Hey! More snow!

And yet another snow for the kids. This is the 5th in 4 weeks, and the last of the ones we had built into the calendar. We have a lot of snow on the ground, but the roads are clear and the driveway's clear. We finally bought a snowblower this year. We moved here in January of '08, and we have a long and steep driveway. We've done a lot of shoveling; we had a plow service one year to the tune of several hundred dollars, and now, the snowblower. I *love* it. We specifically got one that I can manage. I am, to be fair, a gadget-lovin' woman. I like gear, it's just my nature. But this makes it totally doable to clear the driveway, and since we just another foot and a half of snow, it needed clearing a couple of times. ANYWAY. I'm pretty sure no one cares about my joy in clearing my driveway.

I've been massively productive today. I've got about 25 pairs of socks to make (yes, that's right, I am truly crazy) and I got 7 done. I also finished the Ear Flap Hat.

It's a cute and not difficult pattern, but I'm not thrilled with this version of it, for a couple of reasons. I feel like the flaps are HUGE. It may be that this is just a bit bigger-than-newborn, and it wouldn't look too weird an on actual baby, but I don't happen to have one of those anymore, so no way to know. I added a crochet edging to help it lay flat since this yarn is nylon and acrylic, so it's not going to block. I knit this on 7s, and the ball band calls for 6s. I think they would have been better, the fabric is a bit loose for my taste in baby hats. The next version of this I do, I'm not doing the garter edge on the ear flap, and I'll plan just to do the crochet edging, and that will work better and look nicer. I'm definitely going to do a moss stitch edging as well.

Mainly, though, I'm just not diggin' the yarn. It's very soft, true, but the dyeing is just bizarre to me. It claims a "delicate stripe effect." This is what I got. There are a few places where it almost seems like it wants to be variegated, but then says, no no, I'll just stripe. The stripe transition is this weird thing of 4-5 stitches of blue, then the same of white. It repeats this a few times and then just switches color. Very odd. I don't like it for this project.