A Few Sheep Shy of a Farm

I realize I haven’t been posting much (ha, understatement) for the past year or two . . . then, I also haven’t been knitting all that much this past year.  Life with little ones has a way of keeping you too busy for the things you want to be doing sometimes.

However, I recently had the opportunity to step back from the day to day chaos that reins here by going to the Knitter’s Review Retreat.  And while I was away I realized how much I miss my online knitting community!

The KR Retreat was such a wonderful event, such a nice chance to catch up with friends old and new, to hang out with fellow knitters & even take a class! Unfortunately, my camera is acting up and I didn’t figure out until the end of the retreat what was happening with it so I don’t really have photos to post.   I can tell you that I was inspired by the knitters I met, their projects and the overall energy of the group to begin a new chapter in my knitting & fibery career.  I’ve come away from the weekend with a new sense of purpose and new pattern ideas.  I’ve also found the motivation to begin offering my patterns through Ravelry downloads under the name Margaret Testa Designs, many of my existing patterns are now in there and I’ll be loading the last few as soon as I round up the copies of the pdfs.  I hope to have several more patterns available over the course of the winter, including a couple of freebies, one of which I’m working on now but we’ll save that for the next post, shall we?

As for things around our little almost a farm: The kids are now 4 and 18 months and getting bigger by the day it seems.  Mimmo can’t wait for real snow to start so he can build a snowman and Caterina is now walking, talking and getting into everything.   We recently lost one of the cats, Isabelle; we believe the coyotes may have gotten her but can’t be sure.  Arrow is getting old, he’s almost 13, and his hips are giving him trouble.  I don’t think he is going to last the winter and we are all very sad that he will be leaving us soon.  We are looking into getting a puppy (shepard, lab, golden or a mix) so if anyone out there has puppies that need a home let me know.

We also hatched 8 chicks this past spring, 6 of them have turned out to be roosters! I plan to keep one but still have 3 available if anyone is interested.  The hens are taking a winter break from laying and I expect it will be after the solstice before we have eggs again.  This year we may be ordering a new round of hens and these may be retiring, at least most of them.

For now, I’ll leave you with a couple of photos of our first winter snow.

First snow 2009

PS.  Mari L. asked about photos of the children’s socks she’s knit so far this year . . . I’ll post them as soon as the little purple one shows up; its currently winning a game of hide & seek.