Winter is nearly over

At least here in the Ozarks, and I'm glad. The weather's slowly getting better, though it's still off-and-on pretty cold. Currently, I'm freezing my butt off sitting outside the library near the plant because it's the closest place with free wifi to the house, but unfortunately, they aren't open on Sundays, so it's sit outside and be cold in order to hijack the electric plug, lol. But it's not too bad - the area's fairly sheltered from the weather and wind, so if it gets too bad, I can sit in the car.

Things have been still kind of slow, though I did finally get a chance to price out the gear needed for the bailer bucket. Quentin's determined to "help" with the project, and I'm just as determined NOT to have his help. Not that I don't appreciate it, but he has the annoying (to me) habit of "modifying" things to "make them better" (his way of thinking), but which do not accomplish the task at hand the way I say I want it done. It gets done, just not how I envisioned it, and the windlass and bailer bucket are MY projects, so essentially, the worst part of getting them done is getting him to stay out of them. I love the man to death, but he can be a bit TOO helpful at times.

I'm getting my seed list together, and hope to start getting things ordered next weekend. I'd hoped to do it this weekend, but ... errr ... I kind of forgot my seed catalogs and I don't want to have to  hunt through seed catalog websites to find what I'd picked out, because I know me. I would end up trying to order some of every kind of heirloom thing they had instead of sticking to the plan. Me and books, yarn shops and seed catalogs go great together - as long as I have unlimited funds to spend.

A lot more trash got burned this week, thankfully, so the piles around the place are finally starting to look like smaller piles instead of these huge, unmanageable piles of junk that will never get cleared up. One of the first things I intend on planting is a few of those $6 butterfly/hummingbird garden flower strip things from the local Big Lots, because for just a few bucks, I can have pretty flowers pretty much guaranteed to grow, and it will attract a lot more of the butterflies and hummingbirds I saw some of last summer. I will say that there's one good thing about all the off-and-on freezing weather we've had, in that it's caused a lot of the ticks and grasshoppers to hatch out early, only to freeze to death when the next cold snap hit, hopefully alleviating some of the miserable conditions with the things we had last year.

It's hard to believe that it's been five months since we got moved, and nearly a year since we took over the property and started clearing it up. Sometimes, it seems like we've not gotten much done, but then I look around and remember what a total mess it was to begin with, and realize that it's more accomplished in a year, while working full-time, than most couples manage with only one person working full-time. The house is comfortable, we've got our entertainments, and plenty of food and clean clothes, and movies to watch if the satellite goes out for whatever reason, and goodness knows, I've got tons of knitting and crocheting and spinning to get done. Winter's nearly over and I've not gotten nearly the amount of needlework and spinning done that I wanted to get done, but I blame having to work, lol. It takes time away from all my fun.

I got a few pictures taken from the start of that afghan I mentioned I was working on, which is now about 20% done ... I have a long ways to go to finish it and use up all those scraps of mine. But here's a few photos of how I got it started, for those inerested.

This shows several stitches on the knitting needle already - I'm using a US7 60" bamboo cable needle so it's plenty big enough to hold all the stitches, and I can knit the 'ghan in one piece this way. I crocheted a starting chain around 275 or so stitches with an H hook, and the last loop for the chain became the first loop of "cast on" for the beginning of the afghan.

This one came out a bit blurry, but to pick up a new stitch, I insert the crochet hook in the back bar of the starting chain ....

yarn over, and pull a loop through.

I make the loop big enough to go over the end of the knitting needle ....

And then snug it down so it's at normal cast-on tension. Once I've worked my way across the crochet chain, I leave it and keep on working. It's very similar to provision cast-on, other than I don't use a scrap piece of yarn for the chain, I use the same ball I'm going to start knitting with, and work the chain as if I were going to do a crocheted afgahn. This just saves me counting and ripping and counting and ripping a lot on the beginning of the afghan, and also gives me a nice edge on both sides that looks like they are both knitted bind-off.

But it's getting chilly, and I have a lot to do before I go home and hopefully I can manage to get it all done before I freeze.  Haha. Till next time!