It's all about yarn. And cats.

Yup, that's what it's all about. Yarn -- making yarn, making things with yarn, hoarding yarn until your yarn hutch pops open by itself. That's what it's all about, whatever that it is.

First up, making yarn:



Feel like making yarn! bah-dum-dum, bah-dum-dum, feel like making yarn! bah-dum-dum, bah-dum-dum. . .



I started back up on spinning the 8 oz of blue fiber I got in last year's Halloweenie swap on the knittyboard. It's a blend of domestic wool, and really gorgeous. I know the Mister covets the colorway (called "Moody Blues").

Speaking of my honey, his Sam socks are coming along:





I love the color. It's more carrot that hunter cap.

check out this mess of spaghetti:



That's the backside of the secret project I alluded to in my last post. Since taking that photo, I've woven in the ends on one side of it and actually finished the knitting part. Now I have to weave in the rest of the ends and hem it.

Here's the front:



It's a little puckery -- changing colors and keeping things looking nice is hard! The Weird logo is one of the logos used in the comic books that Mike's upcoming book is about. I'm really surprised at how fast I knit this -- I started right before Rhinebeck. Usually a new-to-me technique takes a while. I used the KnitPro application at MicroRevolt to make the chart (I LOVE that application!).

Since I have no more knitting photos for you, I thought I'd post some sleeping cats photos.

Here's Luciano looking much like Marmaduke as he sleeps inside the scratching post:



He loves that thing -- I don't know what he'll do when he no longer fits in it. You can pick it up and turn it sideways, looking in at him, and he purrs. That thing has great acoustics.

He also likes to lay on his back with his feet in the air:



Sometimes he does the classic curled up kitty pose:



Meanwhile, Ellie's most favorite place in the world is on the new sheepskin we bought for her at Rhinebeck:



She's definitely claimed it as her own, and makes bread on it every chance she gets. I did sit on it on the couch one chilly day, and it does help generate heat.



It's been a long time since she fit in the cat scratcher. This photo was taken a month after we adopted her:



She was definitely MUCH younger than the 1.3 years the MSPCA said she was. I wonder how old she was when she had her kittens?

I have a bit of a busy weekend coming up. On Sunday, I'm getting together with several other knitters to put together the blanket squares for the Pine Street Inn Knit-a-Thon I talked about in my last post! This should be exciting!

I don't know when I'll have time to make more progress on my current projects. Maybe tonight, after the gym.

Sick Day

Well, I'm home sick today, but am getting better. We went hiking over the weekend, and something in the woods had a strong, herby smell that made me start sneezing quite a bit after a little while. I was sneezing on Monday, and snuffling, but thought it was just allergies. On Tuesday, I left work around noon because I was also feeling weak and achy. I came home and relaxed, watched a couple of movies (Lust for a Vampire and Witchfinder General, if you must know) and fell asleep. ZMrK was able to capture the moment:



Yes, that is both cats sleeping with me! They're getting along well. They don't cuddle, but they do rassle a whole lot.





They both slept in with me this morning as well, until Luciano decided it was playtime. Everything is a toy to him, you know.





Then he passes out.





Ellie joins in the playing as well:



I'd love to say she has lost weight, but she hasn't, yet. It's difficult to feed her the restricted diet food she is supposed to have, and feed him the high-fat, high-protein kitten food he is supposed to have, and not have them eat each other's food. I try to remember to pick the food up when I leave for work in the morning, so she doesn't graze all day, but that doesn't always happen. She is running around and moving a bit more lately, which is good. I wish we had some stairs. That would probably help her a bit.

I have been knitting, though not as much lately. Or maybe it's just that I'm knitting more slowly.



I'm still working on the Lacy Waves Top. I finished the front and back. I had a little breakdown a couple of weeks ago when I screwed up the front, which resulted in it being thrown across the room and then frogged part of the way, but I recovered from it. I'm working on the insert panel, and started it for the third time yesterday.



Um, hello? Either it's a good argument for using the recommended yarn, it will all work out through the magic of blocking, or I am one crappy knitter, because I think it looks like a mess of tangles. I really hope I can work this one out.

I'm doing much better with the Floral Lace Anklets from the same book:



Granted, those were started and frogged, due to the fact that I was following the wrong chart for a while, but now it's coming along nicely. I am using the recommended yarn (Regia Silk) and I really love working with it. I may use the Regia Silk I have in red to make the Long Long Lacy Gloves from the same book (hm, Lace Style is getting some mileage from me).

