Culmination ...

Busy, busy. Errands and spending time with Barbara and Anailese on days when Corbin's there all day. Mom, Dad, Mary and I went to the art gallery on Tuesday, to see an exhibit of baroque masterworks. On Wednesday, I got to go with Dad and some of his Kiwanis folks to read books to preschool kids at the Norwood Head Start progam. Afterwards, we sat in wee chairs at wee tables and had snacks (that we took with us) with the kids. It was great fun, and the kids keep the books. For some of them, it's the first book of their very own. Brandon and Nina and I had dinner together and watched a movie ... well, kinda. Nina mostly texted on her phone while the movie was on.

I made something out of rayon ages and ages ago. I braided a leftover bit and tossed in in a dye bath with something else I had going, then in the wash. I ended up with a soft, drapey, slightly fuzzy braid. It's sat on my bedroom bookshelf for years because I wasn't quite finished with it.

Soon, the world will drown in T-shirts ... work T-shirts, play T-shirts, T-shirts with clever sayings, promotional T-shirts, T-shirts as uniforms. Ubiquity, thy name is T-shirt. What's to be done about it? I had an idea.

I bought a very pretty tie-dyed rayon dress and wore it when I went to Patty and Jaime's wedding with Pat. Every time I saw the dress in the closet, it would bring back a flood of memories. I wasn't ever going to wear it again, but I couldn't give it away.

These three things were rattling around in different rooms in my mind. One day, they all met in the hallway on the way to the bathroom and, as ideas are wont to do, got all tangled up and sidetracked me from whatever it was I was meaning to do. Zzzzzp, zzzzzp on the serger, shk, shk, shk, shk with the rotary cutter, and I had a grapefruit-sized ball of tie-dyed yarn.

I knit it up.

There wasn't enough of it.

I had a couple of silk shirts that were lovely in the eighties and in which I wouldn't now be caught dead. They got zzzzped and shked and wound into balls, too. They made much smaller balls.

I cut up another piece of rayon I had lying around and swatched some of it with some of the silk, washed it, and determined that the resulting fabric doesn't shrink appreciably once knit up, and that the silk knits up a much smaller gauge than the rayon.

So I knit the hat again, using some of the silk, doubled, when I ran out of rayon.

I didn't like the crown. For reasons I don't now recall, I undid the entire hat, instead of just the crown, and reknit the whole thing, from the top down.

I still didn't like the crown, so I reknit it from the bottom up again.

Taa(boutfreakingtime)-Daa!



Just in time, too! This is outside, this morning:



There was enough yesterday to require shovelling. After I'm done with this, I'll go shovel again. It's still snowing.

On an entirely different note, my house was infested with tipsy faeries on Friday night:

Stuff and Nonsense ...

Daylight:

Length of day: 9:41
Hours of dark: 12:00ish
Sunrise: 7:27 am
Sunset: 5:08 pm
Start of twilight: 6:51 am
End of twilight: 5:45 pm

Current weather: Overcast, light snow showers. -8°C (17°F), -16°C (3°F) with windchill, wind N 20.8 km/h (13 mph), relative humidity 85%, pressure 30.01 in Hg.

Forecast:

Today.. Cloudy with 60% chance of flurries, wind NW 20 km/h. High -8°C.
Tonight.. Cloudy, 30% chance of flurries this evening. Low -12°C.
Monday.. A mix of sun and cloud, High -4°C.
Tuesday.. Cloudy. Low -10°C. High -3°C.
Wednesday.. Sunny. Low -10°C. High -5°C.
Thursday.. Sunny. Low -14°C. High -5°C.
Normals for the period.. Low -6°C. High 5°C.