Author: denisemor

Happy to Be Stump Free!

Hope y’all had a lovely holiday weekend.

We celebrated Labor Day by…..
Laboring (of course!)

But we had the help of a specialist-
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a big hydraulic stump grinder from our local Home Depot.

We took out 15 stumps.
Some enormous, some kinda piddly. But all are now outta here!

I could show you pictures of patches of dirt where the troublesome stumps used to be, but that is not very exciting.

So here are the sheeps!

Here are Edgar and Chone preparing to be beamed up-

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Frank sporting some seasonal facial color-

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Griff digging in to some salmonberries-

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I’m going to have to try harder to get pics of Felix. He’s kind of shy.

I haven’t made a lot of progress on the new sweater yet, so we’re not going to look in on that this week.

Instead, I wanted to show you something completely different!

I’ve recently been inspired to do some embroidery. It all started with this book-

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I found it at the university bookstore. The bird illustrations are so neat,

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I just knew I had to stitch some of them!

Here is the first one I’ve done-

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And a picture of the drawing from the book-

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What I’m doing is tracing the line drawings onto parchment paper (like the kind you use for baking), using a Sulky iron-on transfer pen to define the pattern on the reverse of the parchment, then ironing on to an old pair of khaki pants.

Next up-

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No idea what I’m going to do with them yet.
I just like them a whole lot.

Four Hat Limit

Apparently four hats is as many as I can knit in a row.

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I was going along, feeling like I was kind of in the groove, cranking out hats and feeling pretty good about it- I mean, you can never have to many hats, right?

Then I finished number 4 on thursday night and I knew I had to move on.

So here we go.
New project.

Vintage Mood

In a blend of Frank-Felix, Griff, and Coco (to start)

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The construction on this is really interesting-
You start from the center back, working upward and over the shoulders, increasing on the outside edges to create the shoulder caps and fronts, finishing with an integrated shawl collar. Then you pick up stitches around just about at the bustline and work the rest down from there.

What is really cool about that is that when you wrap the fronts over, the orientation of the stitches is changed and horizontal stripes become vertical stripes.

So it seems really promising from a stash-utilization perspective.
And it’s written for bulky weight yarn, so it should be a fairly quick knit.

Feels good to have a plan.

Dog Days

It’s been fun getting to know Skye this week
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A little bit about the boy-

he is very photogenic
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enjoys car rides
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and walks in the park
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he also really into tennis balls, pig ears, and getting his silly airplane ears scritched 🙂 (but I failed to capture those moments, sorry)

Meanwhile, out in the pasture, we thought we would cut up and haul off the the fallen tree branch, but it has become the the popular hangout for all species of critters. Go figure-

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And work continues on the sheep shed extension- getting mighty close!

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But Edgar remains unimpressed. 🙂

I have been kind of swatching, in a hat-as-swatch sort of way

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and seem to be on a garter-stitch sort of roll right now.

Next colorway?

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Meet Skye!

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Skye is a sweet handsome golden retreiver/white shepherd boy, and he just moved out here to the boonies to live with us on Thursday night.

He’s been pretty busy the last few days, checking the perimeter-

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frolicking with Sadie-

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meeting the sheep-

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and checking out the best comfy spots in the house-

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He’s still pretty excited about the sheep and chickens, but I think that will subside once they are not such a novelty.

And speaking of sheeps, we have begun to extending the entrance to the sheep shed-

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the hope is that a smaller, lighter gate out a little further will make it easier to catch the little buggers inside.

I sure hope it works,
‘Cause the sheeps are wise to all my other tricks!

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(that’s Edgar’s wise look)