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Yesterday Theron trimmed up Whimsy's feet a bit, so now they look half decent. Today, I took her out riding, across the hill and back. It was maybe ten minutes of riding and about thirty or forty minutes of sampling alfalfa and grass.

( Read more? Probably only interesting to horsey people. )

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Off the needles: Brown hat for Sam. (It fits and everything.) On the needles: grey hat for me. I'm doing the one I thought was pretty in the list of hats I offered him, only with a 2x2 ribbing fold-up brim for extra warm. I don't care if it says "Man Hat" on the pattern description. I also don't care if the pattern says SSK for the decreases. I hate SSK and I'm doing k2tog because I like it better and it's faster.

Sam's hat was done in two strands of 2-ply natural brown border leicester that I washed, carded and spun in 2008. (It pains me to omit the Oxford comma in that series, but even Oxford has given up the good fight. :( Stupid Oxford.) Mine is being done in natural grey border leicester that I carded and spun in the grease this year and then made into a nice three-ply using my bashed-together lazy kate (hastily constructed from recyled 2x4's) and washed in the skein.

By the by, I have a metric shitload of the grey border leicester left, sorted into light, medium 1, medium 2 and dark. (Again, I feel pain. Oxford comma! I miss you! Plz come back!! Commas go where you are supposed to breathe while reading. Without the oxford comma, there is no pause between medium 2 and and. Perhaps you, who are reading this aloud to yourself in your cubicle, might be confused. Rest assured that medium 2 is one color and dark is another color. I have FOUR colors of natural gray border leicester.) Persons interested in a woolen hat might do well to consider "natural gray" as a color option.

Revived from the dead: red and black mittens (above the big knuckles, into the finger decrease section) using leftover yarn from the HoHI socks of yore. They're on size 1 needles at around 12 sts/inch.

Next in queue: mittens for mom, now that I have pattern and yarn for that. I need to swatch to get gauge of 37 sts / 4 inches so 9.25 sts to the inch or thereabouts. The book says to use 1.5 needles. I don't have that size, but I'm a very tight knitter. I'll try a test swatch on 2's and see what I get. (I am trying to pretend that the discipline of following a pattern as written will be good for me.)