Winter is Here

Never mind that Winter is Coming, it's here!  The temperatures have been well below normal here for the past week, dipping well down into the single digits.  It was only 2 degrees here yesterday morning and barely got into the double digits.  I had all the intentions of blogging yesterday afternoon only to discover that we had a frozen pipe.  I spent a large part of the afternoon thawing the pipe with a heating pad and a blow dryer.  This doesn't sound really awful and normally I don't think it would be, but the pipe happened to be in between a wall in our basement and the foundation in a spot that I could barely squeeze through.  While I was squeezing in and out of this tiny space I noticed that where the main power to the house comes in had a large hole and was letting cold air in. No wonder the pipe had frozen!  I plugged it up with insulation and then insulated the pipes with pipe insulation.  So far it seems to be working. 

This was the spot that I squeezed into and yes, I was terrified I would either get wedged in there or attacked by spiders the entire time!

Because there was exposed insulation and god knows what else, I dressed properly for the occasion:

Now, onto some fun and much happier stuff!  

Last month Verity from Truly Hooked contacted me to see if I would be interested in having my Wentletrap pattern included in her sock club!  The mail has been really slow here and I sometimes wonder if our mailman likes to keep the yarn packages for a bit before delivering them.  After all,  they are really soft and squishy and hard to resist!  I can't tell you how delighted I was when I opened the lovely lavender package that contained Verity's yarn!  The colors are bright and cheerful, just the thing for the middle of a dreary winters day.  The yarn base is an 80/10/10 Superwash Merino/Nylon/Cashmere with just the right amount of twist to work well for socks, and soft enough for me to just want to wrap the skein around my neck and dance around the house for a bit.

As well as being a fantastic indie dyer, Verity also just recently had one of her crochet designs published in Inside Crochet. Verity also has a group on Ravelry and there are quite a few Wentletraps knit up in this colorway.  It's called Quirky, which suits it's cheerful colors perfectly.  Here is a link to this months yarn club: TruelyHooked

Here are Verity's Wentletraps in Quirky.  Don't they look like happy socks?  The colorway is perfect for them!

I've been working on a second Arya's Needle that has three of the lace panels and omits the sword in the center.  It's going to be used as a sample at the booth I will have at The Powhatan's Festival of Fiber in April.  I dyed up the yarn myself and will have some kitted up with the pattern at the festival. It was snowing again this morning and I wanted to capture a bit of it in the pictures without actually going outside. Even though they are a touch dark, I really like the way they came out.