I've been trying to get some spinning done lately:



This is from 4 oz of Colonial from CJ Kopec Creations. I received it in a secret pal swap package on the Knittyboard from my fabulous partner Maiziemama, a couple of summers ago. I have a few blends from CJ Kopec, and they're all gorgeous.



I love the colors on this. I'm tempted to not ply it, but don't trust my spinning enough for my singles to work out. I have no clue what the yardage would be, but with plying, it should be around a fingering weight. There wouldn't be enough for socks, so it would need to be a nice little pretty like a neckerchief or a pair of pretty mitts.

This is what it looked like, pre-spinning:



Here's another spinning project I've been working on:



It's roughly 145 yards, pure merino (allegedly) with about 3/4 of a bobbin left to spin. I'll probably Andean ply the rest. The end result is nice and soft, and I think it will be nice knitted up (I'm thinking about the neckwarmer in the latest issue of SpinOff). I haven't been thrilled to spin in though. Merino is still a little too soft and slippery for my inexperienced spinning mitts, and the preparation on this fiber sucked.



From the outside of the bag, it looked blended, but inside the bag there were clumps of each color just sitting in there. I used the handcarders I bought at the last Rhinebeck to blend some of it, and did one bobbin blended by me, and one bobbin of the pre-blended. For this final bobbin I said "fuck it" and just spun what was left.

I definitely prefer to spin coarser fibers. That Colonial I showed above was a dream to spin. Falklands, BFL, Corriedale -- that is all great stuff to spin. Merino is very soft and slippery, and give me superwash or something with tencel and you may as well put the razor to my wrist. My only success with alpaca has been on a spindle, spun super fine, so I won't curse it yet. I'm sure I'll get better, with experience. Sometimes I see people who have only been spinning a short time and are producing lovely yarns, and I want to wave my fist in the air at them. Of course, they spin more often than I do, and everyone has a different learning curve.

I have a few new purchases too.



I had a $100 gift certificate to Newbury Yarns, thanks to the attorneys I support, so I used it to purchase some Manos Silk Blend and still have some $$ left over! No, I'm not taking it out of the ziploc bag until I'm ready to use or pat it. It was tough to get the 6 skiens of a brick color and 1 skien of black in there. There was an adorable fitted t-shirt in the spring Interweave Knits made from this yarn, and I want to make it with some slight mods to the flowers on the top (I don't want flowers, I want cat heads). This should do the trick.



This blurry photo is of 200 yards of sportweight cashmere I purchased at the NH Sheep and Wool for about $13. I figured I'd give it a try at that price.



I figured I would finally purchase some sock yarn from Dorchester Farms! The guy is at every sheep and wool fest I've ever been to, and his stuff comes highly recommended. It's also inexpensive and he had Mardi Gras colored sock yarn. I couldn't go wrong!

I realized that I never did a blog post for the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Fest. Oh, hai, blogger fail. Well, it was a gorgeous day, there was sheep, there was wool, there was a cute widdle 10 day old goat, and I stuck my photos in the "Sheep and Wool Fests 2009" set on Flickr. I don't think there's much more to say.

Spinning!

I forgot to show off the yarn I spun:









It's the corriedale/merino/silk that I purchased at the Connecticut Sheep and Wool last spring, spun rather fine and plied with some gold embroidery thread from A.C. Moore. It was an experiment, and so far, it's been a successful one. It remains to be seen how it knits up.

I'm thinking of trying to do some sort of nice cowl with this. There's about 280-300 yards (I think), and like it said, it's rather fine. Not quite lace weight, of course, but maybe around fingering weight. It's hard to tell with the fluffiness of it; I usually associate fingering weight with tightly plied sock yarn. I may have to just play around with it and some needles, just to see what it wants to be.

I need to go to a more serious topic now: racism. I've been pretty active on a certain site lately, and I have seen stuff that I disagree(1) with. I have, however, never seen anything that prompted me to report a post. I know I could be bringing the wrath of the racists on me by posting about this, but I am going to go ahead and do it anyways without naming any names.

