Pam’s Knitting and Spinning, with a dash of Timmy

Despite all the storm warnings, this winter has been pretty disappointing for good snow to play in. This time though, we had lots of fun! Yesterday we went out and ran around catching snowflakes on our tongues and making snow angels. Tim made little snow angels! Today, Chris took him sledding on a big hill near our home, so we had to get him good and bundled up. Here he is, ready for action!

Aren’t they darling?

I couldn’t go with them since I’m on call and have been on the phone quite a bit, but I caught these pictures before they left.

We love snow!

There are a few more pictures in the Flickr photo set here.

This past week was so busy, and I had to put in extra hours at work, so my knitting was pretty much on hold.  I even had to miss SnB!  Boo on that..  I’ll try to finish the BSJ and post pictures soon!

I’d gone about a year and a half without a haircut, so I felt it was time. Plus, my hair was long enough to donate to Locks of Love again.

There used to be a list of salons where you can go to get a free haircut when you donate your hair, but that list has been taken down for some reason. I just went to the same place from two years ago. If you have at least 10 inches of hair to donate and you’re interested, you can identify participating salons by a Locks of Love sticker in the window. Or you could go to your regular salon to do it, but they may not give you a free haircut.

Here’s how it turned out, after almost 13 inches of hair donated:

I really have to hand it to Wendy Johnson, of blogging fame, for not only does she have fantastic knitting and an adorable kitty, but she does self-portraits in the mirror which I have found is NOT EASY!  I think I deleted about 30 pictures where part of my head was cut off in various ways, before I got this one.  Anyway, back to knitting!

I’ve never done an i-cord trim before, but I love it! See how neat it looks?

I followed the instructions for the i-cord bind-off here — cast on 3 stitches at the end of a row using the cable cast-on, k2, then k2tog through the back loops (one of the newly cast-on stitches with one of the stitches to be bound off). Slip the 3 stitches back to the left needle, and repeat k2, k2tog tbl. I thought it would be a pain, but it went pretty quickly! Also, I followed EZ’s advice for turning corners — before the corner stitch, just k3 without attaching any stitches, slip 3 to the left needle, k2, k2tog tbl with the corner stitch, slip 3, k3 without attaching a stitch again, then slip 3 and resume k2, k2tog tbl. Very nice!

It’s almost done! I plan to seam the shoulders with applied i-cord, which is the same as the i-cord edging, but I’ll be picking up one stitch from each side of the seam to incorporate into the i-cord.

Also, I got back to my beloved wheel, and spun up some merino/bamboo in a colorway called Harvest, from Spunky Eclectic.

Ooh shiny!  I found this fiber to be a little harder to draft than plain merino, but once I got used to the bamboo it was really nice to spin.

The colors are orange, green, and brown, very similar to the Dinosaur colorway I used for Tim’s sweater, actually! But these are much more muted, and blend together beautifully. I had a problem with my wheel becoming loose and wobbling, which I think is now fixed, so I need to go back and finish the rest of this.

Tim has another adorable cousin besides Baby Andy, but since she lives in the South we don’t see her that often. Fortunately, Annabelle and her parents will be moving to the Northeast this year! We took care of her on Sunday so her parents could go househunting. It was a day of fun and cuteness. Here she is meeting one of Tim’s Noo.

Then they had fun at the piano together.

They really got into it!

Playing solo..

She also enjoyed our “tuno.”

She’s very affectionate and asked Tim for lots of kisses. Too bad I didn’t manage to get a good photo!

For the most part, Tim was really good about sharing his toys, but when it came to his Thomas trains, he would only let her have his least favorite train, poor Spencer. She didn’t mind.

Here, Chris and Nat are showing off the giant foreheads they have passed on to their offspring!

For those of you who’d like to see more, feel free to check out the Tim photo set on Flickr!

Remember my Fractal Stripe handspun from SakinaNeedles roving? I’m finally getting around to knitting it.

It’s standard Feather and Fan, 3 repeats over 56 stitches. I thought it would show off the yarn nicely.

One of the two plies has a long color repeat, and the other has progressively shorter repeats, which results in interesting color changes. Unfortunately, as a new spinner, I spun this yarn very tightly and robbed the superwash merino of some of its softness. I hope it gets better with washing.

Also, I’m knitting a new Baby Surprise Jacket for my college friend Helen, who’s expecting a baby boy. She likes cream color, so this is what I’ve come up with.

It’s Spritely Goods superwash merino in CoffeePot Rock that I got from the Loopy Ewe, striped with some Patons Kroy from my stash. Here’s how the sleeve folds up so far.

Since this sweater will be for an actual baby, I won’t have to worry so much about yardage and sleeve length like I did for Tim’s sweater.  I started off the striping similarly to Tim’s, but the bottom part of the sweater will be different.  I haven’t decided yet how to finish it.  It’s going pretty quickly though, since it’s my second time knitting the pattern.  So clever and fun to knit!