crochet and drawings

strawberry ice cream and cake.. maybe.  the two color mix I'm doing with a cone of red yarn and the shiny tan yarn is a little like a christmas sugar cookie with red sprinkles...

I couldn't find any more of the off-white yarn at either store, so now I've got to decide to break up the pattern or continue with the white and have just that one area with the off-white... I'm thinking I'm going to mix the white and the tan yarn together there and then do it again on the other side, and that will allow me to do something else 'on both sides' that is alike as well... maybe pink mixed with the tan after that.  I was roaring along did all of what you see here in one day and then I came to a standstill because I wasn't sure how to proceed or if I should rip out.

The tan yarn in the big skein is part Alpaca.. from an old cache of statsh yarn.

 study of a cat that won't sit still - slightly abstracted

 drawing a memory of the 1940s house with the barrel stove and the brick wall... I will have to do from another angle so I can get the German wooden cuckoo clock above the chair by the window to the right of all of this.

chickens, eggs, a ravioli rug and archery

 Here are our chickens.  There are six hens and a rooster - and they are 'Red Star' type chickens.  They lay large brownish eggs and seem to be quite happy in their new home.  We got four eggs from them this afternoon.

Here is Mark showing them off

 We had the fencing and lumber already in the garage for the pen and the coop, so it was the price of the chickens, from a coworker, and buying some chicken layer feed.  Mark built an incredibly nice coop with the lumber on hand.

Our pretty multi-headed daffodils are blooming, as well.  I'm working on what I'm calling a 'ravioli' rug for Esme's room.. but it is also sort of like a zigzag pattern of little crocheted squares.  The white yarn came in a box from Mark's aunt and had cuts through it - but this is a perfect use for it.  The squares do not take very long to make.  Usually the tough part about making a rug that is a useable size is how long it takes to get it there.  By the time it is the right size it feels odd to lay that much work down on the floor to be walked on.  We will see how this one goes. 

Mark also dug out his old recurve bow out of a storage about a week ago.  We took it out today and practiced some target shooting.  There is a lot of muscle memory involved.  It has been about fifteen years since I had a bow of my own and did regular shooting with the 'same feel'... I had about two hours practice today and was able to get everything mostly on or very close to the target (a 2 foot by 2 foot piece of styrofoam on blocks).  We will do more practice later.  I was impressed how kneeling with the bow the memories came back of how to swing it over my neck to the side, how to counterbalance the quiver when I knelt and hold it to the side when walking etc etc... little things you don't even remember until you are in the same position again.

 Father and daughter getting ready to check for more eggs.

 A large brown one in the nesting box, and one more out in the yard.

 That was two more eggs, and that makes six for six.  They are happy chickens.

 Esme, practicing at being a chicken whisperer.  She talked to them for quite a bit. Then we all went and ran a new water pipe from the hydrant to the chicken coop fence, before dinner.

bits of progress - knitting, crocheting, sewing

More progress in turning the tiny squares and scraps into something more. 

Another crocheted round pillow for the bed, as they are quite useful and we have spent a lot of time using the bed as a couch for everyone to snuggle in and be warm during this cold snap. Semi Instructions for Round Crochet Pillow

 

 Extra blankets are useful, too... no one wants to give one up once they have one! 

a bit of beautiful recycled Shetland wool yarn from Sonia's Twice Loved Yarns to match my gloves made from last Christmas.  I am working in a sort of half-broken rib pattern to make a scarf.  It was really quite a good match!  The Shetland wool is not meant to be extremely soft - but it softens with use, and is so warm.

Esme is building a hatchery for her Violet dragon and retrieving agate rocks out of my sewing box collection to be eggs.  Apparently dragons hatch out elephants in lack of smaller dragon toys ;)

And in other news, my brain dreams partially in French - an entire farce about people in a storm who are all preparing care packages for the others because they don't seem to be acting right since the storm hit - because they are being secretive preparing care packages they don't want the others to see... and not doing their regular routines.. and they all meet up in the middle of a room trying to force the other to take the package and the bowls of soup they were bringing to each other.  And the one guy who was not making care packages was paranoid that everyone was going to attack him.  He partially causes the strange behavior and is also effected by it, as at the very beginning we see him waking up in the freezing rain outside with a bleeding wound on his head in his driveway he didn't remember happening... he suspects everyone and comments to several of them about the strange things someone else is doing.  Towards the end of the 'film' in my head - after the soup revelation - his friend finds a bloody stain on a stick in the fence near the basketball at the edge of the driveway, and says he remembers the injured man right after he came inside  kept saying 'it goes up and through and comes down' over and over... (but that was partially in French but not grammatically correct) - and it turns out he was shooting hoops in his driveway at his basketball hoop and the ball came down and smacked him in the head and he fell down towards the fence unconscious and no one else was involved at all... *my brain is an interesting place to live* .. especially on cold nights when the electric blanket is turned up like a sweatlodge experience.