The Little Knittin' Kitten

Secret Pal swag!

My first Secret Pal package arrived and it's an embarrassment of riches. Here's the pic:



I got a skein of olive green yarn which her note says is spun from the fleece of Nova Scotian sheep (how thoughtful!) and a lovely braid of merino roving. The girl knows I like green! Too bad I had to give the spinning wheel back to Lettuce Knit, but I'm angling for a wheel for Christmas, so hopefully the braid won't sit waiting for long.

She also sent a print out of a bag pattern from MagKnits (a suggested project for the olive green wool, perhaps?), a sweet little tin box with Audrey Hepburn on it (love her!), a sample package of goat's milk lotion, one of those plastic pencils where the leads come pre-sharpened in little white holders collected in the pencil shaft (total nostalgia, I haven't had one of those since grade school!), a note book, and a tin of lovely beaded stitch markers from Hide and Sheep on Etsy. Here's a close up of the stitch markers:



Aren't they sweet? I actually remember finding Hide and Sheep while browsing Etsy one day and admiring the dangle-free stitch markers, and now I have a set! Awesome!

Here's a funny, totally non-knitting related story for my dear readers:

I try wherever possible to live sustainably, and toward this end I vermicompost. This is composting with worms, where I keep a bin with red wiggler worms (the kind you fish with) and when I have some vegetable matter, like potato skins, I toss it into the bin and let the worms turn it into compost. I tried this once before with a homemade bin and it didn't work very well, but I recently got a professionally made composter from a woman on Freecycle and decided to try again. I got a pound of worms on Wednesday and dropped them into a bin with shredded newspaper and left them to do their thing.

On Thursday, I had friends from England , Roni and her brother Ram, visiting and after playing tour guide around the city Nyron and I took them back to our place for dinner. While I was giving Roni a tour of the house I heard Nyron call to me from downstairs in a rather concerned tone of voice. He said, "Brooke, your worms are escaping!" I ran downstairs and sure enough, the worms were executing a mass escape! There were worms crawling up the inside of the bin, worms on the lid, worms dropping down to the kitchen floor. It was a mass Exodus! I was so embarrassed as I sat down in front of the bin and began rescuing worms from their own self-inflicted peril (worms can't survive outside of the bin). Luckily, my guests were really good sports about it. They started turning it into a likeness of the show Prison Break and naming individual worms after characters on the show ("look at that one go ahead of the rest! That's Michael Scofield for sure!"). Nyron got into the fun by calling me Bellick, who is the prison guard in the show. "Nice going Bellick" became a bit of a joke for the remainder of their stay in Toronto.

The worms are fine now, I made some corrections to the environment inside the bin and they've returned to their home. But that made it one memorable dinner party!

Until next we knit!

=^_^=

posted @ 10:04 a.m.