Granby hat and scarf

Soon, I will be home where the internet flows freely... well okay, I pay for it to flow at a specified bandwidth that I share with only one other person (Hubbers). I will not miss the frustration of sharing wifi with a whole building full of people and without somebody to hit "reset" on the router when it needs it. This is my excuse for not keeping up with the blog. It has just been too painful. Almost as painful as sharing a single washer/dryer with the whole building.

A while ago, I mentioned that I went to Lonesome Stone and got some new yarn to go with some previously-stashed yarn. So here's the deal. I knit this hat from their beautifully hand-dyed baby kid mohair:
However, I have no scarf that does not horribly clash with this hat. But a scarf made of the same yarn seemed a bit much. This stuff is just too bright and fuzzy. Here's where the new naturally-brown alpaca yarn comes in:
The brown was supposed to tone down the orange. Instead, it highlighted all those minor tones of blue and red. At any rate, it screams a bit less loudly. The pattern is the Anthro-inspired scarflet.Now putting the original hat with this, still looked too bright and fuzzy. Therefore, I needed a new hat to go with the new scarf (how circular). The first hat was too small anyway, so it makes a great ski-helmet-liner. Here's the new hat (pattern: Amanda hat from Sleepy Eyes Knitting).
Now if I just had a pair of gloves made from that brown alpaca, it would be complete. But I used up all of that yarn... maybe next winter.

Swap

Thanks to the coolness of Ravelry, I joined a yarn swap with other knitting grad students. They called it a dissertation-a-long rather than the more typical knit-a-long. This is my first ever yarn swap, and was a lot of fun. I set goals for things to get done by the end of February, and my reward for getting at least one of those things done was this cool package full of stuff to help me get more work done and stuff to distract me from getting work done :)
Of course, I also had to put together a package to send to someone else who completed a goal.

Now I have a stash of yarn sitting in a drawer next to the couch in our little condo. Any ideas on what I should make with it? I'm thinking about making leg warmers for cold-morning commutes next winter.

Powder Stash

Yay, Hubbers discovers a good tree run off the Eagle Wind lift at Winter Park.

And I discover that heavy powder can really trip me up.

Or maybe I'm just bowing to the snow gods... that gorgeous blue sky really isn't helping the incredibly-shrinking ski season.

Saturday

Rocky Mountain Natl Park gives free Ranger-guided snow-shoe tours on the weekends, so we signed up for one last Saturday. The famous High Ridge Road that connects the east side of the park to the west side is closed in the winter, so the two sides are almost like separate parks. Touring the place on a snowy winter day felt like trying to spy on a wilderness in hiding... it's not easy to get to and then it's covered in several feet of snow. All interpretive signs are buried, only a few parking areas are plowed out and the road only goes 10 miles. Trails are only accessible by ski or snowshoe. (No photos, since it was just snow and trees covered in snow). On our tour, Hubbers and I were the token tourists... the rest were locals, which seems rather odd for a national park.

Our guide was a wildlife biologist. I learned that black bears weigh a mere 12oz at birth, and they're born in the middle of mom's winter hibernation so they have time to eat and grow before going out into the bigger world. I also learned about subnivean habitat - that's where all those little ground animals like mice go in the winter.

On our way to the park, we stopped at Lonesome Stone Natural Fiber Mill which is just around the corner from us. They have quite a few alpacas plus a few llamas and goats. They breed and raise the animals, as well as process fleece into fiber. And they do absolutely gorgeous hand-dyeing. After meeting the alpacas and watching the machinery work the fiber, I picked out some new yarn to go with the yarn I already have from them. The top greenish yarn is wool in a complimentary colorway as this hat I made. The brown is alpaca, and I think it goes very well with the yarn of that hat, so I'll use it to make a matching scarf (I'll explain that better once I start the project). The bottom is an odd-lot washable merino sock yarn. I don't know why I always feel compelled to buy sock yarn when I find it on sale.

Charity knit

I get more comments on my knitting posts than anything else, so here's another one for you.
That is my first ever charity knit. It's another iPod cozy, using the same B's Buzz pattern as the last one, but with Peaches & Creme yarn. It's much chunkier looking which may be more stylish these days for high-schoolers. It's going to be sold at a high-school fundraiser. It was entirely knit during a drive to and from Copper Mountain. I'll see how many more I can make while riding in the car/bus by the end of the month.

Irish souvenir sweater

It's done! My souvenir sweater from Ireland. I didn't have enough yarn for a full sweater with sleeves, hence the vest. I really think it's a cute design and I'm amazed that it actually turned out like the Talia pattern promised. It was really an easy pattern requiring virtually no seaming. Although there were times I though I'd never finish it.
This may not be the ideal shirt to wear with it, but hey, that's the shirt that I packed for that day (see previous post).

Stuff

If you're not familiar with George Carlin's "Stuff" routine... it goes something like "Sometimes you leave your house to go on vacation. And you gotta take some of your stuff with you... You gotta take a smaller version of your house. It's the second version of your stuff." Then you get invited on a side-excursion and "Oh, no! Now what do I pack? Right, you've gotta pack an even SMALLER version of your stuff. The third version of your house..."

That's what we did last weekend. Hubber's grandma was sick, so we packed up and went to Denver. She's home from the hospital and doing much better now (although we did get treated to a whole litany of complaints about bowels). Funny that coming back to Granby actually felt somewhat like coming "home" last night. I imagine it will feel even more like coming home when we return to Albuquerque.