Winter Is Too Long to Drink Cold Coffee

Winter is too long to be drinking cold coffee. And tasty as it is when you make it with a press pot, you pour one cup, drink it, and the next one is only lukewarm. The British don't put up with this situation for their tea (even though their houses are sometimes very chilly). They knit up tea cosies to insulate the pot, ones like this, and this, and the one I am totally going to make someday.

And now those clever Brits have designed coffee cozies and put out a book of patterns for them:

 

Americans only think of wrapping their to-go cup. If you don't believe me, search Ravelry's patterns for "coffee cosy" or "coffee cozy" (British spelling) and see what you get.

Reader, I got the book, turned to Pattern #4, and made me a Waffle Weave coffee cosy:

 

Used leftovers from my Juniper Moon Shepherd and Shearer and Colored Flock yarns. Nice, thick aran wool, 2 colors making a double insulating layer. And, Reader, it really does keep the coffee warm longer!

I had intended to make one for my coffee gourmet son who will only drink single-source freshly roasted and ground coffee and only from a press pot.  He used my cosy some of the time, admitted it held in warmth, but found the buttons a little fiddly to bother with. I agreed about the fiddliness, and there is something a little sloppy-looking about the button fastening.

Then the light bulb went on. Magnets! Off to the craft store to procure some cute little rare earth magnets, the really sticky ones. (Take care with these guys, though. If swallowed by people or pets they can cause terrible harm. Enclose them securely so they'll never never escape!)

Cosy 2.0 is double layers of aran wool--2-color ribbing--with 6 little magnets sewn into felt strips at each end of the piece. Wrap it around the pot and clunk! they grab each other instantly and hang on. Absolutely no fiddling!

 Am I pleased with myself? Utterly! It only remains to be seen if the coffee gourmet is pleased as well.

And what's this on the needles? Another cosy for another of my offspring who has suddenly found herself compelled to use a press pot far from home. Happy New Year, kids! As the Scots say, "Lang may yer lum reek." (look it up) And lang may yer coffee stay hot!

Snow Dyeing Again

What could be more appropriate for an all-Alaskan yarn than to dye it with 100% Alaskan snow? And so I did.

Base yarn is the Alaska Yarn Co. 100% Alaskan Grown Wool, DK/light worsted weight from CommuKnitty Stash in Homer, AK. Remember when I bought it last fall? Here's the nest I plucked it from, all pale and bare down in the corner:

After the vinegar soak, the skeins went into the tub laid out on racks, then covered with snow. Sky blue dye powder sprinkled on top of the snow:

and the whole thing left in the heated garage overnight to let the snow melt and the dye seep down into the yarn. Next morning, this is what I had:

Pretty pleasing that for once,  I got something like what I was expecting from a crazy dye technique, a cloudy blue Alaska sky. Last layer was a sparse sprinkle of yellow powder, for sunshine and to meld with some of the blue to form greenery.

 Then a half hour's steam, a rinse, and what have we got?

The yarn for a very Alaskan hat.

Some Finishes to Start With

Happy New Year, one and all! As part of tidying up the old year before bringing in the new, behold some Finished Objects:

The Baby Surprise Jacket with the booties that inspired it, and a little hat to finish it all off (both the outfit and the yarn). And sure enough, though there wasn't a baby in mind when I started this; if  you knit it they will come--a colleague was blessed on December 26 with a new granddaughter. Welcome to the world, Lani Pearl!

And finally, at last, eventually, the Sixareen Cape is finished, blocked, and launched! As I had hoped, just the thing to keep the shoulders warm on long chilly winter nights, yet stay out of the way of the reading and knitting. And, hey, you could have knocked me over with a ball of quiviut, but that seed stitch bottom border came out pretty flat in the blocking.

It fits differently from my original intention because I am a smaller size than when the keel was laid, so thank goodness it's a style that can be a bit loose. If it bugs me enough, I may rig some kind of seam inside to make the shoulders fit better.

I'm sure you realize that the photos have suffered from the seasonal lack of light at this latitude. Normally knitting and reading is not an outdoor activity, but that's where you have to go (at mid-day) to have even half a chance of success. And it's still a flash photo. The main color of the sixareen is closer to the reading picture. The Baby Surprise was either a choice of washout pale or overdone enhancement. Sigh. Photos can only improve now that we're past the solstice and the light gets longer and stronger every day.

A Further Digression

What's this? A snake?

 No, just a harmless Saroyan scarf, off the needles and ready for blocking, all 7 feet of it.  The yarn is nowhere near the worsted weight the pattern was made for; it's Blue Moon Socks That Rock Pining 4 Ewe. It started with a sock club skein, to which I added a second skein so the scarf could be long. The designer said it was adaptable to lots of different kinds of yarn and she was right!  I also added some beads as is my wont. They're not very visible in the pictures, but they're there!

Here's the blocked result:

Neither the indoor nor the outdoor sun shows the actual color. You can get the best idea of it from the yarn link.  It seemed to me that this yarn wanted to be leaves, not socks, and it looks very happy in this incarnation.

Still winter here; still up to our eyeballs in snow, thanks for asking.

The neighbors' mailboxes protrude just enough from the snow to be reachable.

Charlie the dog (18 inches high at the withers) climbs the berm across the road from the end of our driveway in search of horse muffins thrown up by the snowplow. He thinks it's a wonderful treasure hunt in the mountains.

Meanwhile, a young moose rests in the driveway next door. The good news for them is that the high berms give them access to willow branches they've never been able to reach before.  The bad news is that slogging through snow up to their (very high) armpits is extremely exhausting and they've given up finding quiet places to ruminate. They just flop down wherever they happen to be, and sometimes that's a driveway; tough luck if you need to pull in and park. Come back when I'm done with the cud, bud.

Snow: A Digression

Usually I try to stick to my knitting on this blog. Literally. The topic is limited to my knitting. But lately the frisky squeals of delight from Outside (as the Lower 48 is known in Alaska) about how early spring is this year and the blossoms of this and that are coming/peaking/over already are making me grind my teeth just a little. Although it's lovely for you Outsiders, I'm sure. Either that or it's the harbinger of doom from global warming. Whatever.

Up here is where all the snow went this year instead of spreading itself over the rest of the continent. Record  amounts of it. Maybe even all-time record amounts. And it's going to take a while for all of this stuff to melt. (And boy, will we have a mess when it does!)

So I went outside with my camera today, Friday, March 16, 2012, to document a little of what it looks like around my house.

Here's what the outside of the house looks like--several feet of snow on the roof and the snow just laying around in the yard about 4 ft. deep.

Out in back, you'd have to do some major shoveling to get to and open the door of the shed, what the grandson calls "the moose house." And by the look of it there's going to be an avalanche off the left side of the roof pretty soon. Thank goodness we, for this very reason, only keep stuff in there that we need in the summer.

And here's the woodpile. I climbed up on some snow to shoot down into the pit it has made for itself. We don't need the wood for heat, so it hasn't been very motivating to dig my way out there and sled some back to the house. Besides, the splitter is in the moose house.

But snow or no snow, the light is coming back, and at this time of year comes charmingly in the west windows in the afternoon and lights up the colored glass.

It will just have to do for color until the flowers get here.