We start off the day with the fact that it is the 7th Day of Christmas and later tonight we will be celebrating New Year’s Eve. It’s a quiet day here in our little corner of Texas. No parties, no platters of food, just life as usual but we’re taking time to remember the day for a variety of reasons. The temps will be in the high 60’s again with sunny skies this morning and cloudy skies this afternoon…a repeat of yesterday except the wind will be picking up a bit.
We don’t buy champagne for celebrations, we’re just not champagne people. But we enjoy sparkling cider and will open a bottle of that to celebrate. We’ll have a cold cut tray with turkey, cheese, pickles and so forth and watch something enjoyable on TV to await the arrival of the New Year.
Tomorrow I will start on the scrap fingering yarn scarf but I’ll still be working to finish existing knitting and spinning projects. I did a test knit with one hundred stitches on a forty inch, size three needle and I like the texture and fabric it gives me and the closed end I get from the Magic Loop Cast On for a double thick scarf in stocking stitch. When the scarf is long enough I will switch from the forty inch needle to a sixteen inch needle.
The size four needle for the cowl was fine, but for my next cowl I’ll use a size three instead of a size four for comparison. I like to experiment and I’ve got so much in the way of left-over fingering yarn from sock, scarf and hat projects and I can’t think of a better way to make my way through all that scrap yarn…just keep going until I’ve exhausted the scraps.
The cowl is still a teeny bit damp so I draped it over the front beam of the floor loom to allow air to circulate between the layers a bit more and speed up the drying process. Since this is a double thick cowl it takes a little longer to dry completely. This is my third seamless cowl and my grafting skills are improving, but I still need to work on the inevitable gap between a couple of stitches where the beginning round meets the ending round. I think it would help if I secure the end of the yarn at the beginning of the cowl before I begin to graft both edges together. It would be easy enough to accomplish after I’ve knitted a couple of inches from the waste yarn cast on. I’ll make a note of it on my One Note page for this project for the next time I knit a seamless cowl.
I’ll start a pot of my Black Bean Soup later this morning and it’s time I made a pot of ground beef sauce for some spaghetti later in the week. Brad has requested garlic bread to go with it and we’ll have a small green salad as well. I need to make sure I have plenty of spaghetti in the pantry because it’s been quite awhile since I cooked some. I use more egg noodles and elbow macaroni than spaghetti and usually have plenty of both on hand but I’m not sure about the spaghetti.
Have a safe New Year’s Eve, ya’ll. God bless!
Rural Texas Knitter 