Weekend Photos

The above photo is what I've been seeing from my driveway these past few days.

The small photo to the left shows one of the trees with its mix of yellow and green leaves. The small photo to the right is a close-up of the leaves. I love the way the leaf margins and veins are golden while the interior is still green. In a day or two, the leaf margins will go brown. Some leaves never do this. They just turn yellow. Or they turn in a more splotchy manner.

I live in a rural area, obviously. It's very peaceful most of the time. Most of the trees you see in the top photo are evergreens, with Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine predominating. At this altitude, the aspen groves are the most conspicuous deciduous tree.

I don't know if it's my ISP or blogger, but it took several tries to get these photos uploaded. Is it a Sunday night thing? An end-of-the-month thing?

My attempts to take decent photos of fiber and fiber-ish objects did not fare as well as the above driveway photos. This is something I'll need to work on. I'm sure that taking the photos outdoors would help, but it was too windy today.

The yarn from the Hyrna Herborgar shawl continues to look like an out-of-focus brown blob. I suspect I'm going to give up on that little photography project.

Here is a photo of the Lacy Cables shawl from yesterday, totally unblocked, of course. The photo is not as well-focused as I'd like. You can see that progress has been made. The undulations created by the cabling are very obvious. My yarn's variegation is subtle but pleasant, I think. It looks better in reality than in a poorly done photograph. I've done about 5 pattern repeats so far. The original pattern calls for almost 12 repeats. I might do that. If I have enough yarn, I might do a few more repeats and make the shawl a bit longer. We shall see.

What else should I share today? I took photos of dyed strips of roving and of pretty yarn spun from previously dyed roving. I'll save that for some future post. I have some shots of pretty yarn dyed by others yet spun by me, along with some natural-colored yarn in pretty colors grown by the animals themselves.

This blog post has enough photos already. I don't want to overwhelm the people with slower internet connections. Yarn photos can wait until I'm in the mood to babble about spinning and dyeing.

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We had cool and frosty weather this morning. I got to wear my wristers for the first time this fall. Wristers are also known as fingerless mitts, wrist warmers, and pulse warmers. I enjoy knitting quick and easy wristers from combinations of yarn remnants. They make good gifts. They're fun to wear. They're fun to make. They provide a good opportunity to experiment with color and texture combinations.

These wristers are not great in the wind or if you already have cold hands, but they work very well if your hands are still non-frigid and you're out of the wind. They're also more effective when the air is a bit nippy rather than wicked cold.

I'm going to share the pattern I use for these Rapid Wristers (or should that be Wrapid Wristers?), but not until later this week. Until then, here's a rather dim photo of a few pairs of wristers I happen to have lying about the house, along with a very out-of-focus shot of a wrister on someone's hand. I'll have better photos by the time I write it up, I hope.

As usual, I will give a basic pattern with a few rambling digressions in the middle, and then add a few variations and ideas that seem related. I might even add the mitten pattern that builds on this. Someday I may give some patterns or recipes for more complex wristers. However, these are the ones I've been happiest with in the past few years. The ratio of effort to results is very much in its favor.

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Ugh. The preview option in the blogger new-post window does not look much like the final version of the post. Edit, publish, edit, rearrange, wave arms in rude gesture and try again.