New Knitting Project - Ragna



I have started swatching for Ragna. This pattern is in one size only, and I would swim in it, so I am using a slightly finer guage of yarn and one needle size smaller and hoping for the best. I'm too lazy to figure out if it is actually going to fit me, but my gauge is just a little smaller than that specified, so it should work. I decided to use the center part of the chart for swatching, thinking that it would make a nice headband, and then noticed that the way I am doing it is exactly the way that the hat is started, so I could continue on and make the hat. However, I might decide that a headband is what I want afterall. I have lots of hats and don't wear them all that often.

The sweaters in this book (Viking Patterns for Knitting) use the basic sweater construction where you knit the front, knit the back, knit each of the sleeves, and then sew it all together. I have been thinking about doing them seamlessly. They are not raglan designs though, so the obvious way would be to knit the body tubularly, with steeks for the armholes. Then stitches could be picked up for the arms after cutting the steek. But I'd rather sew side seams than do all that. Another possibility would be to knit the body tubularly up to the beginning of the arms and then switch to back and forth knitting the rest of the way up (attaching a second ball of yarn). I'll think about it, but maybe side seams aren't such a bad thing afterall.

House Chickens

How do you know when the chicks are grown up enough to go outside with the rest of the chickens? Here's how:

• They don't know that they are chickens.
  
• Either that, or they don't know that the rest of us aren't chickens. Either way, they don't stay in their box anymore and they think that everyone and everything exists for their use.
  
• They think that the dogs are running a terrific taxi service.
  
  
• When one of the kids curls up for a nap, they just pile on top like chickens do when they sleep.
  
  
• The real clincher is when they start helping themselves to people food.
  
  

The chicks are now living in the chicken house with the big chickens, but the children visit them regularly out there. Out of the four hatchlings, only two of them survived to this point. Keeping baby chicks alive isn't as easy as it looks.

Flowers
My hollyhocks and daisies bloomed at the same time. I need to plant something that will bloom from mid-spring until these start (early summer). We get a few early flowers from various bulbs, and the daisies and hollyhocks will keep going until it freezes, but we have quite a gap in between. I know I could just get some annuals, but I usually don't, and for some reason the chickens and goats always manage to get anything new that I plant. Hollyhocks are a great dye plant, so I'm fighting the bees (which think that those flowers are theirs) and collecting the spent blooms until I have enough for the dye pot. That job is enough to keep me busy. There are lots more flowers now than there were when I took this picture a few days ago.



The flowers are so dark purple that they look black. I chose this type because it has a lot of dye in it. My fingers turn purple when I collect the flowers.