Jared Nathaniel Yoder

Our Jared

Keep that name in your heart.  Jared is our great-nephew and was in a very bad car accident early Monday morning.  He has multiple skull fractures and is in a coma in a local hospital.  If you are a praying person, say a prayer or six for this very fine young man and for his mom, dad, and three brothers.  Jared has a long road ahead of him, and it will be at least a week to ten days before we have any idea where that road is going to take him. 

Our odd weather has continued.  We've been as high as 80F degrees or more in the past couple of weeks, and it snowed the day before yesterday!  It's freakish. 

My son and his wife are separated. Again. But he has a job now, and we're hoping for the best for them all.

A customer brought an eight-week-old English bulldog puppy into my little shop on Monday and let me hold him for a bit...it was all I could do not to run away with him as he was SO adorable!  He snuggled warm and soft against my chest and breathed his puppy breath into my face, and I fell head over heels in love.  I do miss having a dog. :(

Two Left Socks with a bunny shadow

And so, I knit. This pair of socks is the next installment in the Sock Madness group at Ravelry.  I am out of the competition after A Difficulty With Pattern #2. 

(my wide farm girl feet, very high insteps, and 'sturdy' ankles make it hard for me to follow any written pattern precisely if I want to have wearable socks when I'm finished)

but will continue to knit with the group, nonetheless. 

I took this picture on Easter Sunday morning, and when I was editing it I found a little surprise left for me by that large brown thing hopping in my garden... do you see it there in the shadows?  

The yarn is Opal, from the van Gogh collection, and the color is "Cafe-Terrasse am Abend (Le Cafe, le soir)", or in English, "The cafe at evening".  What you see here is two left socks, one for me and one for Michelle, as we both bought the same yarn when we were at the Tutto factory store, and I decided to make matching socks for the two of us.  The pattern is written differently for right and left foot.  When I've finished the left socks, I'll begin the right ones.  I wish that I'd bought six balls of every one of those van Gogh colors!

Leaves of Green

There are these finished socks.  When my sister died, her husband gave me her sock-knitting stash, and in it I found the "Cascading Leaves" pattern by Jeanie Townsend printed off and bagged with this lovely olive-green yarn.  It was ironic that I had that very same pattern printed and bagged with nearly-identical yarn in my own sock-knitting stash... and so, a message from my sister.  

I don't know what the yarn is, as Cherryl had not saved the ball band but it is lovely stuff, soft and wonderful to knit up.  It reminds me of some Louet Gems Opal that I used for a pair of socks a few weeks ago. 

These are, I suspect, the very last of my tulips, and one dandelion, of course. Spring came far too early this year.  I spoke last week with a lady from Holland, Michigan, and she said that their annual Tulip Festival the first week of May will, sadly, be not much more than a Stem Festival this year, as the beautiful tulips will be past their prime.  

Cocoa Bien Socks

 One more finished pair of socks in a simple ribbed stitch, this pair for our friend, Ron Bien (pronounced bean), who did a very nice turn for Rich last spring on a trip to Tennessee. When one knits a simple pair of socks with no special stitches or other fancy work, sock knitters say that it's a "plain vanilla" pattern.  These are much too nice of a hot-cocoa-brown color to be vanilla, so I've named them "Cocoa Bien" socks.  They have extra-long cuffs to fit inside Ron's riding boots.  I hope he'll like them! :)  Opal Uni Color yarn, from the Tutto shop in Germany. 

It will soon be time for the first Big Ride of the season.  I need to polish my own riding boots, from the looks of that last picture, and get ready to go.  It's been three years or more since I've seen some of the friends I'll see on this next trip, and I am long-past ready to be with them once again.