Knitting Trigger MIttens

When I was visiting my friend, Cathy, a couple of weeks ago at her alpaca farm  on the north shore of Hay Bay, south of Napanee,  she wondered if I could knit her a pair of trigger mitts from the 'Saltwater Mittens' book, recently published by Christine Legrow and Shirley A Scott, using her beautiful alpaca blend yarn. The yarn was processed from her 2018 alpaca shearing.

I started it using the Grenfell pattern and had almost a whole mitten knit before I accepted the fact that it would be just too narrow. I then cast on the men's mitten "Blowin' A Gale" and finished it up this morning.

The original pattern called for salt and pepper stitches above the palm on the back of the mitten but I decided to continue the design all the way to the tips of the fingers.

'Salt and Pepper' knitting stitches - alternate yarns.

I'll be casting on the second mitten this evening.

While away last week, I got the missing floss skein for my Quilting Bee project - GAST (Gentle Art Sampler Threads ) Mountain Mist. I am filling the wings in with that colour.

I believe the fabric is 40 count grey linen. All the threads are GAST.

The monarch operation is moving along nicely. I have released 3 adult males and have another one in the chrysalis stage. I am finding lots of eggs on our milkweed plants and see lots of butterflies flying around nectaring and some females laying eggs.

I have two eggs with the black spots on them which indicates that they're about to eat they're way out of their egg casing.

They then eat the egg casing and start eating the leaf in the immediate area. They don't crawl far so I don't even bother putting them in a container at this stage. When they get to be about 3/8" long, I put them in a container and then when they're about 1/2" long they can go into the caterpillar castle.

This big one was crawling on the vinyl side of the mesh 'cube' so I was able to get a photo of its underside. It's pretty close to climbing to the top of the 'castle' and pupating. We have had a couple of larvae pupate on the underside of milkweed leaves. When that happens, I wait for the chrysalis to harden, then carefully peel the silken mesh at the top and stitch the mesh part to the ceiling of  the castle.

In this photo the green water reservoirs can be seen holding milkweed plants and keeping them hydrated. They've saved me a lot of work by keeping the milkweed leaves fresh and moist for days.