This is what the post said: >>On a funny note: I saw a new thread du jour in the "patterns" forum, called "Inaugural Scarves". Yeah. Right. Over here we have another
name for those: Nooses.<<

Seriously. I was HORRIFIED. The post was reported (and not just by me), and the post was later edited. I didn't bother to send the poster a PM, nor did I attempt to post in the same thread questioning her choice of words. I just reported it to TPTB.

So, tell me, did I overreact?

Springing Forward towards 2009

Seriously, that was the best title I could come up with. I'm sorry.

What I'm not sorry about is finishing my Spring Forward socks:



Mmmmmm. They were a little big, because I had swatched and machine washed the swatch and knew exactly what would happen. I washed them once, and they shrank a bit and now fit ever-so-perfectly!

I love the snaking rib down them. It reminds me of the game "Chutes and Ladders" (which is sometimes called "Snakes and Ladders", but the version I had was "Chutes").

This freed me up to work on another project:



That's the "Here There Be Pirates" hat from Hello Yarn, made with some Dale Baby Ull. The colors are brighter than the photo suggests, but I was too lazy to work at a better photo. At first I was really slogging through this pattern, as each round takes between 5-10 minutes, AND it requires following a chart. I'm definitely becoming a more intuitive knitter, and/or I've memorized the chart, because it has become much easier.

I would love to be done with this by midnight on New Year's Eve, making it my 13th FO of 2008, but I know better than to push myself. It's my first attempt at colorwork, and does require a bit of attention, and each round takes between 5-10 minutes, so it may be done over the next weekend instead. I'm about halfway done with it, though, and it is quite a fun knit.

I also set aside some time for spinning:



This is the turquoise and gold Coopworth/Merino/Silk that I purchased at the CT Sheep and Wool, and I finally finished plying it! I had to go out have ZMrK drive me to A.C. Moore and purchase more gold metallic thread to ply with it. I had hit my sweet spot and I didn't want to stop until it was done! The remaining bit of plying took about 2.5 hours -- I watched "Demons" (1985 super gory Italian flick) and "Macabre" (1980 kinda sleazy Italian flick) while finishing it up.

Here is the single I worked on to warm myself up for plying:



The photo color is crap, but it's pink, black and white merino. ZMrK had purchased this (7.5 oz) for me at the NH Sheep and Wool Festival a couple of years ago (2007, probably). It looked lovely, but inside there were several clumps of the fiber in the different colors that weren't blended. I have blended those clumps with my new hand carders, and I'll spin up a bobbin of that. I'll have to show that off too.

I really need to take photos of my Christmas gifts. I got THREE skeins of Malabrigo sock yarn! Damn, I could probably post that somewhere on Ravelry and have people get all pissy with me for "hogging" it all. Hey, they were gifts from my pets, and who am I to refuse them? Man, they are so gorgeous. I got another skein of sock yarn that is purple, yellow, and orange, but I don't know who the vendor is. ZMrK also gave me "Knitting Lingerie Style" and "Romantic Handknits". I think I'll be very busy in the upcoming months.

I think my first project for 2009 will be Knitty's Frankensocks, done in Cherry Tree Hill Supersock yarn. I could change my mind in the next four days, though.

Spinning and a Kitten Break

This is the new spindle I got a couple of weeks ago.



I loves it. It's so lightweight, balanced, and spins like a dream.

I'm working on some superfine alpaca on it.



It'll take me forever, but whatever. I'm in no rush.

My next door neighbor is fostering a momma cat and her three kittens, which were born 16 days ago:











I'm on a campaign to get my parents to adopt the momma, because she's so awesome. She's beautiful and she loves to be petted -- what more could you want in a cat?

Hopefully I'll get to take more pictures as they get bigger.

Have you seen my mojo?

I seem to have lost my yarny mojo.

I got second sock syndrome on my October socks -- well, it's third sock syndrome, really, because the first sock I made was too small and the second one was just right. I started another "just right" sock to make a matching pair, seem to have dropped a couple of stitches on the cuff while waiting for the Devo show to start (knitting in dim light is a little tricky), so frogged it and don't feel like starting again.

I tried using the Noro Kureyon that's been sitting in my stash since 2005 to make the crocheted Square Hole Hat and Wristlets from 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders, and discovered there is a mistake in the hat pattern and the errata has been removed from the publisher's website. The wristlets didn't work for me either -- I don't know if it is my bad crochet skills or an error in the pattern, but they just kept getting smaller and smaller. I'd really like to make these things too; I wonder if there is a similar pattern that isn't fecked up?

