Heather chronicles

I have a bit of old business to catch up on, so I'll chronicle it all for you. First are pictures from October, when we took a day trip up to Flagstaff to see the fall colors with Laurie's coworker and friend, Marc. A few days before, a huge storm had blown through the area and there were three tornados that where spotted. It was cold enough in the storm that a lot of the color weren't spectacular, it got so cold that they froze and turned brown, rather than lovely yellows and reds. Here are the pictures of the colors we did see.

This is the snow that the storm left on the San Francisco Peaks.

Here is a picture from our trip to CA for Thanksgiving. It was a very short trip but it was good to see the nephews and family and we even squeezed in a trip up to the cabin. This is the picture that we took when first arrived. The next day, it snowed another foot and Laurie and her parents took a nice cross country ski and I spun, watching it snow and snow and snow. The picture is of the cabin's deck, covered in lovely snow.

What post would be complete without some recent bunny pictures?! Bennett loves his naps in the sun. I'm not sure if this is a repeat of info, but we decided to put the bunnies back into the second bedroom again, the bunny room, because it was getting tiresome to have hay in the bedroom all the time and it was more that I could keep up with. Ella is fenced in so Bennett can't get close and bother her in her cage.

A nap in the sun, bunny pancake.

Auntie Laurie woke him up taking pictures of such a cute bunny.

One ear listening... Always.

And for spinning endeavors, right now I'm spinning some merino in the color "wine" and some angora that I got before we got Bennett. The angora fiber is from Bennett's mother and I don't have enough to finish the whole project, so I will be using some of Bennett's fiber. Bennett's mom was a bit darker that he is but every time we pluck him, he seems to be getting darker and darker. He's also mellowing out a lot - a huge cuddle bun :). Here's a pic of the carded fiber. I actually decided that it wasn't blended enough after I took this picture, so it will be a solid heathery purple. I am spinning in for three ply sock yarn.

The yarn I took off the wheel to start the bunny sock project is this, Pagewood Farms BFL wool in the colorway "Mississippi Mud". It was chain plied, to keep the colors more stripey. It ended up to be lace weight, so I'll be working hard to spin the bunny socks heavier to make it fingering weight. :)

I think that is it for right now, I'm listening to Laurie read Harry Potter and am itching to spin lovely angora merino...

Kool-aid fun :)

Yesterday, our friend Mandy and I set up in our kitchen to have some fun with fiber and kool-aid. We had a very good time and made a very big mess! Laurie helped us set up and took lots of pictures of our fun for us. Normally, I dye in the garage, but the garage was too crowded for us to use it and our car has a dead battery right now and we couldn't get it easily out of the garage. Actually, getting it out was not the problem, the problem was getting the car back into the garage. So, here's the chronicle of our day:

Mandy and I in the midst of all the fun!

Applying dye to superwash merino, Laurie said that in this stage it looked like bacon, Mandy agreed.

Sometimes being chronically ill has its benefits, we used syringes from a few years ago when I had a PIC line for 6 months, the syringes really work well.

I was using paper towel to test out my color mixes.

Mandy dyed some beautiful sock yarn, here is her yellow in the rinse bath.

Mandy's lovely yarn hanging to dry.

Me with my fiber, hung out to dry and yes, making funny faces (Laurie seems to like to take pictures of me rolling my eyes). Laurie said my fiber looked like bloody bandages in this stage.

A couple of years ago, Laurie dyed some merino/silk sock yarn for me at Tempe Yarn and Fiber and neither of us liked the color that it turned out, so we overdyed it. Two of the skeins were kind of peachy and the other was pink, here are all three in the dye bath. We used more of a kettle dyeing process than what we did with the other yarn and fiber (which was handpainted and microwaved). I liked the kettle dyeing better than handpainting, so I might try doing it in the future with a more variegated results. It was a big chore to try to get all three skeins to match each other.

Sock yarn in the rinse bath, looking all matching.

The three skeins hanging up to dry. They look pretty similar, but there is a noticeable difference between the different colors, not too bad but not perfect so we'll see what we're going to do with it. Might try dyeing it again...

My fiber all dried and fluffed. It will be interesting to see it all spun up. It's more orange in real life, the pictures made it look more pink than it is. I really want to spin it - but I'm working on some merino/bunny yarn and I'm excited about that too.

So, that was our day, lots of fun and beautiful yarn and fiber as the results.

