Spring Preview

They say by the end of the week, it'll be cold again and the highs will fall back to the low 40's, but for yesterday, today, and tomorrow--it's a spring preview. The snow is melting so fast that water runs down the street in front of the house. My garden, which has been at least partly covered in snow since early February, is revealed in its entirety for the first time today (lookin' kinda haggard. It'll need some attention as soon as it thaws out.)

In general, the melting snow reveals . . . decaying leaves, dead spots on the lawn, dog droppings, dreary evidence that I don't do much to the outside of the house between November and March.

But just as Milo and I were starting to wonder how we were EVER going to get this place fixed up nice again we saw . . . the first crocuses.


We oohed and aahhed at their tiny purple-blue beauty (and how FAST they come up and bloom!) and I silently thanked the previous home owner who was wise enough to bury crocus bulbs randomly around the yard. Or, maybe it was the squirrels, I don't know. But they are so pretty and you don't notice the mud that surrounds them at all when you're looking at them.

I finished Chris's socks. At last. Only sportweight yarn for the boy from here on out. But the finished pair is handsome (if ordinary looking) with simple tiny twisted cable ribbing, a standard heel flap style heel, and Austermann Step Yarn in Color Nachtblau. It's very soft yarn and knits up very nicely on size 0 steel needles. I had to buy a second skein to finish the socks, of which most of it is left--so I'm guessing at some point I'll make some socks for Ben or Milo out of what's left.

I've redone all I frogged of the Orenburg shawl and am in the final minutes of having to decide what size the finished shawl will be. The directions are a sort of loosey-goosey, "work 5 times" with a portion of the chart marked off--and then handwritten next to it, the designer has written "can do up to 9 repeats." Well, I figured out that in order to make the REST of the pattern work, you really can do 5 OR 9 repeats. 6 or 8 won't work at all. 5 or 7 and section 2 of the boarder will work out, but the main body of the shawl (which you knit last) won't.

My greatest fear is that I don't have enough of the main body color to knit the bigger version. But the designer swears that there's enough. So I'm leaning towards the 9. I know the shawl will block out, but it just looks too small at this point.