Finishing Things. Turned Fingertips. And Stuff.

Finishing Things:

First off, I finally darned in the ends on my double-knitted, non-reversible name tag. (The large-eyed, slightly blunt needle I like to use turned out to be in with the bodkins and tiny mesh gauges in my netting stuff.)

Then I finally knitted the last two rows of the second Valdani pearl cotton bag. It's been waiting for literally months for those last rows. And I took that same needle and cast it off. All it needs now is a pair of fingerloop-braided drawstrings.

I used all but the last two feet of the ball to knit this one, so I'm not sure what I'm going to use to braid the drawstrings.

Turned Fingertips:
These beat-up gloves are the stretch gloves with the turned fingertips that gave me the idea to try on my re-knitted mitten thumbs.

I realized that the stitches ran right over the end of the fingertip, just like a short-row or turned heel on a sock. So all I did on my mitten thumbs was knit almost to the end, wrap and turn two stitches at each side of the thumb (four total) and then pick up and knit the wrapped stitches. This turned the end of the thumb and made a tiny little cap for my thumb tip. Then I grafted it shut.

Because of the "dog-ear" or "donkey-ear" effect you can get when you graft, I think if I was doing this from the start, I would knit tip-to-cuff gloves or mittens.

Stuff:

I've been going on about some of this stuff on Ravelry, so it seems only fair to share it here.

The first thing was a "mysterious cone-shaped object" found at a late Stone Age archaeological dig in Zaraysk, Russia. It's the last photo in the article, past the figurines and the bison.

I realize that what it looks like might not be what it was. But it does look a lot like a spindle whorl.

The other thing was a find of a bit of 8000-year-old string from an undersea Stone Age site. (Another article here.)

I just love learning about early fiber technology. This kind of stuff is so fascinating. And the nice thing about the internet is that I can find out about it at home with all my own fiber tools and projects around me.

The last thing in today's "stuff" category is the weather.

While the northeast was getting iced in, we were getting crazy-warm weather. First it got up into the forties, and last night it even hit 50 degrees F! When I went to bed last night, it was 51 F (11 C). I even heard a couple of loud, hard, splatters of rain on the roof.

This morning: 17 degrees F. (-8 C). A lot of ice on the roads where there were puddles and standing water last night, so at first school had a two-hour delay, and then before that was up, they just closed school.

So I am staying home, keeping warm, and probably knitting. I have a knitted fish that's been waiting around for a year for me to figure out what to do with it . . .