BTW - the vessel that is in the last picture of my fiber is a lovely gift that Laurie got from our church friend's secret santa exchange and is beautiful.

Happy me!

This picture was taken by Laurie last Friday, on our yarn binge. I had them all lined up and was admiring how lovely they all were, and Laurie thought it was pretty funny and took a picture before I put them away. It's a cell phone picture, so big it's really grainy but small you can tell how happy I was!

I meant to add this in the last post, but I didn't want to deal with all the formatting, so it will be a post all it's own! Happy advent!

Yarn and fibery goodness

I've got lots of yarn and fiber and projects to share with you! The first is the totally finished Baby Surprise Jacket for my nephew, when he's born. My sister's baby shower was a month ago and she really liked it and I really like the way it turned out. I hope baby Paul gets lots of use out of it!

Finally all the buttons are on!

Last night, we had our usual Sunday night dinner with my mom and had a lovely time playing with all of her beading things. She has an extensive, beautiful collection of beads and I wanted to make myself some more small stitch markers, because all the small ones I have are on projects and I needed some more! It was a lot of fun just hanging out making things, here are the ones that I made for myself (not pictured are some I made for a person that I'm doing a swap with on Ravelry, I didn't want to post them just in case she read this and I want them to be a surprise):

Of course, the way the pictures got loaded, these are ones that Laurie made for me.

Ten little pearl ones.

Ten little mother of pearl ones, these are lovely don't you think?

Crystal ones.

This next project is one of the reasons that I needed new little stitch markers. This past week, when Laurie and I went to Tempe Yarn and Fiber for our usual hang out on Wednesday night, we oohed and aahhed at the new malabrigo sock yarn that came in. Unfortunately, we couldn't afford to buy what we were drooling over and I was a bit disappointed. On the way home, I decided to attack my stash (that's what it's there for, right?)! I was rewarded with two balls of malabrigo sock yarn in the colorways eggplant and archangel. I decided to use the archangel colorway for these socks. Before we left for California for Thanksgiving, we used one of our borders gift cards from last Christmas to get a book called "Socks from the toe up", which one of our TYF friends has and was making socks with and let me look it over. I really liked most of the patterns in the book and so did Laurie, so we went ahead and got it. So, these malabrigo sock will be my first toe up socks, using the Lace and Cable sock pattern from the book. You may have a long memory and remember that I have two other pairs of socks on the needles right now, but I decided that I wanted a pair of socks for me before I could knit anyone else their socks, selfish I know, but I don't have any to call my own... Here's how they are coming along, I've finished the toe and have just started the lace and cables that the sock pattern is named for:

On the following Friday night, we ended up buying that other malabrigo sock yarn that we were ogling (my dear mother helped us out) and here it is:

This is the yarn I fell in love with, the colorway is "abril", lovely isn't it?

This is what Laurie fell in love with, "terra cotta"

This isn't malabrigo, it's Cascade Heritage, in the colorway "tutu", we went on a little bit of a binge, this is for another pair of socks for one of the patterns in the toe up sock book. All of these pics show the one skein of yarn broken up into two balls of equal weight, so you can use up all of the yarn when you are making toe up socks - you can just knit until you run out of yarn!

Lastly, the weekend before Thanksgiving, I was able to take a dyeing class with a friend and teacher at TYF, Barbara. It was a lot of fun! I only dyed fiber and was trying to go for a tonal look on the fiber that I dyed. I hope to use it for socks, it's superwash merino wool. Along with the wool, I dyed some silk hankies, which was fun and I like the way they turned out.

Here's a blue/green/teal 6 oz bump of fiber, possibly will become socks for Laurie.

The silk hankies.

And lovely purple/burgundy/purple-black, possibly socks for me!

My February Lady Sweater is coming along, I worked on it a lot on our drive out to CA, I'm finally in the lace part and it's going quickly, a great bus and car project! I hope to have it done while the weather is still cold enough to wear it :). Also, I am in the process of plying some Pagewood Farms BFL in the colorway "mississippi mud", I have two of the three skeins plied and I can't wait for them to be all done, it's funny that so far, they all look so different! Then, I may start on the alpaca for a scarf for Laurie's dad.

