I just love blogger. I typed out a huge post last night, uploaded a bunch of pictures, and just when I went to hit publish, blogger went down for maintenance. So I'm trying again! (since I started this post, the power has gone out 4 times. It's a conspiracy, I tell ya!)

When the ice storm started on Saturday, I wasn't too concerned. I had heard about the destruction of the 2000 ice storm, but since we have lived in Oklahoma, we had never had an event like that. We had had some sleet, but sleet doesn't really hurt anything, it just piles up on the ground. Ice coats everything standing still, and it just gets thicker and thicker. I wasn't too scared until the trees started breaking. You would hear a crack like gunfire, and then the sound of a glass cabinet falling over breaking everything inside. It happened over and over. I stood on the porch maybe five minutes, and there was never a pause in the noise as tree after tree broke, the tops crashing to the ground. The tree that stands next to our garage was leaning over, it's top resting on the house, right over the car, so I went to move that and there was so much ice on the windsheild I couldn't scrap it off. I moved it hanging out the door looking behind me and managed to back into the half barrel that holds plants. That branch never broke, but another big branch on the same tree did, and we will probably lose the tree. It's the tree the kids have had a swing in since we moved here, it will be really sad to lose it.

We lost power early Saturday morning, about 3:30 am. Just as we were getting ready to head to my in-laws house, it came back on though, and went off and on all day as I rushed around trying to get clothes and things that we would need (my knitting!) packed up to go. Finally about 4 oclock, it went out again, and it didn't come back on until after dinner on Tuesday night. As I have said before, we were really blessed to be able to go to Chad and Judy's, they really made sure everyone was taken care of, we spent the whole time relatively comfortable.

It's amazing to me how the ice that caused so much destruction can at the same time be so beautiful. I wish I could have gone out and just walked around and taken pictures, but at the time it was pretty dangerous to be out there, and then it was so bitterly cold. We still have some ice today, but it is supposed to get warmer today and hopefully it will melt off some before the snow forcast for tommorrow (4-9 inches) gets here. I hope it does what forcast snow usually does around here, and never materializes at all.

So we got home late Wed. morning, and started cleaning house. I had a zillion loads of laundry to do, I got the kitchen cleaned and mopped, my room straightened out, the living room clean, when Reagan came to me and said, Mom, Look what Yoda did!

Well, on top of all the stress of the last 5 days, I cried. This was my first piece of Fair Isle work, Anne from She Ewe Knits helped me pick out the colors and figure out gauge and then posted a picture of the finished hat on her website. He also ate a piece of the ribbed brim, and the thumb of one glove. I was really upset that I was going to have to throw all that work away. It was too shredded to try to re knit the area and I don't have any of the yarn from that project left anyway.

So what I did was I used the closest matching yarn I could find and whip stitched the edges of the hole closed, and did the same on the chewed thumb. Then I threw them into a pillow case closed with a ponytail band and put them through a wash cycle.

I think they actually fit better now, since they were a little big to begin with, and you can hardly tell where the chewed areas were. So if you have a disaster with a knitted item, try to fix it somehow before you just give up on it, it might not be perfect, but if you have an attachment to something, anything is better than throwing it in the trash. My thoughts behind felting them were that even if they felted down too small, Reagan might still be able to wear them. I'm really glad they still fit me though!

I have had a request to post information on the baby hat and booties I have been knitting, and I promise to get that up the next time, as well as some pictures of my current project.