Plenty to blog about

I have a bunch of pictures that I wanted to get posted almost a week ago but just haven't had the time. Especially since I had to download my photo editing software again and again trying to get it to work (PhotoImpact 8 and the latest version of Norton antivirus don't like each other, but as long as they are each kept to their own corners of the hard drive (Norton gets disabled while running PhotoImpact) they are finally coexisting fairly peacefully. Then I logged on to Blogger and found that I have been moved over to the new version. It looks diferent, but should work just fine.

Dolly


Dolly has settled in just fine. She doesn't seem to know how much bigger she is than the goats and sheep. We put the hay out and the goats tell Dolly that it is all for them, not for her, and she believes them. So I put hay in another place for her, up a little higher so that it is right at her level. The goats are sharing that too, but not chasing Dolly away from it.

Completed Yellow Jacket



Yes, this has been done for several days and I have been so slow getting the pictures up, but hopefully there are enough pictures to make it worth the wait. Since it is a reversable sweater, click here to see it the other way.

Here are some pictures of grafting the underarms. This is the last thing done on a raglan sweater, since the underarms are left open when the sleeves are joined to the body. It's just like grafting the toe on a sock.

• First you have to put the underarm stitches onto DPNs.
  
• Then with the end of the yarn that was left from knitting the sleeve, on a yarn needle, you are ready to weave the two edges together. The needle goes into the first stitch on the front needle,knitwise, slipping the stitch off of the needle.
  
• Next, bring the needle back through the second stitch on the first needle, purlwise, leaving the stich on the needle.
• The back needle has its first stitch grafted by bringing the needle through it purlwise, slipping it off of the knitting needle,
  
• and the second stitch is entered knitwise and left on the needle.
  

These steps are repeated until all of the stitches are removed from the knitting needles. Tie off the yarn and work it in, and you are done. The underarm will look as though it were knitted continuously with the rest of the sweater. Repeat for second underarm of course. If your sweater is knitted in reverse stockinette stitch, the grafting should be done in purl stitches instead of knit (or you can just do it inside out, looking at the inside of the sweater rather than the outside). Since this sweater is in a pattern stitch with some rows where every stitch is knitted, I didn't try to follow the pattern while grafting. I suppose that I could have (by reversing the direction for some of the stitches while grafting) but who is going to inspect the underarms that closely anyway?!

The Zoo
One of the reasons that I have not been here this week is that I was gone. We went to the zoo on Thursday and Friday. We live 3-4 hours away from the zoo (Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City) so we spent the night in SLC. It was a good trip and there were a few critters in the zoo that I would have willingly brought home with me if they would have let me. There was a llama, some angora goats and Navajo-Churro sheep (okay, maybe I don't need more of those) a bighorn sheep (it would be fun to see how well he would get along with my rams here), bactrian camels (but they didn't look nearly as good as Al's camels that I got to work with for the movie. I know that camels shed their hair for summer, but the camels at the zoo looked so bald. And their humps looked shrunken and bent over. Maybe these were old camels, but they were all that way, and that is a sign of neglect and poor nutrition. They were much smaller too. Well, it just wasn't the same as being able to touch the camels and take them for walks. The cutest creatures at the zoo that I wished I could take home with me were the Golden Lion Tamarins. They were just adorable. No, I don't have pictures of all the zoo animals. I had my camera there but just didn't take very many and what I did take didn't come out really well. You can find much better pictures of these critters elsewhere. Mark might have gotten some good ones, but his are on film that must be developed. If anything turns out really good I might post it here.

We got home and found that one of the dogs, Taz, had decided to remodel the house. He removed the linoleum from the bathroom floor and tore up my llama/soysilk roving. Next time, Taz either goes on anti-anxiety meds (Some dogs get separation anxiety) or goes to a kennel.

While in the car I worked on the Vigdis backpack. It's knitted and I am now working on assembly.



I guess next I start on Ragna.