work. Walk out to the living room where I can see through the window at my car and my car was covered in snow. At least 4 inches, and snow is still falling. Crikey! Can’t the weather guys get it right? It wasn’t supposed to start here until 6 am and this has been coming down for hours by the looks of things. I was gonna go to work and then keep a close eye on things and head home if it looked bad. I decided not to go after they closed the local schools.

From watching news reports all day, the roads were fine. Bit slushy is all… oh, and we have more snow here than where I work. That happens a lot around here. I got a foot of snow once in West Fork, and Springdale had maybe an inch… the job I was at back then was NOT happy with me for calling in. Hey, what can I do? My car can’t get out… I don’t own a 4WD or chains. I’m not risking my life… or risking wrecking my car by driving in it.

So I stayed home today. Got a lot of knitting done, and walked the beagle kids, too. Took the camera out early, and then again when I walked the beagle kids. Plenty of pictures, but could NOT get the photo I wanted of Sadie making snowballs by churning up the snow with her nose. She was doing this whole snow plow thing with her nose… but never when I had the camera out of my pocket.

More pictures… we did our usual walk, down around the pond and all. Underneath the snow there was quite a bit of water, and that melty stuff is gonna turn the roads into total ice slicks by morning. I’ll get up and check it out, but if I feel the least bit scared I’m staying home again. My job is gonna hate me.

I may not have these in the right order… but it’s all snow and all my beagle kids, lol!

They have a lot of fun running around… and they seem to like the snow!

I didn’t even mind walking around in it today… No snow forcing it’s way into my boots. I turned the edges of my coveralls under to fit tighter against my boots. Worked great.

Now, I know this wasn’t a lot of snow… and it wasn’t cold enough to make it stick to the roads like it usually does here. But it’s going to be a mess in the morning when it gets below freezing and freezes all that slush. What can I say? I’m a California girl, and the older I get, the more wimpy I get driving in bad weather. I’ve never been a really brave driver anyhow…. heavy rain will make me pull off the road. I’ve seen some heavy rain… rain that makes EVERYONE go slower… like 35 on the interstate. Well, except maybe the truckers and idiots that then wreck a few miles down. Seen it, don’t want it to be me. You ain’t getting me out there in conditions that can be worse with snow or ice.

Hope everyone enjoys the dog photos, though… they are such good furkids!

hugs,
Vyx

I used the old screen yesterday when I made more blackberry jam. Only took out 1 gallon bag and one pint bag from the freezer. Cooked them up, ran the stuff through the food mill twice just like before. Ended up with WAY too much juice/pulp for the amount of jam I wanted to deal with, so I put the extra into a labeled container in the freezer.

This time around I made sugar-free jam. I have a friend who is diabetic and so I said I’d make some jam for her, too. I couldn’t do sweetener free… that would be too tart… so I opted to go with Splenda. The recipe calls for 1.5 cups of Splenda if using. (you can also use sugar with the “no sugar needed” pectin, up to 3 cups, which is WAY less than a normal batch would use)

It gelled quite nicely, but is slightly on the tart side. Tastes great, though, and that’s what is important, right? I got 4 full jars (1/2 pint size) and an almost full jar that I will put in the fridge until my friend comes to visit.

Instead of throwing the seed stuff out in the field… this time I put it on a cookie sheet covered in foil and stuck it in the oven to dry. I’m thinking that it would make a good addition to homemade suet cakes. I don’t usually feed the birds here, but I can see finding some places for suet cakes when it’s all snowy or icy. When it’s totally dry I’ll break it up and store it until I can get some suet or lard to mix up with birdseed and stuff and form into cakes for the birds. (there are tons of recipes online if you feed birds)

Made labels again, too. Probably forgot to mention that I spent about 2 hours fixing a photo of a berry until I could use it on a label, lol! I have a really ancient program that I use to make stickers/labels. It doesn’t really like to run in Vista but it does…. and I can import art, but only if it is in bitmap form! I keep using the program, though, because I can move things =exactly= where I want them. I’ve tried to make good labels with other programs but this old program that came with my first Canon printer is the one I use. I use it for my return address labels, stamping swap labels… anytime I need a label or need to tweak things better than I can do with other programs I own. Only bad thing is that it doesn’t do barcodes for shipping labels. Oh well, can’t have everything, right? I even do baggie headers with this program, as a custom sheet.

On to other stuff. Friday I bought a carpet cleaner machine. Mid-range priced Bissell. My little dog Rita is on medication now for congestive heart failure and it makes her pee more. She’s not hitting the potty pads all the time and I was starting to smell it. Can’t really do anything about how much time she’s outside, as I’m gone for over 12 hours a day. I hate wall to wall carpeting… it’s just a big dirt suck and needs constant vacuuming and cleaning, especially if you have pets. I’m not big on house cleaning anyhow… but the carpets here are a disaster. Not all my fault…. gosh knows how old the carpeting is here and no one ever took care of it. But I can’t have the smell of dog pee, so I have to clean the carpeting where Rita has “missed” her pads.

