A Rose and Some Stripes

I'm finding myself gravitating towards anything to do with yarn these days. The knitted rose is from Nicky Epstein's Knitted Flowers, although mine doesn't look quite the same as the one in the book.
I used RYC Cashsoft 4 ply and small needles, and I think this makes a nice fine-scale finished piece.

The finished look of this rose depends a lot on how you roll up the knitting to make the rose. It can be a tight or a loose roll. It seems to be a matter of finding the balance between evenly rolling and leaving room for the top edge to curl. It all depends on how you want it to look. I fiddled about with it for quite a while and I'm quite pleasedwith the finished effect.

If it's not knitting, it's crochet.

This is what became of the pile of yarn I bought 3 months ago with a striped blanket in mind, and it has indeed become stripes.

I wanted to keep the design simple and let the colours speak for themselves. It's aran weight, which is thicker than my last blanket. It's mainly rows of half-trebles, but to vary things slightly I did the pale blue rows in trebles (I'm using UK crochet terms here).

It's almost finished now. I just want to work some sort of edging around, so I'll see how that works out.

This has been so therapeutic to do, I could hardly put it down. Just one stripe after another, stacking up colours.

And at the end of a week of real winter weather, this is my snowy garden.

I must admit I do quite like the snow, at least I do when I don't have to go anywhere in it.

I like the stillness of the undisturbed garden, and the reflected whiteness brings a lovely quality of light into the house.