SNOW!!

Hey,

So I haven't been here for awhile, blame pneumonia, work, school, final exams and pneumonia again!

I'm DONE university!!! I wrote my last exam yesterday morning and am so thrilled to be finished, but am now packing up like mad since I'm moving home tomorrow....

But, this just had to be blogged about. Yesterday it was sunny, warm, 17*C outside. I went out to lunch with friends and we sat on the patio, I was worried about getting sun burnt and I even put on sunscreen. At 9:30 at night I walked home with just a sweater, no jacket, and I was fine!

Today however, today is a different story. This is the view out my window this morning:

... yeah... It's hovering around 0, and nothing's staying on the ground, but it has been steadily snowing for more than 6 hours now, on April 26th, after being 17*C out yesterday... Wow.

Finally January!

So after being around plus 10*C for the earlier part of the week and being under a heavy rainfall warning, yesterday it snowed and today it is -17*C, -30*C with the wind chill, and it finally feels like January!

Kindly Sheep Mittens!

A project I finished awhile ago but haven't posted about yet, mostly because I haven't gotten any photos of them yet today, but it is snowing big, fat, fluffy snow today, so walking home through it I decided it was a good day to finally get some pictures of these mittens.

A view from my balcony this afternoon (really only 1/2 the snow shows up in this picture...):

So the mittens.

These are from a great pattern from Knitty (Fall 2009) that was written for a dk weight handspun, but the yarn I fell in love with for them is Fresco by Classic Elite, it's a fingering weight wool, alpaca, angora blend that is so soft!

The pattern is for wrist warmers and a cropped mitten that then hooks onto the wrist warmers and both have the same cable pattern.

I modified them a bit, adding a repeat to the cable motif on both the mittens and the wrist warmers to make them longer because of gauge issues.

I love them so much, the double layering means that your hands stay really warm, although there's still just a single layer at the top so I've been scheming about how to make that better.

Also I'm having some problems with the hooks, especially on the back of the hand staying hooked, I'm contemplating whether to move them further down the cuff (and out of line with the ones on the palm side) or tighten the hooks up with pliers. Leaning towards the pliers at this point because it requires less effort...

I also wish that I had picked a slightly lighter colour for the mitt part because in the dark yarn the cable pattern gets mostly lost, it's there, but the effect is very subtle, whereas on the wrist warmers the cable pattern stands out and is really pretty.

I apologize for the blurry pictures, but the camera refused to focus too well very quickly and the longer I continued trying the same shot the more the pictures became like this:

Something wrong with the camera? I think so!

Anyways, since I finished those not much knitting going on here, been busy with the back to school, new job, messy apartment things.

I've tried a couple socks, one cobbled together from leftovers and the 'More Sensational Socks' book and another that I'm trying to design, but all efforts so far have been failures which kind of makes trying again less appealing.

But I do have a sweater picked out for the Knitting Olympics, so I'm just waiting to get started on that! (should swatch first, maybe I'll go do that!)

Snow, Snow, Snow!

Well, tis that time of year again when we tend to get a bit buried in snow. We saw our first actual snow on Sunday (only a little bit) and then temperatures dived to -20 C and lower on Monday, the wind was especially brutal. But you know what? It was sunny out and I came to realize I really enjoy winter like that. As long as you're bundled well and you aren't standing around outside, weather like that is nice. The snow on ground is so cold it squeaks when you walk on it and the sun is out, which is quite rare for this time of year when it sets at 4:11 pm, and is most often behind clouds.

Yesterday it warmed up to about -10 C and started snowing in earnest though, and really made me wish I had gone out to buy groceries over the weekend. By last night we had about 10-15cm of snow on the ground and the weather report was predicting it would go up to +7 C and rain today (which can I just say - gross). But that didn't happen, and isn't going to, it warmed up enough over night that we apparently got a lot of freezing rain though the night, and now it's snowing again - I haven't been outside yet, but something tells me it's going to be slippery!
At least the freezing rain made all the trees pretty, with a layer of ice on everything. This is the picture I woke up to this morning


Lots of knitting going on here, mostly stress-related, I've got two exams in the next two days and I just handed in a 10-page paper yesterday. I'll try to get on here again soon and post actual knitting content!
Happy winter all!