Premie Update

The lamb is doing great! And the kids absolutely love him. They are calling him Lucky, and although he can chase them all around the yard (and the house), he doesn't get that much of a chance, as he is always being carried. Lambs are not really supposed to be in the bedroom, even though we are bringing him in the house at night now (it's been a little cold at night), but sometimes they get away with it anyway.



Not Much Knitting This Week

I still have not really started a new project, but rather picking up something small and just fiddling with it. Like crocheting hair scrunchies, or lucet cord (that I can use for the Knitty corset when I get around to knitting that). Oh, and I finally got around to putting a button on the front pocket of my backpack so that things don't fall out. I knitted and sewed in an inside pocket also, and I like that so well I may do several more of different shapes and sizes.




What Else?

Ok, I didn't get an entry made here as often as I wanted, but there is a lamb update in the comments under the last post, and I have worked on the 100 things and links pages. I added links (which I will continue to do), and changed pictures around, including adding some new ones. I even got a picture of Taz, the black lab. He doesn't appear often in my pictures since he doesn't sit still for the camera. But Jonathan ganged up on him so that I could get one.

I have pictures of the construction of the purple striped socks (which were done on 2 circular needles), and my plans include posting those and my comments about that pattern. I still need to discuss the shawl too and directions.

For the Cross-Cultural Analysis class, I had to (well, actually I didn't have to - the paper was only required for graduate students in the class, but I like to write so I did it anyway) write a paper about a subculture of my choice, and I chose Knitting Bloggers. I think I will (soon) post that paper here - you might find it amuzing. That class is over and now we are well into the Study of Language class (same time, same place, same teacher, most of the same students). It really is very nice to have one class finished and be able to concentrate more intensely on fewer classes at a time. Study of Language (Linguistics 4100) goes into strategies for teaching languages, and looks at how language is acquired, and the factors that influence the language learning process. I'm finding it to be a nice review and application of things that I learned before. A general linguistics class was something I took way back as a Freshman in college, and was one of my favorite classes. Besides that, I was a communicative disorders major for 3 years (I finished that major but will not receive a degree in com d - not going to get into that again here), and this class draws on psychology very heavily also - learning theories, aptitudes, learning strategies, personality and sociocultural factors, etc.

Always Plenty to Do
Some of the things I need to do this week:

• always plenty of reading material to get through
• get my birth certificate so I can get a new passport so I can go to Norway
• write a paper
• take Taz to the vet for shots
• shear the angora goats
• arrange for a shearer to come and shear the sheep
• time to shear the llama too, but she is a bit cranky so maybe I'll wait until after her cria is born - which will probably be in the next couple of weeks
• catch up with this web log
• get started on a new knitting project
• all the usual classes, meetings, and activities, etc. that we have every week of course
• what am I forgetting???

A Premie



Leia had her lamb today, her first, maybe about a week before he was really ready. He's a very pretty little boy, with Two Grey Hills markings, but he is so tiny. His hooves are not hardened (they all have soft hooves at birth, but not quite like this), teeth have not started to emerge, the wool is extremely short (it's not uncommon for Churros to have an inch of wool already when they are born), and he is weak. He can stand briefly, but not long enough to find mama's udder, and then he is completely worn out. He does have a sucking reflex and takes a bottle greedily. He also can hold his head up, but mostly just sleeps. We have him in a laundry basket in the house for the night. Although Leia tries to mother him, this lamb is beyond her ability to raise at this point.



Here Leia goes up on the milk stand to be milked so that her baby can have colostrum. She didn't want to get up there, and took some coaxing to get her to stand up, but once she did she cooperated better than a lot of first time freshening dairy goats do.

Another Lamb



Coal is a two-year-old (Ember's daughter), and this is her first baby. He's a gorgeous little moorit ram lamb, born 3/16/2004. That happens to be Mark's and my 14th anniversary.

