Little grey rabbit, loose ends

In my freelance life I've been given the enjoyable assignment of knitting up toys for a venerable yarn company. The latest completed project has been a shy little grey rabbit. She refused to smile for this photograph.

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Yesterday was the Ides of March, and as promised, a winner of the Knit Nordic pattern book giveaway was selected. That person is TracyK, and to her I say "congratulations, and please email me via the button on my blogger profile (the "About Me" section of the blog on the right side of the page) with your mailing address so I can send that to the publisher, who will then dispatch the book to you. If I don't hear from you by the 29th, the book will go to the contest runner-up." 

For those of you among the gentle knitters who like receiving free pattern books, a new giveaway will be posted shortly, so be on the lookout. Very few people tend to enter these giveaways, and you therefore have a much greater chance of being awarded a knitting book than you do of, say, winning Powerball.

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Thanks to the awesome designer Kristin Nicholas who mentioned it on her blog, my free pattern for the Earbud Sleeve went viral. That was quite pleasing to me, because I like it when I'm able to improve the lives of so many knitting friends. One of them, Margaret in Grafton, Massachusetts, sent this photo of her completed earbud sleeve, which turned out beautifully. 

I welcome photos of any others people care to send me, and I'll publish them to inspire future generations of knitters who wish to solve the problem of tangled earbuds.

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Purim and spring both arrive this week. At the moment there's very little snow left on the ground in southern Rhode Island, but it's bitterly cold and windy, so difficult to imagine there will be a warming trend. To offset this depressing thought, I baked a lot of Ultimate Hamentaschen today.

They're filled with a delectable mixture of oranges, pecans, dried figs, etc., and I highly recommend the recipe, from the venerable Joan Nathan, which was published in Tablet Magazine last week. Bon appetit!

"Orange you glad...

...I knit this scarf, for your double protection?" I asked H.

"Double?" he responded. "You mean, I can wrap it twice around my neck?"

"No, silly. Once for warmth, once for protection from the Mighty Hunters!"

Reading Kristin Nicholas's Berkshires-based blog post of December 8th, "It's Orange Season Here in the Country" (http://getting-stitched-on-the-farm.blogspot.com/), reminded me yet again of the inescapable fact--that in New England we're already deep into the season of Bambicide. And orange is the color of protection. Everyone who's not a deer is advised--legally required, in many areas--to wear orange clothing when on land approved for hunting.

For a while it's just been the bow hunters around here (southern Rhode Island), including one hardy soul, an anthropologist who teaches at Connecticut College. In the spirit of authentic participation, ML makes his own bows and then sits in trees and shoots the deer as they stroll past. Or not. He spent the better part of about six entire days, from 5.30 a.m. to a half-hour past dusk, perched in trees on our property hoping to bag one, but nothing happened. Meanwhile he read books and graded midterms. (Apparently he killed nine on a property adjacent to the Conn College arboretum, where he'd planted alluring foodstuffs, like corn and sorghum. Way to go, M!)

Gun-hunting began last Saturday, and non-hunters like moi and H like to wear orange even when we're not all that close to the line of fire. It makes us feel safe, though this may be illusory. (Our Portuguese Waterphobic Dog, Lola, also has an orange AKC-approved coat to wear when we walk in the nature preserves.) Last year, at his request, I knit H a fluorescent orange scarf out of exceedingly synthetic yarn that I found at Job Lot (a store that often carries weird knitting supplies, like clear plastic knitting needles from China that somehow resemble Christmas candy). The yarn's so lurid and bright it looks radioactive.