The start of lots of posts: Bunny update

It's been awhile since I posted, mostly due to busyness and travel and being sick. Laurie commented to me that my last post was rather dire and that you all probably think Ella's dead or something now. Well, she's not, her leg has totally healed since I posted, and she didn't pick at it and even though she hated the e-collar, it kept her from pulling anymore stitches out and it healed very nicely. Laurie and I took the stitches out ourselves, and I was pretty proud of us :). Recently, though, Ella's been having trouble breathing. She's had an upper respiratory system infection since we adopted her and the last two time that we tried to treat it when it got bad, the antibiotics didn't seem to do a thing, so we've opted to not stick her with needles for the antibiotics anymore and see where the infection takes us. It's definitely getting worse - you can tell that she's struggling to breathe pretty much all of the time. I have no doubt that eventually the infection is going to turn into something fatal, but right now she's eating with gusto and loves her greens and being petted, that it's not the right time to put her down. If there comes a time when her quality of life seriously deteriorates, I think that it will be time to let her go. For now, we're just giving her loves and keeping her warm (she lost all of her fur again to the mites and is butt naked right now, although some hair is growing back in, slowly). Here are some pictures of her in her e-collar, she was seriously cute in it:

Exactly a week after Ella's accident, we came home to a sick Bennett. He was "scanning" moving his eyes back and forth all the time, and falling over when he tried to walk. I was really worried that he had a stroke or chewed a cord that had shocked him and that it would be permanent, so we called our vet after hours. We have a fabulous vet, he called us back 15 minutes later and we had the calm reassurance of just and inner ear infection. The next morning Laurie picked up two antibiotics for him and we just finished off all the medicine this week. Poor guy was really miserable, he kept wanting to do his regular bunny activities but would fall over and crash if he tried. We kept him in the exercise pen so he wouldn't try jumping on things or moving around too much, the scanning is a result of vertigo. Luckily, Bennett is resilient and he is back to his old self. In fact, I caught him on top of Ella's cage this morning - naughty boy! He really is such a love bug, he'll nose you if you aren't petting him with both hands! Did I mention he's also really spoiled? :) We went away to northern CA for Thanksgiving and the bunnies stayed here because Ella's not fit to travel and it was pretty cold. We had our former neighbor come and watch the two of them and she gave them a treat of a growing plant of mustard greens, which Bennett is really loving. Eileen and Bennett got along really well (there were treats involved) and I'm sure he'll miss us when we go to San Antonio for Christmas but I know he will be in good, loving hands. Here's a pic of Bennett looking disapproving, but really he's loving Laurie petting him:

Healing thoughts for Ms. Ella

This will be a short post, and I have lots more to say but we're having a bit of a crisis with Ella. On Wednesday night, I was grooming her back legs and felt something catch in the comb, thinking it was just a large mat that needed tending to, I went looking for it. I didn't find a mat, I found a quarter size laceration below her hind leg. So, off we went to the emergency vet and had it sown up, because she doesn't have sensory perception in her back legs and because the fur mites have greatly reduced the quality of her skin, we are worried about infection. She managed to get the e-collar we were sent home with off last night and bit off two of the stitches - the wound is still closed and we're heading off to our vet office this afternoon. Please send healing thoughts her way, poor girl, we're doing the best we can to keep her comfortable and healthy.

Bunny pictures

There has been a sad lack of pictures around this blog, lately! Here are some bunny pictures to make up for that...

Bennett's been cuddly boy lately - I'll snuggle him close to me and pet his nose and ears for a while and then put my arm around him and he'll just stay there, all cuddled up with me for as short as ten minutes and as long as an hour. Most of the time, I'm either laying down for or getting up from a nap when he does this - it's so cute but it makes me feel guilty that he doesn't have a friend to cuddle with when I'm not around. I keep telling him to wait until Thanksgiving - when we bring Maisie home!

Anyways, here's disapproving Bennett (he doesn't give this look very often but you can see his displeasure at an empty food bowl...)

Mr. Bennett all stretched out and cute, but mostly I put this pic in because you can see all his lovely angora fur.

And *poof* there goes all the fur!

The black splotches are the only places where his fur was going back in after we plucked him. I think it was the hot weather that we are having combined with a molt that left him very bare and pink! (You can see in the picture above, him saying "Mom, really? You have to take a picture of me like this?!?! Come on - give me a little dignity!)

And one of my all time favorite pictures:

Now, Bennett in his Halloween costume... Cowboy Bennett!

Lastly, yes, Ella still lives. It seems that she's decided to pull through :). She's very happy in her cage and also very much loves to come out for loves. Here are some pics of her (she's going to be a princess for Halloween, but we don't have any pictures of her in her costume, yet):