"Bad Dog!" Story and Mitten Progress

This is Ajax. You might remember him as the dog who chewed up the soup can.

If you regulate your Vermont soapstone woodstove by dog thermometer, the reading is, "Too cold, human, put some more wood in that thing!"

Friday my husband took the day off work to get a tire fixed. When I dropped him off at the car place, I went inside for a few minutes, because they had an enormous Rotweiler there who I wanted to meet.

Like most Rotties I've met, she was a sweetie and a leaner, and in about a minute she was leaning hard against me and being petted.

I knew that when I got home, I would be thoroughly sniffed at the door. And of course, I was.

What I did not expect was that the breath of one of the sniffing dogs would smell strongly of . . . mint!

I knew in a flash what he had gotten into: the bag of York peppermint patties our son and my husband bought for me on Tuesday! My present!

That dog found and ate up my present!

After I had explained to him in indignant tones that his name was not on that bag, and he was not to go opening doors, ferreting about on bookshelves, and getting into things that were not, either! his, I stuffed the plastic candy bag through his collar as a Bag of Shame.

Then I alternately sulked and growled at him, because he ate the whole bag, foil wrappings and all, and didn't leave me a single one.

Saturday afternoon, at 3:22 pm, it started to snow, and in an hour it looked like the photo on the left. Our son joyfully suited up in the winter coat that's really too big for him and went outside to make slush balls from the snow on the cars and pelt his dad with them.

I stayed inside and finally got to work double-knitting the thumbs on my snowflake mittens.

I didn't do it on purpose, but I happened to pick up the hardest one first, the mitten where I had had the hardest time picking up the upper stitches of the thumb hole.

I put the thumb openings in a spot where there was color patterning. In double knitting, naturally the colors cross inside, in between the layers. But my big stumbling block was the fact that the top edge of the opening had loops that were half white and half green, with the other half crossing into the inside layer.

On the mitten for my right hand, I got confused about which side to pick up for which layer. It was a mess, and no doubt that was why I let them sit while I tried to get my courage up to tackle them.

At first I thought I'd just knit green-outside, white-inside thumbs, with a little contrast patterning to lock the layers together. But after a couple rows, I realized I could easily ladder down on both sides in pattern and exchange colors from layer to layer, the way I do to fix a mistake.

So then I was good! After I fixed the colors of the stitches at the base of the thumb, I could knit the rest in pattern to match the mittens.

Just in time for:
TODAY
Windy. Cloudy with a 40 percent chance of light snow showers. Highs in the lower 30s. Northwest winds 15 to 25 mph.