Ah! Spring has finally come to our mountain! It's still early spring, mind you, but it's here. I can take a little more of the chilly weather knowing that we are definitely through the winter. The snow is finally gone from our yard. The snowdrops have come and almost gone (I was so ecstatic to see them peeking out form under the piles of snow!) and the crocuses are in full bloom.
When we bought this place almost three years ago, we inherited a huge, but overgrown red raspberry patch. What a treasure! The original owners planted it and from what I hear, they used to sell raspberries in the summer. But the people we bought the property from weren't into gardening, so it got a bit overgrown in the 8 years they were here. I've been wanting to reclaim the patch, so that we can actually walk through it and get to the back to harvest the berries we haven't been able to get to. So every chance I get, I've been down there clearing out the old canes and pruning back the new.
Morgan, my youngest, loves to come down and help. He doesn't do the raspberries - too prickery- but one day he was cutting back old stalks of Japanese knotweed - a great job for a kid, because they're so easy to cut with a pair of clippers. The other night a big, old, rotten birch came crashing down at one end of the patch. While I was out there raspberrying on Sunday afternoon, he was carry pieces of broken birch away! He's great company and a great big help!
In knitting, I finally finished and forgot to post last Friday for
this sweater I've been making for Winter!
I was so excited to finish it. And the best compliment is how much she loves to wear it. She wore it to church on Easter Sunday, too.
It was made form a Sirdar pattern, using KnitPicks CotLin yarn in Desert Turquoise, size 4 and 6 US needles. It was an enjoyable pattern, well written, and not at all difficult. I loved learning how to do the Thumb Cast-on and how to make the loops at the bottom edges of the pieces - just a matter of casting on stitches, then casting off some and knitting some in the following row, then casting on more for the sweater in the third row.
I've also been working on some felted bowls. I found a pattern in One Skein by Leigh Radford and have had such fun knitting up these three bowls below. They only take about an hour to knit up. It's been really interesting to see the differences in felting each of them, both with time and texture.
The bowl on the right is the first bowl I did. It's knit in Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride Bulky in "Oregano". The bowl on the left is knit in Berroco's Peruvia yarn, a worsted weight, knit holding two strands together. All of these bowls were knit up on size 15 US dpn's.
This third bowl is knit with two strands of Morehouse Merino variegated worsted weight I had in my stash. I love the colors! This bowl took wayyyy longer to felt than the other two, however. I did one other bowl, with Lion Wool Landscapes which also took a lot longer to felt.
With the knitted eggs I made last spring (free pattern from Julie at little cotton rabbits).








