Oh yes, ostensibly this IS a crafty blog

Pictures are nice, too. I apologize to anyone on dial-up.

First are the socks, and by socks, I mean sock that I have been "working" on for Fiona for a while now.



They are based on this pattern. The yarn is the Fig and Plum colorway from Yarntini. I absolutely love the yarn, love, love, love it! Anyway, I turned the heel, it went so well. I knit the foot. I thought at one point, I wonder if this is long enough and it was precisely the right length. There were no ladders. No holes in the heel. I was so happy. I thought, I'll just figure out how many stitches there are. I checked gauge. I had apparently gone from knitting 8 stitches to the inch to 10 stitches to the inch by the time I got to the foot. I did some math, I had knit 5715 stitches. Then I thought, Fiona should try this on before I graft the toe. The foot is snug. Not tight, but snug and I think it would be uncomfortable. The foot will have to be reknit. I'm hoping that if I go from US size 0 (2mm) needles to US size 2 (2.75mm) that it will be ok. So knowing all of this, the sock has just been sitting. I don't have the heart right now to rip back all of those stitches and start the foot over. Picking up such small stitches is a nightmare to me.

Here is a little magic, the color changed just as I was doing the short rows for the heel.



Here is a photo of the scarf I am working on for my sick co-worker. It is going slowly and I feel terrible about it.



The yarn is Louisa Harding Kashmir Aran. The pattern sort of evolved through swatching. It is reversible. I will write it up one of these days.

I've been interested in spinning lately. You may remember that a coworker invited me over to her house to try out her spinning wheel. Since then I have wanted to try out my spindle again. We didn't really do well together the first time. So I pulled it out a couple of weeks ago and spun, and it/I worked. I think spinning with the wheel helped me understand. Anyway, I decided that I wanted to wind off what I had spun so I could practice plying sometime. Since I don't have a nøstepinde I looked around the house and used this instead.



The sad thing is the relatively well spun fiber is at the center of that little wad of yarn-to-be, so you will have to use your imagination.

For Christmas, I made a patchwork doll blanket for Fiona to go with a doll bed she received.



This is only the second time I've touched a sewing machine. Not bad, if I do say so myself. It is based on the tutorial at Happythings. It is backed with off-white chenille.

While reading Feministe I came across a post about this Face Transformer. It was really interesting seeing myself as an Afro-Carribean or West Asian. They also had a couple of artistic options.

Here I am as Botticelli might have painted me:



And here is a Modigliani me:



And the last picture is of little bird foot prints on my doorstep from when we had snow eons ago.



I love watching birds and have several feeders including one just to the side of my front door. This morning at breakfast we saw a Varied Thrush digging and pecking in the duff beneath the large firs we have in our backyard.