So, I'm not knitting on my commute this week. I started Stephen King's Cell instead, which may make me miss my stop once or twice. It's really compelling, so far (first 30 pages) -- very gory and WTF? The people in the story act like zombies, so it may start up my zombie nightmares again.

My spinning has been going well, though! I spin for about 15 minutes before dinner last night (on that gorgeous turquoise fiber that Bezzie said looks like forget-me-nots). I also purchased a new spindle from Spinsanity. I purchased and paid for it on Friday, and it got to me on Monday! I stood in the kitchen in my gym clothes and spun the sample fiber she sent me (already started in a nice thin laceweight) while ZMrK was making dinner. I just couldn't put it down. It's freakin' gorgeous. I might try to spin a tiny bit of alpaca I bought at Rhinebeck on it as laceweight, just to see how much I can get. It's only a couple of ounces, blue and purple and wonderfully soft.

My secret pal gift is packed up and sent! Have you sent yours? My downstream pal is blogless, so you probably won't see pictures of anything I sent her. I hope she likes it.

Time to leave for work! My niece is coming in today with her fiance and baby to see where I work. Yup, I got some cute baby pictures recently. I'll share them.

Spinning Stuff!

The other night, I wound my most recent 2 ply into a pretty yarn cake.





I also knit up a swatch with it.



Sorry for the crap-ass picture. My camera was being moody last night.

I'd love to make socks with this (I have about 400 yards in 3 separate skeins), but I'm afraid of their durability. This yarn is . . . hm, how should I put it? This yarn is not even. In some sections it is around a heavy fingering weight, in others near lace. I can probably work things so the lighter weight parts are nowhere near the danger zones on my feet -- heels and toes. I also probably could double up the yarn in the thin parts. I washed the swatch this morning, and will measure it when it's dry. If not socks, what else should I make with it?

I also started another spinning project over the weekend.



It's this stuff that I got at the CT Sheep and Wool Fest. Corriedale, merino, and silk, I think, with gold tinsel thrown in there. It's really soft and smells nice.

I had some friends help me out with this weekend's spinning.





The Abita Jockamo is pure perfection. I love Abita, and I love IPAs, so it makes sense that I love an Abita IPA!

The Monty Python beer has a great cap though.



I'm not sure if I kept the cap or not, but it would make a great magnet or a button. Back in my wild youth, us punk rockers used to wear beer caps on our leather jackets. Oh yeah, I owe you stories, don't I? I'm such a tease. I have one in mind, but it's a little racy for me to type out on my blog while I'm at work. . . keystrokes and such. Do companies really keep track of that stuff? Well, not racy, but indicative of some of the degenerates I've hung out with over the years. I'll do that this weekend, because I'd hate to keep mentioning it and have y'all be disappointed when I finally start telling stories. I'm going to aim for one story a week, as the mood hits me. Okay?

Oh! I got these really cute stitch markers too!



Tree frogs!!!



Snakes!!!



Turtles!!!

Check out this little trucking turtle dude:



(Pay no attention to the black cats hairs underneath said trucking turtle dude.)

Aren't they adorable?? I got them from an Etsy seller called Yarn Lust, who has many more that are just as cute!!!

Oh, yeah, I also got more yarn lately. I blame my downstream Secret Pal, because every time I buy something for her, I buy something for me.

I was purchasing "things" for her from KnitPicks and decided to pull the trigger on one of the laceweight samplers. If only I could knit lace as fast as I can purchase laceweight! Here they are:








I don't know which is which right now, so I'll come back and tag them later!

I also purchased some tweedy sock yarn:



And, because my total was something like $48.10 and $50 gets one free shipping, I went trolling through the clearance and found this laceweight for $1.99.



Considering how much fiber and yarn you know I already have, and how long it takes me to knit anything, much less lace, you'd think I'd be done, right?

Wrong.







(the 1st and 2nd pics, and the 3rd and 4th, are both respectively of the same yarns. . . just so you know there was only three yarns in that purchase.)

A local yarn shop, Mind's Eye, was having an anniversary sale so I strolled in and bought the above. I've since made another purchase at another LYS, Newbury Yarns, but I don't even have pictures of those yet.

I think I may only buy equipment at Rhinebeck, like carders and stuff. No fiber. Do you think that's feasable for me? Or should I just make 2009 my "yarn diet" year?