Star and her lamb wanted their picture taken too. Coal is the darker ewe and her baby, of course, is the smaller one. He runs around with the rest of the lambs already, but still panics if his mama gets too far from him.

Thanks for hanging around

It's been a couple of weeks since the last entry here. Tell you what! I'll make up for it by attempting to blog almost every day for this week. How about that? I'm also going to be working on the other pages, like the links, and if I get ambitious enough I might add something else too. So don't give up on me yet!

Two Needle Opal Socks



They have been finished for a while. I think they are a little big for Jonathan, but he wears them constantly anyway, except for the day that Carol beat him to them.

Binding off is a little bit tricky with this method of knitting socks. It takes a third needle, and goes like this:

• Knit the first stitch
• Slip the next stitch onto the back needle
• Knit the third stitch
• Slip first stitch over last stitch
• Continue in this manner, LOOSELY
• Once both socks have one side bound off, the other side is much easier to finish.

Also see this picture and this one too.

There turned out to be two places where I was distracted and slipped with the yarn in back instead of in front. Repairing them was not a really big deal. Turn the sock inside out to the point of the error. Snip the offending yarn. Repair as you would if your sock had gotten a hole in it in any other way. I might have snipped the wrong side, as I wound up having two holes to repair for each error.


Between Projects Now

I have already finished an additional pair of socks, which I will tell you about later.



Petting Zoo



Angela, Joe, and Andrei came out to visit at the end of February. It was lots of fun, and even though it was the off season for tourism in Vernal, we found things to do. We went to the Dinosaur Monument, and of course took advantage of our very own petting zoo in the back yard.

Be Happy

I did always like this song. Thanks, Heather, for sharing this link with me!



Another Fun Quiz

Are you a Yankee or a Dixie? The quiz seems to be down at the moment, but hopefully they will get it back up. It worked a few days ago. I came out 60% Dixie, based on dialect. That result may seem strange, but I did go to high school in Austin, Texas. Also, some of the Uintah Basin dialect they speak around here in North-Eastern Utah is based on Southern speech patterns.

Knitting

I'm almost finished with the socks. Still not sure who they will fit - most likely Jonathan. There is one place on one sock where I evidently did not keep my yarn in front when slipping stitches. Ooops! What do I expect when I use knitting to keep anxiety under control, as I was doing at the time when I probably made that error? It's far enough down that I don't want to undo stitches that far to fix it, so after I finish the socks I will cut the yarn where it catches the wrong side and weave in more yarn to repair it.

What to knit next?

I have more possibilities than I know what to do with. I really like the new bonus pattern that Knitty just published, and I have a couple of different yarns that I am considering but I'm not sure I have quite enough. Either the green bead yarn or the Autumn yarn. I thought I had a picture of that here after it was spun, but maybe not - I can't find it. Same goes for the green yarn, which is also my own handspun. I know I took pictures - maybe I didn't publish them though. Anyway, I'm not positive that I have enough of either, so maybe I'll do the front in one and (no, they won't go together) use a neutral color for the back.

As if I didn't have enough yarn, I found these grab bags on sale at One Fine Yarn. It's probably whatever they have left of a dye lot, but you don't choose the color - you just get what they have, and can choose all different colors or two skeins of each color.





I am wondering if there is enough of the Peer Gynt to knit a Norwegian style sweater. What do you think? I would make it up as I go along, choosing patterns that would use approximately equal amounts of each color.

Or I could use it for socks, hats, mittens, etc., with Norwegian motifs of course.

Not really sure what to do with the Cascade yet, although nosewarmers are fun. I made some of them last winter, and my kids thought they were good as chicken hats too, which means they got left outside sometimes, but the kids did like them. I'm just not sure how many nosewarmers we really need.

Sheep



Here's a picture of Amidala taking her turn watching the babies. She may be paying more attention to her own, but the ewes do trade off sometimes and one will mind all the kids while the rest of the ewes go off on their own somewhere.