I won! Tomatoes? & Knitting

I can hardly believe it. I won Mambocat's blog contest! (Dez has recently opened a yarn shop in Baton Rouge called the Knitting Asylum. If you live nearby, go visit and tell Dez I sent you.)

Look at the goodies I won just for ordering some yarn from Ray Whiting. Hubby has already laid claim to the coffee. :-) You can read more about what was behind the contest in Mambocat's September 18, 2008 post.

Ray is the dye master behind Knitivity yarn. He started his business in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina moved through in 2005. After that he moved to Houston, Texas to start over. On September 12, Hurricane Ike roared through knocking out power, causing damage, and stopped his business dead in its tracks. His power was not restored until September 30. Can you even imagine having no power for over 2 weeks? I can {{shudder}} and it ain't pretty!

So I ordered a couple of skeins of yarn to help out. (Sure, like I needed an excuse to buy yarn. LOL!) It took awhile for Ray to wade through the backlog of orders. (Not a bad problem to have.) I have to say his yarn is wonderful stuff--big fat skeins with lots of yardage, nice quality wool, and great colors at very reasonable prices. Guess who'll be going back for more?

I've been watching snow and winter arrive during the past couple of weeks. Lake effect snow dumped another 9.5 inches of the white stuff on us from Thursday night through Friday. Our daytime temps have been well below what they should be for late November. Shall we say January temps? Yep! And the lows have gone down into the single digits. It was a bone chilling 8 degrees Farenheit here on one recent morning. Brr! You'll find Boo sleeping as a lump under the covers on our bed. He loves to burrow in the winter.

I took a few tomato cuttings from some cherry tomato plants in our garden before we had a killing freeze this fall. I put the cuttings in a jar of water until they grew roots. Hubby planted them into big pots last week. They are now cozily warm in our family room near our pellet stove. If all goes well, we'll have cherry tomatoes sometime before spring arrives. One day we'd love to have a greenhouse where we could grow veggies year round. We still have a few tomatoes left from the final picking from the garden. Here's a picture of some unusually shaped cherry tomatoes I found when I gathered all the tomatoes in the garden. The tomato plant they were growing on was a volunteer---a cross of some sort between last year's tomato plants. We'll save the seeds and plant them next year to see what they do.

I've been knitting a lot but not posting much about it here. Most of my projects get posted on my Ravelry project page. I just finished another Fire Bird Shawl on Friday night. We've been doing a KAL for it on Ravelry. I used Fleece Artist Nova Sock yarn for this one. The red kept rubbing off on my hands (and my clothes) while I was knitting this. A lot more loose dye came out when I washed and rinsed it again and again yesterday. I blocked it last night and set it in the family room to dry. As I was taking pictures of the shawl this morning, Boo decided he wanted to help. Isn't he a handsome fellow?

Watch for a new shawl pattern to be posted for sale tomorrow. This is another wing shaped shawl like Fire Bird. Though this one has a border of hearts and has been christened Love Bird.