Early Days

I have not always been a knitter of lace and socks and mind-stretching double knitting.

This might be the earliest knitting of mine that exists. When I was in the fifth grade, our teacher gave us a mimeographed pattern for something called Pixie Boot Baby Booties.

You knitted a garter stitch square, folded it into a triangle, sewed up the sole and the back, folded the top corner down, and voila! you had a baby booty.

That was the theory, anyway.

When I was trying to learn to tat, my fondness for DMC shaded pastels had not left me.

This is not quite the first tatting I ever did. I think it's the second. I just stranded the thread along behind and started a new clover leaf.

No, I think this might be the first tatting I ever did, complete with ring joined in the wrong spot so that it ended up accidentally three-dimensional.

After I threw it across the room, I fished it back out of the corner, got a little squinty-eyed, and did it again to take the curse off of it.

You can't let these fiber arts think they're the boss, you know, otherwise they will make you no end of miserable.

Plainly my fondness for shaded colors has not left me. I'm up to row 21 on chart A of "Lilac Time", a row where each repeat starts with a shift of the stitch marker and a slip 1, knit 2 together, pass the slipped stitch over.

Another couple of rounds and these will really start to look like leaves. Then it will be on into chart B and a swath of lace ground.
It's been raining on and off most of this week, but this afternoon it finally relented a little and the sun even came out.

I went outside to give the birdfeeders a shake and found one last tiny sunflower of the season, barely nine inches tall, under the edge of the yew bush where Truffles likes to dig herself a cool bed in the sand.

A sunny bright yellow flower to enjoy at the end of a chilly and damp day.