Holidays on Ice

It's been 3 weeks since I've updated the blog, but I've got some good excuses. A flurry of excuses, in fact.

First, of course, that perennial excuse: "It was the holidays." This year I made all my own gifts, which included a knitted scarf for my year-old niece, three "sleeping bags" for my 3 to 4 year-old nieces' dolls, a doll "diaper" bag for my toddler niece, a large batch of shortbread cookies for everyone in my department at work, candied nuts for the women I live with every day in cube-land, and this, which isn't even done yet, and yes, it's after Christmas:

This damn thing is my first foray into lace knitting, and while technically the stitches are easy enough to create, what's hard is following the pattern. At first, I was following the written instructions, which go something like "k3, ssk, yo, ssk, k1, [k2tog, yo] 2 times," etc. Once I got the gist of it, I started using the charted pattern instead, which looks something like notes on a musical staff, with five different lace rows, each followed by a simple purl row. As I said, the stitches themselves aren't hard, but I'm having a hell of a time not losing my place as I go along. Whether this is due to mild ADD or just a matter of being an inexperienced knitter, I don't know. When it's going well, I feel like a virtuoso, knitting in an imagined rhythm that corresponds to the charted "notes" on the page. But then I get to the end of a row and discover that I'm one stitch short, so I end up going back and counting and counting again, only to end up ripping out 5, 6, 7 rows at a time just to get back to a neutral place where I can start over.

So each night, for every 20 rows I knit, I probably rip out 7 of them. It's kind of like paying down my credit cards: for every payment I make, the finance charges end up eating a good portion of whatever I just paid, and the progress I make in paying down my debt seems to crawl along at a snail's pace, just like this scarf. But unlike paying down my credit card, the yarn I'm working with is a tactile dream: it's 50/50 silk/wool, hefty yet smooth and soft, with a beautiful, subtle sheen. The scarf is for my mom. I showed her the work-in-progress, and she loves it. Phew.

I guess I don't have any other excuses. But here are some pics of the general white-out conditions we've been experiencing up here in Maine.

Thumbs losing her footing during the season's first snow:
After that, the sun came out, and we had some gorgeous days with the sun glinting off fresh, smooth snow. The calm before the storm:
The storm:
Nick running outside to move our car after the two cars in front of us cleared a path. We don't even have a shovel yet, so without using their tire tracks to guide us out, we would have gotten plowed under by the next snow plow, for sure:
And then, the calm once again after the storm, early one morning. It was as cold and early as I look.
I posted more cute animal photos under the weekly photos link.