Sunshine on my African Violet.

It's really, really cold outside.

Really, really cold.

It was -44 degrees Celsius when we walked to work this morning.

I need a warmer hat.

I bought some wool from Erin on Saturday. One hundred grams of beautiful snowy white South African wool (which falls somewhere between Merino and Blue Faced Leicester on the fine wool scale).

I've been wanting to try oven dyeing so last night I got it all wet and put it in a casserole dish (that will never, ever be used for food) and poured blue and yellow and green dye over it and stuck it in the oven for half an hour.

After cooling off and rinsing and drying over night it looked like this:

It makes me think of spring - sky blues, cloud whites, daffodil yellows, leaf greens and a bit of earthy green-brown. The colours are much more apparent as I am spinning and I enjoy every one of them.

I'm spinning lumpy-bumpy style. Partly because I'm still getting used to the wheel and drafting and partly because I want a nice squashy warm hat. It works out well.

I'm half way done the spinning now. My yarn is hanging up to dry as I type. Thirty-eight metres of squashy hat wool.

...or "All the things I was going to blog about but didn't get to and then the power went out."

The highlight of my weekend was certainly Erin lending me a spinning wheel. It's the Ashford Traditional and is great fun to play with. It takes a bit more co-ordination than my hand spindles but I can spin a lot more stuff. This is especially exciting since I was thinking of asking my family to help me buy a wheel for my birthday and it is wonderful to be able to try one out before making an investment.

By the way, spinning wheels make the most incredibly relaxing whirring noise. It's lovely to listen to and even better to make.

Besides Zeke's bed I've been working on another little knitting project. This will be one of two Cabled Fingerless mitts. The yarn is Socks That Rock Heavyweight in Rose Quartz and feels so beautiful to work with. I love to see all the tiny variations in the pink. Watching the cable emerge is magic - a couple of little twists in what looks like the wrong places and you end up with a braid. I can't wait to wear these; they manage to be feminine and substantial at the same time.

I've been sewing too. Just before Christmas I discovered that a bunch of the wrapping cloths I had stored away were not fat quarters but quarter metres and not very handy for wrapping. After Christmas I decided to take all these bits (leftover from making our stockings I think) and make a quilt top. I pieced for almost two days straight and came up with a crazy quilt style middle but didn't have any fabric to make borders. A couple of weeks ago I was at the quilt shop and picked out enough fabric for borders, binding and backing (I think) as well as some batting to sandwich in the middle.

On Sunday I finished off my top and couldn't be more pleased. I had enough left over from making the centre to add a skinny pieced border and managed to do mitred corners (which were not very hard but extremely fiddly). When I held up the top to show Rob the sun shone through it and illuminated all the pieces like a glass window. I'm looking forward to starting the quilting next weekend.