Winter is back

I had to turn the heat back on yesterday. They're giving freeze warnings for the next several nights. My lilac which was so beautiful is wilting now. Dominic brought the lawn mowers (both walk-behind ones; one is self-propelled) up from the back shed on Monday, filled them with oil and went around the corner for gas for them - Yes, tiny town does have a gas station. They both started with no problem, but he hasn't done any mowing yet. We were too busy with other things on Tuesday, and I guess it was a bit wet yesterday, and too cold today.

We went to two knitting groups on Tuesday - in Mayfield in the morning/early afternoon and in Paducah in the evening. The Mayfield group has two women who are just learning to knit, so they're meeting every week for a while. I'm glad Jo had started teaching them, because she's much better at teaching than I am. I can answer questions, demonstrate techniques, etc, but teaching is not my forte. They started with the garter stitch dishcloth that starts with three stitches and does yarnover increases. I think Betty Ann bought every color of Peaches & Cream that WalMart had and went to town knitting dishcloths, which she plans to give to neighbors for Easter. Julia had not gone quite as crazy - only five or six. Tuesday they were starting on a different dishcloth pattern and learning to purl.

So we spent about three hours at home (I was knitting, of course) and then headed for Paducah in time to get to the drug store before it closed at six. They only had half of the Thalidomide that I needed last week, so we had to pick up the rest of it. Then we had supper - taco Tuesday at Taco John's - and got to the coffee shop early for the Ewe-nique Knitters meeting. Valerie said come on in, so I was the first one there. I selected a table and started knitting. It wasn't too long before others started arriving, including Heather with the baby. Ben was born on Valentines Day and has already been to two knitting guilding meetings - think he'll be a knitter?

Knitting from stash 2007

Yes, I'm still knitting from my stash. My production for March consisted of 6 hats, 4 scarves, 4 short capes, 1 child's sweater, and 1 pair of slippers for me. The hats and scarves are mostly for the Seamen's Church institute. We dropped the capes off at a nursing home in Mayfield on Tuesday. The slippers are from some of my handspun wool. I made them bigger than I intended to, so I need to full them. All of this used 6.16 pounds of yarn, for a total of 16.62 for the year.

When my granddaughter called Saturday night, she asked me to make a blanket for her daughter to take to daycare - she said the one I made a year and a half ago when Rose was born is too nice for daycare. She wanted pink, with Rose's name in black. On Monday afternoon, I looked through my stash and found three 8-ounce skeins of Red Heart 4-ply in Raspberry. I decided to make a stitch sampler blanket - four blocks wide and five blocks long with garter stitch 'sash' between the blocks and a wider garter stitch border around the outside. I made the lower right block in stockinette stitch, on which I will duplicate stitch ROSE, not in black, but in a dark plum/purple called Roseberry. I'm ready now to start the fifth row of blocks and will soon have to start the third skein of yarn, so I guess the blanket will weigh between 17 and 18 ounces.

I love stitch dictionaries! Working on different stitches makes the knitting so much more interesting, and it seems to go faster. The capes I made for the nursing home residents were in lace patterns, except for one. I did that one in stockinette stitch because of the terrycloth texture of the yarn. It was soooo boring, I thought I would never finish.