check it out

Check out this little lovely who came to visit my kitchen last night.

I've never seen a moth quite like this before. I'm most impressed with the pretty wing markings and the cool Phyllis Diller hair style.

After a few weeks of cold, very wet weather, Mother Nature has gifted us with this gorgeous day. It reached 29 C (84 F) this afternoon. Such a nice change from temps hovering around frost!

I'm also happy because I finally got to groom my dogs this week. I couldn't get at it for a few weeks because of a fibro flare and they desperately needed a good brushing. It feels so good to get it done.

I'm in love

with this.

I told you how much I was enjoying the iPod Touch. Well, one thing led to another and this (the most basic) iPad came home with me this week. Could I truly afford it at this time? No. But I convinced myself that I couldn't live without it and I sold the Majacraft Pioneer so that partially funded it.

This is iPod Touch on crack. It is amazing and wonderful and mind-boggling and beautiful. When I think back to high school computer programming class in the mid-70s I feel like I grew up in the dark ages. There was one computer for our use and it lived at the university. It filled a massive room there. We learned flowchart programming skills (of which I remember nothing but the words Fortran and Cobol) and used ticker tape-like cards (that would be the technical name) to send our work to the university. Who would have believed that about 35 years later we would have mini-computers in our purses that operated wirelessly to connect us to the entire world?! I wish my dad had lived long enough to see it. He died in 1970 but had advised me to learn about computers because he truly believed that they were the way of the future. How right he was.

That is all I have time to blog today. My iPad is calling me.

for charity

I have posted before about our wonderful LYS Golden Willow Natural Fibers and its owner Sharon. She received a large donation of wool this summer and sent out word to local knitters that she intended to knit hats for Souls Harbour Rescue Mission with it and could use help. There was no shortage of help offered once word got out. I took a skein and here are my finished hats to donate.

I don't know what the yarn is but it was very nice to knit and washed up even nicer. I think there must be mohair in the blend because it is soft and has a nice halo. It is a rustic yarn - I picked out bits of vegetable matter as I knit so I don't think it was mass produced. I'm sure it will help some people stay warm this winter. I won't be taking any more yarn to knit hats though because my hands really, really don't like knitting with anything heavier than sock yarn. I was happy to finish up this knitting and give my hands a break.

I also finished spinning some sock yarn with Spinning Awesome Good Falkland fiber in the Hydrangea colorway, one of the club offerings. I'm enjoying this fiber club. Shelby offers plenty of choices for each month's fiber and even will dye this month's fiber from a photo that each member provides for her. I'm excited to see what she does with a picture of Austin that I sent her.

Anyway, back to the Falkland.
It's the first yarn that I have spun on the new Hansen miniSpinner. I'm very impressed with the Hansen! It's so easy to use and I love that I have great control over my spinning with it. I spun two plies with the Hydrangea and plied them together with a strand of light blue wooly nylon for extra durability. Wooly nylon is serger thread that I buy at a sewing machine store. Some people carry it along with their sock yarn in heels and toes for strength. It's so fine that it could be carried for the whole sock. I hate carrying two strands of yarn as I knit so decided to try just using it as a third ply. It was a little tricky to ply from the little spool that the wooly nylon comes on but once I figured out how to manage everything it worked okay. The end result surprised me a bit. Due to the wooly nylon's elasticity, the Falkland plies puckered up somewhat and the yarn is quite delightfully bouncy! My plan is to start a pair of socks with it right away so that I can see how it knits up.