Look What DD Made!

DD came back from her week at The Clearing yesterday with a box full of things she made during her very first time working on a lathe.  There're spindles and a mallet (for hammering the wood onto the doodad that holds it onto the lathe), a whole bunch of bowls, and even a couple of little boxes.  Boxes!  Little round boxes with fitted lids and room inside for tiny treasures made from a single piece of wood that she made in her first days of making sawdust.  We were amazed and impressed.  You can see by her smile how proud she was and how much fun she had making it all.  She hopped up this morning and tootled off back toward Lexington so she kind of blew in and blew out but it was great having her for the few hours she was here.  We're planning to go there in about a month so it won't be long before we get to see her again.

Remember I said that I was going to close my eyes to choose the yarn for the next Car Knitting Warshrag?  I went downstairs to do that yesterday and well... I just couldn't bring myself to leave things to that level of chance, so I picked out these.  I also gathered up four small remainders of cotton not enough to make anything with on their own and have almost finished knitting them into a doublethick cloth instead of starting the car cloth as I intended to, but I might just take the car knitting yarns back downstairs, dump out the bins of solid cotton and variegated cotton, close my eyes and just pick.  (Good lord, Barbara, it's only a warshrag.  For god's sake, woman, get a grip.)  Also way back in the dawn of (my) knitting time I started working on a cotton throw patterned after a Sudoku puzzle.  That's been scratching at the back of my awareness for a while so I dug it out to see how much is left to do, and it's not too bad.  I've got over half of the squares knitted and maybe with my added experience I can crank out one a day, perhaps at work, and get this thing assembled in time for next summer.  Which means that I haven't knitted another stitch on the Dobby Hat(s) in the last few days but let me just get this doublethick cloth done (later today) and the car knitting one sorted out and I promise (cross my heart) I'll get back to the house elf hat(s) because I am intrigued by the pattern and the challenge of it.  Really.

I heard something thump the patio door this morning and when I went to look all I saw was this drift of feathers in the grass.  Something got it, maybe a mourning dove, they're kind of slow and dithery.  I imagine they're on a lot of hawks' menu.

July 26--Ron Kimball, ROO-0060.  There is no cock-a-doodle-doing allowed withing the city limits so backyard chicken coops are girls-only clubhouses.  Ella built a small wheeled coop big enough for two chicken even though the city ordinance said she could have up to four.  No roosters, though.  Evidently roosters were just too rural, giving a farmyard air to an urban lot.  Two chickens worth of eggs were enough for her needs and their coop was small enough for her to keep it clean.

Now I'm going to go see about finishing that doublethick cloth and being a little less Germanic about picking warshrag yarns.
--Barbara