First a Menagerie then Snow

What a couple of weeks it has been, especially the first of the two.  It all started on Saturday evening.  I had gone to bed early because my head was hurting and I was just dropping off to sleep when my doorbell rang.  It was a friend of my neighbour saying that an ambulance was coming to fetch my neighbour to take her to hospital so please could I look after her 4 dogs, one puppy and 6 cats until she was allowed home.  Of course I would, even if I spent half the night then trying to work out how I was going to manage it all!

The next three days were very busy, as you can well imagine, and ended with my collecting my neighbour from hospital on Wednesday.  I thought it was all over...

Then, on Thursday, the snow came down.  It looked beautiful so I just had to take the compulsory snow photos.

                                                        

Of course, it also involved walking up to the shops to get some essential groceries for both myself and my neighbour since my online grocery order was cancelled due to the bad weather.  This was repeated the following morning and topped off by my neighbour's burst pipe in the evening. At least the thaw had set in and I was able to drive to the supermarket the following morning.

While all this was going on I was intermittently knitting a gorgeous sweater for Marie Wallin.  I didn't finish it until the middle of this week but here it is in its unblocked form.  Marie will block it before sending it to her customer.

There are a lot of twisted stitches in the pattern that are time consuming to knit but it is worth it for such a pretty jumper.

As a result of the thaw, the ground of course, became very wet and the fields very muddy so I decided that a trip to the beach was the best idea when I walked Jacques and Millie on Thursday.  It was a beautiful morning.  The sun shone and it was quite warm.  The snow suddenly seemed a lot time away.

As you can see, the dogs enjoyed it too, even if one of them needs to learn to return to ball all the way to me instead of dropping it on the beach.  Jacques became quite adept at finding it and bringing it back for me to throw again, even if it was a little reluctant to actually drop it.

I was also pleased to discover that a jumper I knitted as a sample for photography was shown in the current issue of Knitting magazine.

                    

This pattern for this interesting design came from Jo Allport.

Returning to the dogs and the weather, the fields are now waterlogged and starting to flood, especially since the weather is now generally wet.  I suspect I am not the only one looking forward to Spring, although the dogs didn't seem bothered by it all when I took them out this morning.

 Now I am hoping for a quiet day so that I can finish off the lacy sleeveless top I am knitting for Jo and hopefully start an interesting oversized sweater for a student designer.  I am pleased to say that the orders keep flooding in at the moment, with many designs that I am looking forward to knitting.  Somewhere in between I am hoping to produce some of my own designs and finish off the one I have started.