The White Stuff

One of these days I'll actually write a blog post with some knitting content in it - and you'll all fall over with the shock of it. And by all, I mean of course my mother who will be the only person left reading this blog after I've wittered on about frozen precipitation ad infinitum.

Actually, just to make sure, would you like to see some knitting before I talk about snow? Of course not; snow it is.

For it has snowed in the Midlands. It started yesterday morning just after I got into the office; tiny pin-head dots of frozen ice, building to wonderful feathery flakes which drifted lazily down from the sky to create a wonderful velvety blanket of white over the city. H reported snow further south slightly later, and then phoned to tell me that his office was closing because they were all having problems getting in and out of the car park.

We hard-core peeps pressed on until the end of the working day; I consider I was remarkably restrained not to spend the entire day with my nose pressed to the window. Of course once it got dark we couldn't really see what was going on; we only knew it was still snowing because the lights from other buildings looked flickery; and it wasn't until we got outside that we could see how completely and beautifully the city was covered.

Warwickshire is similarly tucked up for winter at present (which is why our car couldn't make it back onto our rather steep driveway despite H's best efforts.

Today my very best attempts could have got me to the office but the driving was horrid and with more snow forecast for this afternoon I requested a work from home day and it's been pretty productive; no doubt greatly helped by a walk around the village at lunchtime, plunging through the shin-deep snow on the playing fields where we encountered this fellow



Rachel commented in the last snow report that she finds my complete obsession to be a little bewildering, and it's something I've been pondering for a while. Not so much my personal devotion to the white fluffy stuff; that stems from a series of childhood winters spent on the South Coast where the naturally mild weather and high salt content in the air makes snow a real rarity - basically I'm making up for lost time. Even the people who aren't quite so crazy about snow as me, mostly look forward to it, hope it will snow, and are happy to see it falling. I think it must be the transience of snow in England; it's set to stay below freezing for the week so we'll be mostly white and dirty grey slush for a little while, but that's unusal. In my mind snow is a fleeting glimmer of wintry glitter that often disappears as fast as it comes, returning the green normal before you really get to enjoy it. We don't often get lingering snow, a feeling of having seen nothing green in weeks, and piles of dirty slush to slip through - perhaps we have the right sort of snow after all.



OK, I relent, enough snow talk, time for some yarn to warm the cockles of your heart, and some more of the Christmas knitting. Today's walk gave me a chance to photograph the last of H's knitted Christmas presents 'in the wild' so to speak;



the Cairn hat and mittens from Ysolda's Whimsical Little Knits volume 1.



Apparently mittens are for making snowballs and then trying to shoot them through the basketball hoop on the field!

It's another great pattern (can you tell I'm a bit of a fan) which responded rather well to my pattern abuse, swapping DK weight recommended yarn for Mission Falls 1824 (the brick) and Cashsoft Aran (the charcoal). I also added a couple of extra repeats to the wrist on each mitten to make them properly boy sized.

What more could you need when it's white outside.