Happy Easter!

I know, I should have mailed this earlier, but we had connection troubles again yesterday - the line disconnected after mere minutes.... never mind, we had a fairly nice Easter sunday with some sunshine, not too much in the way of showers - and definitely not a speck of snow! we dyed our easter eggs late on saturday night and we hung up our painted eggs even later (there is a big difference between dyed eggs and painted ones in our house! dyed eggs are done in food colours, essentially hard boiled eggs in different colours. painted eggs are first blown out, washed well, dried - and then painted with water colours or similar! we collect them, a few more each year, and hang them up, see photo). I cut the branches of some flowering trees, early cherries, hazel, birch etc. - it looks like spring in a jug!

I had to hide the dyed eggs inside - when we were ready for them we had a few heavy showers and searching for them outside didn't seem too tempting! after counting them all (we had forgotten one outside years ago - and only realised that, when Michael hit it with the trimmer - the stink was unbelievable and the dogs nearly went berserk over the spot for days:)) we demolished quite a few of them over breakfast, together with part of our saffron yeast plait - another tradition we have every year.

the rest of the food over Easter isn't really traditional, we just have what we all like. the most memorable thing was dessert this time - lemon mousse on grilled fresh pineapple. it tasted very nice - but that wasn't the memorable part! when I saw the recipe being done on german tv, they used one of those little blowtorches for the kitchen to caramelize the icing sugar on the pineapple. I don't own anything that fancy, so I thought it would work the same under the grill! it did - but unfortunately my porcelain plate had a tiny crack - which split in half after 2 minutes under the grill:(( but - looking on the bright side - the pineapple was still nice:))

I also managed to do some textile things - I finished the "spring in the woods" shawl, did it up and washed it. it really changed after washing, white and like a slightly fluffy cloud it looks really inviting! though it is a bit difficult to wear - folded in half into a triangle leaves it too small, so I'd have to wrap myself into it as it is. not very practical when working, but cosy and warm as a lap afghan".... or maybe as a heirloom baby blanket (only, no babies in this house anymore....)? I still have to do the last two charts of the peacock and this will be done, too. I look forward to finishing and esp. washing it to see how much this will change (if it does at all!) afterwards - it made a very big difference with the spring shawl! I also have enough yarn left over from both of the yarns to do another shawl each - or maybe something entirely different? just now I saw some interesting pictures from the book by Fiona Ellis "Inspired Cable Knits" that I really liked....

when we finished dyeing the eggs I kept the leftovers of the dyes - and sprinkled some over NZ lambswool tops I still had - should be enough for a pair of socks after spinning! DS claimed he would like some socks out of "egg" wool..... I might ply the very mixed colours of this with one strand of a darker yarn in a single colour for effect.