Winter Activities

We've had a cold winter so far, with much more snow than usual. The average depth of snow is about 2.5 to three feet, so walking anywhere in the pasture is not fun for anyone. If you want a great cardio workout, try running in deep snow!
Rather than kill ourselves with outdoor recreation (did I mention that temperatures frequently dip to minus 30?) we have been busy indoors. Besides, when it is dark by 430 pm it is difficult to get anything done outside other than feeding the animals and occasionally clearing snow. This year I made a few things as presents, here they are.

First is a pair of illusion scarves.  Illusion is the technique -- by contrasting rows of raised knitting you can knit a piece that looks like plain stripes when seen head-on, and reveals a motif when seen from an angle, like this:

or this:

I also did a piratical fair isle toque. It has 24 skull and crossbones on it, and no two are alike:

I made this little lamb out of some scrap cotton yarn:

and earlier this year I finished a cotton/linen lace sweater. I knit this out of my head after a pattern I saw but couldn't locate here.



I would also like to include some pictures from last Christmas, which didn't make it into my blog at that time. It's of an old hen I brought into the house. She was being picked on by a younger hen because she was old (any women out there identify with that?), she had big gashes in her back. I couldn't bear to leave her among them, so I brought her inside. She was about nine years old, and had laid many eggs for me in her youth and she proved to be a wonderful pet. Her name was Ginger, and she used to sit at my feet like a cat and purr. She would come running when it was dinner time, and she loved to eat spaghetti and tomatoes. One of her favorite treats was strawberries. She helped us wrap Christmas presents as you can see, and everyone got along with her, cats and dogs.  Sadly she passed on to the choir invisible last spring, but I wanted to share her sweetness.

I also want to say that chickens (at least my chickens) are not stupid nor are they mean (I have many roosters that live together in relative peace and who never lay a spur on me, but come to be petted and fed treats -- the pecking order notwithstanding is a cultural trademark that is shared by the British and the Indian caste system), though they are limited somewhat by their physiology. A chicken for example does not have binocular vision as we do, therefore it has trouble negotiating complex paths. It also can't see well in the dark. People with insufficient empathy and imagination (the two often go together) brand animals as stupid when in fact they have failed to take into account the set of potentials the animal was born with. Within a week Ginger had learned her name, as well as "dinnertime" (always an important word with those in a foreign country).  She loved to sit with old Teddy by the fire on the warm hearth.
She was a speck of brightness in a gloomy winter. She died of old age last year, and when she left we missed her sparkle. It was a pleasure to know such a cheerful little soul.