Fire on the Mountain

Here's this morning's sky:



I love the way the early morning sun sets the snow on fire.

And since the sky looked like this yesterday,



and it wasn't very cold, and I was over my cold, and there was no excuse in the world left not to - the world's weeniest skier took to the slopes yesterday. I did not take pictures, because I was not at all sure a sensitive piece of electronic gadgetry would survive the experience. Actually, I wasn't at all sure I would survive the experience, but I didn't fall getting off the lift, and after a painfully snowplowish start, the muscle memory kicked in (not that there was a whole lot to remember - I was only ever an advanced beginner when I last strapped on skis 7 1/2 years ago) and by the bottom it was not so bad. Fun, even.

Christmas kicks into full swing at our house today, as the tree goes up. Technically it began the evening of Nov. 30th, when Rob and I stayed up into the wee hours wrapping tiny tidbits accumulated through the year and stuffing them into the kids' Advent calendars. Now that Liam is old enough to comprehend and compare, it's a strategic exercise in symmetry (is a wind-up penguin equivalent to a turtle, for example) but I so love the behind the scenes process of creating magic.

Moo

Somebody (I feel badly I can't recall who, but I'm also not inclined to search the archives of every blog in my roll) blogged these the other day. (Edited to add: thanks for the comment, Caro, now I remember!) Which is the only way I ever would have discovered them, since the link is tucked in fine print at the bottom of the Flickr page. Anyway, I've been casting about for a nifty, artsy business card idea, and this fit the bill nicely. Here's what I sent off last night:

North Wind

The cold front has brought windy temperatures well below what Whistler is used to (though still mild compared to the prairie winters we endured for the last 6 six years), but with that came the sun. The (happily abundant) snow is transformed from soft dove grey to dazzling, blinding white, last week's enormous, delicate snowflakes covered up by dry powder that wisps and swirls off the drift crests.

I am beginning to understand why Scandinavian sweaters are primarily two toned, white and blue / red / black designs. This is not weather to inspire subtlety and shading. But neither, in my experience, does this particularly blustery cold call to mind primly stylized snowflakes and rows of dancing children. It's beautiful, but it feels wilder and less orderly than that.

Race to the Wrists

The sampler pack sweater is ticking right along, and the great sleeve race is on.


Will the yarn last to the wrists, or will I have to settle for some sort of fractional look? More to the point, will I be able to make the "best" colours last? Because I have plenty of mouse gray, carrot orange and anemic lavender left, but I'm not going to use those exclusively for the last half of the sleeves. I sometimes think I should learn to love all colours equally, but I am savoring my bits of blue, and the nice dark cranberry. It's a bit like when I was a kid, hoarding the last bites of chicken to assuage the discomfort of finishing the plateful of rutabaga that we had to eat because it would be wrong to waste food even if the original veggie was the size of a small car, and woody enough to construct a house with (and why oh why did those prairie church ladies with farms never gift the economically challenged with edible produce?)

But I digress. Here's a closer look at the shoulder shaping, in which the short rows form a bit of a design feature in their own right:

Playing

I should have been knitting FIL's socks, creating motifs for DS's Christmas stocking, sewing a funky patch over the hole in DD's jeans, or preparing for the artisan market I'm showing at in three weeks time (more on that one another day). But all these deadlines and obligations have been seriously drying up the creative well, so this weekend I took time out for a little infusion of happy.

I am in love with short row shoulder shaping. It is much like turning a heel - elegant and clever, and best of all, I can line up the stripes by eyeballing as I go, rather than spending hours with the calculator extracting hypoteneuses from curvy lines.