Monday, December 23, 2013

Knitting through an ice storm

It looks like I've emerged from this weekend with almost all of a hot water bottle cover - so timely!


Where the colour shifts are speckled, this almost looks like I worked a Fair Isle pattern instead of blindly knitting along and letting the Cascade Eco Duo work its magic.  And soft?  whoa.  soft.

The grey of these stitches is a great match for the grey of outside, too.


We've been having an ice storm, you see, and there's no sun in sight.


Just the amazing and bizarre image of branches encased in a thick layer of glass as though imprisoned by some superhero's personal arch villain.


But that's not all.  There's also the not-enough-infrequent sound of crashing, as huge limbs crack off their trees and descend to the ground.


The trees in my neighbourhood are pretty old and very tall, so some of those limbs really pick up speed on the way down.  The worst is when they land on somebody's car... there were two smashed windshields on our block by about noon on Sunday, and that is just sad.  I almost feel guilty about being relieved it isn't my car's windshield this time.  (I had that honour with a summer storm a few years back, and I'm not anxious to relive the experience.)


Amazingly, as of Sunday evening nobody had been seriously hurt yet.  Anyway that's what we heard from the police officers who stopped by to check on the fire we'd been monitoring up in the wires surrounding the street lamp across the road.  A couple of branches had gotten caught there, and the wires were shorting out from the contact, which seems to be all it takes to cause trouble.  But we were lucky: there was a lot more freezing rain coming down while we watched, and that kept the flames from getting too big.  Also, none of them took out the power to our house.  Yay.


That may come - for the next few days, nothing is due to happen that would make any of the ice melt, so those poor branches will be under a lot of strain indefinitely.  Some of them are guaranteed to take out power lines if they fall.  If I don't pop in tomorrow to show you pictures of the really cute last-minute insanity gift projects I cast on, that's why - there's a very high risk of No Internet in my immediate future.

On the upside, our house is well equipped with wool blankets, battery operated book lights, party snacks, and a freshly charged tablet for listening to audiobooks, so I'm all set to knit... which is lucky, as there are a few gift knits I would still love to make this week.

Hope all is well where you are, and stays that way till I'm able to turn up again.  And just in case: Merry Christmas!

2 comments:

N.C.Fabric Junkie said...

so where did you find the pattern for this water bottle cover?

Mary Keenan said...

Whoops! It's a Churchmouse pattern - I've updated the post to put the link in the first line up there. Super easy and SO PRETTY.