I vacuumed first of course, and we do have a decent vacuum… so good that you can’t get through one room without having to empty it. Like I said, the carpets are dirt sponges. Then I ran the carpet cleaner 3 times over the area I was doing… twice with cleaning solution and once with plain water. It still stinks… and the carpet isn’t really clean yet. But I was worried about putting too much water into it in one day.

I will be doing over probably next weekend… and until I get the smell out… which may be never! But I’ll try, that room is the one designated as the guest room. Oh, and I blocked Rita from going in there, moved her potty pads and put them where she HAS to hit them in a small area blocked around.

More other stuff…. :)

Early today Ron went out to feed the cats and take Rita out. No cats were on the porch, but when they heard the food hit the dishes they came running…. including Wild Thing who came running from the barn with a giant RAT in his mouth! Silly cat! He sets it down so he can eat kibble, and another cat takes it to play. The rat is still very much alive. They kept taking it from each other and Rita finally came up into the area and got very excited. She IS a rat terrier, you know! Ron made her come in the house… she got her treat, and then she kept jumping up to the window to watch the cats and going to the door and whining. So, Ron let her back outside. She ran out and attacked the rat, gave it a shake, dropped it and let the cats have it again. Ron said she yelped, too, so she might have got nipped by the rat and that’s why she dropped it… but she was done, she had her turn at it and came back in the house all proud of herself. As many rats as these cats get down in the barn, well, the barn must be seriously infested. (oh, and Wild Thing is a BOY cat, not usually the best hunters, but all the boys we have now seem to be)

It’s Superbowl Sunday, and I have no plans on watching… I never do. Always miss all the good commercials, lol! Today is also what I think of as the anniversary for Ron and I. We took each other to meet our Mom’s on Superbowl Sunday. Things were great when I met his Mom… Beulah told lots of stories and told me how much happier Ron seemed since he met me. Then we went to my Mom’s house and she had a house full of people drinking and talking politics. When we left there I was thinking… OMG, he’s gonna run away screaming and never want to see me again. But all he said was… “No Bush fans in that house, were there?” And here we are, all these years later… a gazillion cats that I’ve named, a very prolific blackberry bush, the adoption of 3 dogs and the moving of one here, and kids moving in and out. I cook, Ron cleans it up most of the time… and we work different shifts and miss each other a lot. We take time to have fun together… and manage to talk every day. I’m still his computer guru and he’s still my mechanical guy. Long live Ron and Vyx together! :)

This is all for now…

Hugs,
Vyx

I had planned on making jam this weekend, lots of it. We have that huge thornless blackberry hedge (below) that started out as a single cane the year I met Ron. I can only make so many pies and cobblers and blackberry buckles… I really need to make jam, too. This year I think I’m going to have to work harder at selling some of the blackberries. I offered them up free to anyone who would pick them last year and I still put a gazillion bags into the freezer.

I took 3 gallon bags out of the freezer Thursday night to make jam. Just had a look in the freezer and there are 2 more gallon bags… plus 6 quart bags! That is just from this past year… I took a couple gallon bags to my friend over in Oklahoma last year when I visited. LOTS of berries!

Anyhow, in preparation of the big blackberry jam making, I went to visit my Mom and borrow her food mill. I absolutely cannot stand seeds in berries. I dislike them so much that I won’t usually even eat fresh strawberries… the crunching seeds in my teeth makes me forget how wonderful they taste. I can make all the blackberry pie and such that Ron will eat, but I don’t eat any of it myself because of those seeds.

Mom bought this food mill a few years ago. It’s really wonderful at getting the seeds out… I’ve used it previously on raspberries. Mom uses it for tomatoes, but hasn’t used it in a few years. The funny thing is, we don’t even have the berry screen… just the standard screen that it came with. The berry screen is supposed to even get strawberry seeds out… but the standard screen works great at getting out regular berry seeds and tomato seeds.

So, there we have the machine processing the cooked berries. The instructions do NOT say to cook things first. What I did yesterday was try to process the thawed berries without cooking. They were still a bit frozen but squishy, so I thought the machine could handle it if I went slow.

To make a long story slightly shorter… it couldn’t. The screen broke apart from the bit that holds it to the machine. AUGH! When we looked at it, it was easy to see why… it only had 2 good welds on it and those were both about an inch apart… so the rest of it wasn’t really welded. Pop goes the screen.

