Welcoming Vroni.

This is Vroni

More about Vroni later. The big project this week was the scarf that has been on my loom for nearly two years. The warp has been on the loom much longer. I used it to make a beige waffle-weave scarf for DS2, which I gave to him Christmas 2014. I changed the tie-up to weave a twill, then the loom was damaged. (I won't go into how that happened, but it took nearly 18 months to get it fixed.) If you've been reading my blog the last few weeks, you've seen renewed progress on it. Now it's done and ready to send to DD.

The edges aren't exactly straight. It was a little difficult with the odds and ends of yarn I was using, some of it hand-spun, but also I have been out of practice. I really need a temple (not a place to go to pray for more skill, but a device to keep the edges even).

I made some progress on the Impari Shawlette. It's a good project to take if you go out to eat or to a meeting. Or watching football, perhaps (more about that later). I would have finished more of it, and more of my "Sistine Chapel" quilt, except that I had a blessed event...of sorts.

As you may remember, Hannah went to live with Daphne, Daphne Jr. and the other Wisconsin dolls. Hannah is a Götz doll with a vinyl body, which is slimmer than the cloth-bodied Madame Alexander play dolls and American Girl dolls. She is even slimmer than the Tonner play dolls, which also have a vinyl body rather than cloth. Since Dolly (Madame Alexander) and Gabi (Tonner) are too plus-size to make good models for my sewing and knitting for Hannah, I was without a model in the correct size after Hannah's departure. So...I needed another Götz doll. My plan was to purchase a Vroni after Christmas, thinking the prices would go down. They didn't. They went up, and as you can see from the link, they are out-of-stock. Every place I had located one in the past was sold out. I was resigned to waiting, months perhaps.

Enter my hero, a doll owner in the Ravelry Götz Doll Lovers group, who had decided to clear out all but one of his dolls to make room for more yarn stash. He offered seven of his dolls for good prices, some of them in the lovely smocked dresses he had made for them. When I saw Vroni was among them, I snapped her up, because I knew that the seller kept his dolls in immaculate condition.

Vroni started her journey to me on Tuesday and arrived in the middle of a blizzard on Thursday. She hadn't seen snow for a long time, and never so much at once.

She made friends right away with Dolly and Gabi, who took this selfie of the three of them together.

Vroni arrived with only the lovely dress, a full slip and panties. After just making sweaters and hats for Gabi and Dolly to keep myself from feeling cold whenever I looked at them, I found myself with another almost skimpily clad doll standing around my fiber studio. Of course I needed to make her a sweater and hat as well. People had been talking about the free Kitty Cat sweater and hat pattern available from My Doll Best Friend. It looked like a fun and fairly quick knit, so I downloaded the pattern and picked a color to go with the smocking design, because of Vroni's limited wardrobe.

I knew I could use Palette (fingering weight) held double to get the thickness I needed for the pattern, and I had Semolina in my stash, so I CO. I found the denser knitting yielded by the 3.00mm needles hard to work on, but I was able to get gauge, and the sweater was soon done.

The sweater makes a good top to go with the jeggings I ordered for her back before Christmas. (You may remember that I ordered four pairs, two for Gabi and Dolly, another pair for Hannah, and this one.)

I wanted to save her gingham ribbons to go with her dress, so I got out some yellow ribbon and threaded it through her braids using a yarn needle.

Then I started on the hat. The pattern calls for larger needles for the hat, so it went quickly and easily.

The neckline is a little large for warmth, so she needs a scarf before she can go outdoors. I can make one easily from fleece, using the pattern I've used before for warm hats and scarves.

Monday we went snowshoeing, because the weather was nice for a couple of days. 

Dusty must have covered three times the distance the rest of us did.

No Worries is open again in its new location. DH and I went there on Tuesday for breakfast and then took the pups for a walk along the bicycle trail at nearby Gorgoza Park.

One nice thing about Dusty is he brings the ball back. Rocky just runs to the ball and points at it, or picks it up and "throws" it at Dusty.

I met Joanie at No Worries on Thursday. With all the snow and other stuff going on, Common Threads couldn't get a host. Ana brought her. It was fun to see her again, and we got some knitting done. The owner/manager is a friend of hers, and she knows all the wait staff. This was her first meal at the new location.

We've had more snow than I can remember ever in the mountains of Utah. Excess snow, followed by slight melting--not enough to get the snow to slide off the roof--worked together to create a dangerous situation for our house. We started getting cracks in the walls. DH spent several hours on each of three days up on the roof with rappelling gear to dig up and remove snow. The last day he worked up there was Sunday, coming in just in time to watch the Super Bowl game. That's when he discovered that the TV, which had worked earlier in the day, no longer had reception. Something must have happened to it while he was throwing snow and ice off the roof. We ended up having to watch the game on my iPad. We used the JBL Clip speaker for better sound. Whew!

What's on my needles: Still the Impari Shawlette. The March of the Fibres is still waiting in the wings. Still hand-quilting my “Sistine Chapel,” working on the first border.

What's on my Featherweight: Still waiting for a new assignment.

What's on my loom: The leftover warp from the Multi Scarf. I don’t know how much I have, so I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet..

What's on my wheel: Stanzi is still set up with Full Circle spinning fiber but no progress again this week.

What's on my iPad/iPhone: (Besides the Super Bowl game.) Finished The Quilter's Apprentice by Jennifer Chiaverini. It was a good story. Then I listened to Frey by Melissa Wright. There was more violence for the amount of plot than I usually like, but the story was OK. Now I’m listening to Footsteps in the Dark, a mystery by Georgette Heyer. I’ve listened to it before, but it has been a long time. On the Kindle app, I finished Anna and Her Daughters by D. E. Stevenson. Now I’m reading The Housewife Assassin’s Deadly Dossier by Josie Brown. Not really into it yet.

What's in my wine glass: Crane Lake Malbec, again. One of our favorites.

What's my tip of the week: Natural peanut butter will not need stirring before using if you put it in the refrigerator within a few hours of grinding. If you buy the kind in the jar, and the oil has already risen to the top, you can turn the jar upside down for a few hours (or days), and sometimes the oil will go back into the ground peanuts in its attempt to return to the top, in this case the bottom of the jar. If it does that, put it into the refrigerator before the oil starts collecting at the bottom of the jar.

Note: This blog post was produced on the iPad and the MacBook, using the iPhone for some photos and some photo processing. No other computer was used in any stage of composition or posting, and no Windows were opened, waited for, cleaned or broken. No animals were harmed during the production of this blog post.