Green, Red, and Glowing

Last year we got snowed on early in the season and the snow only melted in between blizzards. This year it hasn't snowed yet. This beautiful green moss is revelling in the mild weather.

The stripe of red in this photo is apples that haven't fallen from the you-pick trees. Michigan had a great apple crop this year, but there are so many apples in storage the farmers can't sell them all.

That bright spot there is our winter sun.

I've been knitting mitered squares to contribute to a blanket. These are cool, since they start from a 3-stitch cast on and then you knit until you get to 3 inches, 6 inches, or however much yarn you have. I'm using up sock yarn leftovers.

I finally worked out some of the netting patterns in the 19th century books I've downloaded from Google.This pattern is called round netting and appears in several books. It's made just like regular netting, but you twist the loop twice before putting the netting needle or shuttle through it.

Once I worked down to a small enough gauge, it made nice neat hexagons.

This one is the Grecian or rose netting. I had started a sample and then quit, thinking I was doing it wrong. Weeks later I stretched it out and saw it was working just like the engraving. There are a lot of variations on this one: it uses two mesh sizes, and the appearance changes a lot depending on the size difference between the two.

There are a lot more of these I haven't tried or haven't worked out yet. I have always had a hard time visualizing things from just words, and these old books are all words.

Give me a diagram and I can work backwards and see how the words apply, and given that the books have some engravings of the end result, at least I know what I'm aiming for.

Often I have to just keep bashing my brains against the words, and then one day I sit down and my educated hands start working away while my brain shuts up and watches in amazement.

For now, I'm mostly still in the bashing stage.