I was freaking out… this belongs to my Mom, and now I have to find a replacement part. I did, too. This is an older model but I found a place online selling replacement parts for it and bought one. The internet is great! But I’ve got a dilemma here… what the heck do I do with 3 gallons of thawed out berries? Refreeze them and do this when my replacement part comes? Get seeds out the old fashioned way, with a sieve? (blargh, but that would take forever)

Ron came to my rescue. He has a MAPP gas welding kit. He got it out of the garage and let it all come up to room temperature, and then he welded the screen back to the holder bit. Not a perfect job…. but at least it will hold so that I can get on with my jam making!

While the whole welding thing was pending, I packed most of the berries into a canister and put them back in the freezer. (bags were leaking) The partial bag I dumped out into a pan on the stove and brought them up to simmer. By the time the welding was done and the machine put together to make sure it would work… well, it was late and I was tired of messing around. I got the canister back out of the freezer and put it in the fridge.

Bright and early this morning I got the canister out of the fridge and poured it all into a pot to cook. Didn’t cook it long, just enough to soften things up a bit. I also decided to use the grape spiral for the machine, instead of the regular (longer) spiral. Blackberries have a lot of seeds and they also have a pithy center.

This is what you get out of the end of the machine….

Looks like a lot of pulp left in that too. And it was, so I did like they recommend with the grape spiral and put all the waste back through the machine again. Probably could have gone one more time but the bowl of good stuff was nearly full at that point.

I forgot to take photos of any of the rest of the jam making process… or the jars all filled and everything. I made 3 batches of jam today, and now have 6 pint jars and 12 half pint jars of SEEDLESS blackberry jam. There were a couple teaspoonfuls left in the pot after the last batch… so I made some toast and used that up! :)

Still have a bit of clean up to do… as soon as I was done with the last batch of jam this afternoon we went out to walk the dogs in the 8 inches or so of snow we got. I should have taken the camera, it was really beautiful down by the pond. I did upload some more photos, though… continuing yesterdays picture story of the yard. So I’ll just paste them in here…

First, the yard last night just after dark. It was still snowing, and the flash helped catch that.

Then again this morning. The snow had stopped falling, but the sun never actually came out today.

The big tree and the neighbors house… not the exact view as last year, but you could still compare it a bit…..

One of my bluebird houses. Good thing the birds don’t need them this time of year, that’s a lot of ice hanging on it.

Last picture for tonight… the west side of the storm shelter and how much snow piled up on the wood pile. The snow was blowing from the east…. so the boat on the east side of the cellar has no snow on it to speak of. Looks like about 2 feet of snow on the wood. We didn’t get that much snow… only about 6 or 8 inches….

I’m very tired, and my feet hurt. Walking dogs in the snow was fun, though. Right up until I realized I was packing snow up the legs of my jeans and coveralls with every step. Bits started falling into my boots, lol! The snow is pretty deep… beagle tummies were brushing it as they walked.

hugs,
Vyx

We got about a half inch of ice. It was still doing the freezing rain this morning, but switched over to sneet and then finally snow around noon. The above photo is a close up of the walnut tree branches. Below is the yard… and I tried to get a photo of this view about every 2 hours today.

When it changed to sneet or sleet or whatever it was, it was hard to tell, except more white stuff showed up on the ground.

When it finally started snowing it was coming down heavy. I tried to get photos of the snow falling, but with a point and shoot camera that I don’t really know how to use very well… it didn’t work out. But here is some snow…

It’s STILL snowing. The wind is blowing like crazy, too… and from the north east. Weird, very weird. This storm system is moving steadily to the east, so why the heck is the snow blowing from the east? Ah, I guess it’s because of the layers of weather interacting… but it’s still very weird in my opinion!

More snow…

Some more snow before it got too dark to take pictures. Well, I do have a few more on the camera, might post em later.

In case anyone has forgotten, clicking on a photo opens up a bigger view of it. I resized all photos to about 800 px wide, so they aren’t too huge but get you a bit more detail.

Hardly anyone in the area has lost power… the electric companies did a good job of getting the right of ways cleaned up good. The biggest power outage I’ve heard of was when a car took out a major pole. Duh, stay HOME when the roads are bad. I can’t believe how many people feel like they HAVE to go somewhere when the roads are so messed up. I just took photos of someone in a pick up truck turning around almost in our driveway. He had about a 10 inch hole of cleared windshield, maybe wipers not working. Not going fast, but someone was behind him. Backing out, well he wasn’t IN our driveway quite, so he backed out in the fairly deep ditch. Made it okay tho, must have 4WD. He turned around and went back the other way (north)…. it’s still quite a bit of climb from here going south. Going north its a slide down to the lake, then a climb… and then either more up or more down and up depending on which way you go. I know the snow will drift really bad over the top of the hill south of us… if I’ve got 6 inches of snow in the yard that hill will probably have a lot more on top.

