Snow Fog

Snow, turning directly to fog, without bothering to melt first.

Also, I hate voles.

Yesterday I was carrying our five-foot wooden step ladder around the house and raking the roof from the ladder. When I tried to set it up by the bird feeder, as I climbed the steps, one (ladder) leg sank into a vole tunnel, the ladder pitched sideways towards the rose tangle, my brain shrieked THORNS! THORNS! THORNS! at me, and as I jumped backwards, the sunken leg of the wooden ladder broke.

Stupid voles.

I turned the heels and started the ribbing on another pair of blue socks.

Bells says "God I love those socks!!!!", meaning my Smartwool snowflake socks. I think that particular pattern is discontinued, boo hoo. But I think it was the price of my warm, silky, superwash Smartwool socks that inspired me to knit my own. I love how those socks feel, but I'm too cheap to pay for them.

Yarn, on the other hand . . .

We picked up my husband's repaired car yesterday and went grocery shopping:

Today is Paczki Day!

But these are not real paczki -- if you could read the fillings on the side of the box, you would see that there isn't even a check-box for prune filling.

Probably we'll make some real paczki tonight.

Yarn is Where You Find It
I've had several pairs of these ragg wool leg warmers since high school. I never wore them much, because they were very very long, and very tight around the calf even then.

But I found them in my cedar drawer when I got my blue wool pair out the other week, and it dawned on me that just because they were too long and too tight, didn't mean they had to stay too long and too tight.

So I unpicked one end and wound one whole leg warmer into the cake of ragg wool on top. From unwinding them, I learned the cool cast-on where you start with a provisional cast-on using half the number of stitches you'll need, knit one row into that cast-on, and then painstakingly knit one, then pick up and purl one from the provisional row, until you have the full number of stitches needed. This gives you a nice, stretchy starting edge that looks just like the tubular or grafted or invisible bind-off.

Like every new knitting technique, as I learn it I fall absolutely in love with it. I used it to start the edge of this hat:
And I'll probably use it on anything tubular I start from an open end. It's very fiddly to start, but it looks so nice.