Real Snow

We woke up this morning to our first real snow, a pretty good one for this early in November. I snapped this picture before the birds started moving around and knocking the snow off the outside of the feeder.

The child was happy to see snow, but disappointed to learn that school was not closed.

After I took him to school, I drove carefully down the snowy highway to take Truffles to the vet for her annual check-up.

Our vet has been the third professional this year to send us a letter saying "I am selling my practice/leaving my practice/bringing another professional into my practice as I start to think about retiring." (The other two were our family doctor and our dentist.)

Fortunately both of our dogs are mellow, social animals, and she seemed to like the new vet.

And here finally is the next step of my little Duchrow lap blanket.

The hurdle I had to get over was the corners. If you draw a circle inside a square, you will see that the corner is not a straight-sided triangle. The base is the curve of a quarter of the circle.

The math was not the problem for me, but the ways I had worked out in my head to knit the corners each failed me, one by one.

My first idea: knit one-half of a corner outwards, then knit the second half from the point back down to the circle. This way I figured I could continue with an uncut strand of yarn. However, in practice the joins just looked yechhhhy. I tried a couple of times before giving this one up.

My second idea: knit the corners as a knitted-on border. This meant redoing the math, since the corners were going out sideways. This was working okay, and I didn't have to cut the yarn, but I just didn't like the way the colors looked knitted this way. I got about a corner and a half done before I frogged.

My third idea: which you can see in the photo, and the one I initially rejected, was to just knit each corner separately out from the center, ending at a point and cutting off and darning in the end. I didn't want to do it because I had to cut the yarn. I guess this is a holdover from my tatting days, when ends meant knots and fiddly end-hiding. Anyway, it wasn't at all as hard as I envisioned, and turned out fairly square.

Now I am picking up the sides to knit a couple of rows of seed stitch around the edge until the yarn runs out.