South is town, well, the small town closest to us. I don’t need anything. But I’m sure there are other people who do… even though we had a LOT of warning on this storm.

So, that’s the weather report…

Hugs,
Vyx

That was an inch or more of ice. The weather guys are saying that we are going to get from 1/4 of an inch to maybe 1 inch of ice this storm coming in. A quarter inch of ice is enough to do damage, I don’t know what will happen to our poor trees if we get a whole inch of it!

Only good thing is that it’s not supposed to hit us until tomorrow afternoon. I’ll probably be able to get in a full days work and then zoom home and hunker down until it melts. Hmm, maybe better would be able to miss work, but I need the money.

I have plans for the weekend, anyhow. Stay at home and cook jam plans. I’m going to be doing seedless blackberry jam until I either run out of sugar and pectin or jars, whichever comes first. I know I won’t run out of blackberries… I haven’t counted the gallon bags in the freezer, but there are a LOT of them.

I hope I don’t wake up Friday to something like this photo…

Hugs,
Vyx

Well, I’m home from work early… They let us leave at 1 pm. Closer I got to home, the more rain… and ice already forming on things! Augh!

With mx dyes there is always a lot of wash out. Excess dye that didn’t bind to the fabric and has to be rinsed out. Not so with acid dyes!

So I took some photos. This first one is of the yarn going into the murky dye pot. I left a bit sticking out so you could see the color it was. (pale lime green, almost yellow, yuck!)

When the water gets to a certain temperature, the dye magically disappears into the yarn. (the magic temp was 150 F for me) The water was still faintly blue, but you can see all the way to the bottom! Couldn’t do that before!

That was so cool… I mean, I was expecting it to happen, did quite a bit of reading online before attempting to dye wool… but still, nothing like seeing it in real life!

The almost dried yarn looks like this next photo, a very blue green. It’s also quite tangled, I didn’t tie off the yarn more like I’d done with longer skeins in the coral to red/brown batch. I tied off the second batch of this with some cotton yarn before putting it into the dye pot, though. Can’t be having a bunch of tangled yarn! (sorry about that, Jan, it’s gonna be a chore winding this)

Second batch is cooling in the dye bath and will get rinsed/washed as soon as I can put my hand into the water and have it not feel too warm. Sometime before bedtime, I hope, so that it can dry overnight and get mailed early this week. Er, of course Jan may not approve of this color… so I may be doing over and changing it somewhat. Hey, but at least it’s not pale yucky lime any more!

Lastly for tonight… while I was waiting on dye bath to cool down yesterday I finished knitting my hat. Now, previously I’ve only knitted 2 fun fur scarves and a purse that got felted. Just basic garter stitch, aside from a few rows of purling on the purse. I was sort of experimenting on this hat I made with cheap acrylic yarn… to see if I might like knitting anything fancier than just plain old knitting every row. I do love knitting in the round… if I had to do stockinette stitch by switching between purling and knitting it would NEVER come out as even as it does with circular needles. I knit very tightly, and I purl very loosely. Switching between those, like for the ribbing… Big Holes. But as you can see, I managed to do some more garter stitch that came out pretty good.

The bottom of the hat was done back and forth until I wanted to switch to stockinette, then I went to knitting in the round. I think it came out pretty good, considering I was knitting without a pattern. It’s not as long as it should be, I underestimated how far it would go when I got to decreasing at the top. The decreasing bit was fun… I realized about the 3rd round that it was NEVER going to work continuing on the circular needle. Switched over to DPN’s and went a little smaller because my bamboo DPN’s are in metric and the corresponding American size was actually a bit larger. It’s easier to switch to smaller needles than to larger needles when you knit as tightly as I do.

While knitting the hat I also tried to train myself to knit in the continental style, with the yarn held in the left hand. I got good at it… but my rows got tighter and tighter and I had to switch back to right hand yarn after the 3rd round or so. Could BARELY get the needle in at that point. It’s probably just a matter of practice… I’ve also taught myself a bad habit knitting the hat. Using my fingertips to poke at the tips of the needles while working stitches. I’ve got a fairly well bruised right index finger, so with my next project (already started) I’m trying to untrain myself at that. Hey, I’ve got so I can sort of watch tv while knitting… long as I remember to look over the reading glasses when I look at the tv, lol!

Expecting Ron’s daughter Candice to come over in a little while… she needs to use the computer… plus I want to talk to her. My new project is something I think she’ll like… but it may have to be the next project after this one. We’ll see.

Hugs,
Vyx