Snow please go away!

This is the time of the year when I start feeling that we have had enough snow. This winter it came late, after Christmas, but we have had lots of it. Snowy landscape makes stitching a Scandinavian Christmas quilt very OK, but still! Yesterday I made the Churn Dash blocks needed for Block 2, the block I'm re-stitching after I managed to use a too small fabric for my first version.I hope to show the finished block soon.

There is still this much snow on the garage roof, and about 40 cm on the ground where the snow has not been touched. We still get new snow as well, but it usually melts away by the next day.

Two pheasant cocks have started to come to eat under our bird feeder, where the sunflower seeds drop. They are still almost friendly to each other, and wearing their winter looks.

By the time they start chasing the females, they will have to change this much:

I have been working on some secret projects I can't show yet, but I can show you the socks I knitted for my daughter. They are knitted from toe to top and two socks at a time:

The lighter yarn is a vintage ball of camel's hair, and the darker is an alpaca yarn I bought so I could knit her two socks instead of just one and a half. Both yarns were super soft and lovely to knit. The book I used is available in English at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Toe-Up-2-at-Time-Melissa-Morgan-Oakes/dp/1603425330.  This method is perfect for using ends of balls as you can make the socks as high as your yarn goes. This was my second "real" pair using this method, and I'm slowly getting the idea. I really like knitting them at the same time on a long circular needle. The four balls of yarn were a challenge with this pair, but I soon learnt to keep the resting balls inside the sock and out of the way.