Spring is in the air..

Spring is in the air, and Christmas is right around the proverbial corner. While everythings getting beautiful outside, it's getting pretty overwhelming inside.

My spring knitting is going along. I'm well over halfway on my "surpise" project, but needless to say, I can't show the progress or results. That will have to wait until sometime after Christmas. Still, I'm knitting 4 peices of a garment more or less simutaneously so that I know I have enough of each color to make an equal size stripe (relative to the size of the peice) on each peice. It's going well, but slower than I would like.

I finished up the Fetching fingerless mitts. They turned out well, I think, but a bit shorter than I would like for me personally. When I make me a pair, I'll likely add some length to the body. Just a couple or 4 rows should do it, and I might still get away with using only one ball. But my cousin has daintier hands than my chubby ones, so likely they will be perfect on her.




I haven't started on anything else, although I do plan on doing a couple of beanies, time permitting. I may start one up soon, as the jumper is getting a big big to be carrying around with me, even peice by peice.

I haven't had time for much spinning lately. The only spinning at all that I've done was to ply together the two randomly Koolaid dyed rovings I had spun up a few weeks ago. They had sat there on the bobbin for a couple of weeks. I was determined to just do the knitting I needed to do, but finally I gave in to the temptation and plyed them together. Here they are right off the niddy noddy, before the wash:



They were both fairly balanced, certainly more balanced than anything I've done previously. I love the results. They are the best I've done to date. I showed them to Chris and he thought they were store bought (not that he's an expert, mind you) and asked me what it was called. I told him that I had spun it, and that it had no name, but offered to let him name them. He promptly did, dubbing them "Princess Shabooboo". The finished skeins:



The colours are rather feminine I suppose. I'm thinking of making a shirt for Kaitlyn with them.

In the last post, I promised pictures of the garden, and now I will deliver. I have some very pretty blooms going on now, and wish they would last all year.

The rose bed out front has gone a little wild, and is in serious need of a pruning, but that doesn't stop it from being very lovely:



I love this pretty pink bloom:



And a homemade bouquet I made to dress up the table on Chris' birthday:



My "mini roses" given to me by my mother in law, June:



The bottle brush bushes along the driveway:



And of course, the beautiful apple blossoms:



These pretty colors have inspired my next dyeing and spinning project, but more on that later. This post has been far to long in coming.