The Knitting Pirate

(Technically, I was the guest in the cat’s house. She’s just a guest on my blog.)

Today’s Feline Friday is brought to you by Keta, small and grey, who lives with my sworn-brother Stephen. Every so often she would look up at me and say “mraaaaaaah.” I’m not sure if that means “give me treats,” or “what the heck are you doing in my house, human?” or if it’s just a friendly hello.

She was very patient about letting me take pictures of her. Here she is showing off her super-fancy Soft Paws, which prevent her from tearing the carpet into small ragged bits. I have been tempted on more than one occasion to apply these to Floyd and Kipling’s claws, but I think I could probably only successfully get them onto Floyd. The claws still need to be trimmed before the Soft Paws go on, and if I can get Kipling’s claws trimmed then he wouldn’t need the Soft Paws in the first place.

Unlike Floyd and Kipling, Keta is happy to sit right beside the fire. (Unlike my fireplace, this one is gas and less likely to startle cats with sudden noises.) Whenever we had it burning, she was up on the hearth soaking in the warmth. I can’t say that I blame her!

Keta’s favourite toy is a small rubber alligator, which she carries around the house with her. It seems to be the only toy she’s interested in, though she did stare pretty intently at my yarn while I was finishing up the Warm Hat, and once or twice considered making a grab for the dangling ends.

Thanks for being a guest cat on today’s Feline Friday, Keta!

On Saturday afternoon I cast on for the Hurricane Hat while sitting in the airport waiting for my flight home, and knit fairly steadily on it through the afternoon and the rest of the weekend. By Sunday night I thought I had gotten far enough to do the decreases, but when I’d broken the yarn and tried on the hat, it was about two inches too short. I guess I’d misinterpreted the pattern where it said “five inches” to mean from the cast on, and not just the patterned part of the hat. Since the brim of this hat isn’t meant to turn up, it needs to be exactly the right height, so I ripped back to just before the decreases. At least the width of the hat was right! I had been a little worried, since I’d done no swatching or anything, that it might have been a little on the small side, but it fits really well. Hopefully it doesn’t stretch out too much with wear.

After work on Monday I got back to it and in an hour or so had re-finished the top of the hat. When I had to join yarn ends, I untwisted the single, split it in two and broke off one piece on either end, then intertwined the two halves and rubbed them together until they stuck. I didn’t bother using any water to felt the ends together as it didn’t seem like the ends would wriggle out at all when they were knitted together. On the other hand, when I wove my final end in I was probably more careful than necessary to make sure that it wouldn’t ever come loose.

The Hurricane Hat pattern is available for free at String in Motion. It is a quick cute knit, definitely suited for the soft stripes of this yarn. It would work nicely with a semi-solid or tweedy yarn as well, but the texture might be lost in a wildly variegated colourway.

I really like the way the purl stitches spiral up into the top of the hat to make the eye of the hurricane, and could see doing a similar swirl motif with twisted stitches or traveling decreases and hidden increases. I get more and more design ideas from nearly every project I knit! Now, if only I had the time to work them all up… though I do seem to be getting faster at this knitting thing. One hat in two days, another hat in three days? (And it would have been another two day hat, if I hadn’t had to re-do the top.) Pretty fast indeed!

I’m happy with the finished hat, but not thrilled. On the plus sides, the swirly pattern is appealing and the colour of the yarn matches my eyes. I think this hat will go perfectly with my gray coat. On the minus side, the yarn was fairly expensive for its quality and it seems like the hat will last only a few seasons before it gets covered in pills. While that does give me an excuse to knit yet another hat in a year or two, I’d rather have clothing that lasts a little longer, especially if I’m going to the effort to make it myself.

The Tonalita yarn was interesting to work with – not awful, but not great either. It’s half wool and half acrylic, spun up into a loose soft singles yarn which is quite soft, but it splits easily and so I had to be a little more careful with it than usual. In some places it was significantly thicker than others, but the differences are almost imperceptible in the finished product. It’s a little thick for the US 6 needles I used, especially when it came time to do the decreases, but I like the way the fabric turned out for this kind of hat. The label suggests a US 9 needle, which would give a fabric with a lot more drape. I barely had to dip into the second ball of yarn to finish the hat, and I’m considering using the leftovers to make armwarmers, maybe with a light neutral yarn for contrast colourwork. There is certainly enough remaining. I just wonder if armwarmers wouldn’t pill up so fast in this yarn, due to the extra wear that they’d see on my hands and wrists as opposed to on my head.

The outside of the ball of yarn is even and smoothly wound, with each strand laid comfortably against the next, but the inside has this fascinating star shape to it. I found myself wondering about the yarn-winding machine, and what sort of movements it would need to make to create this loose star on the inside but a rounded ball on the outside.

It had come to my attention that I’ve never knit anything for my sworn-brother Stephen. When he was living in a mostly-summerish place it would have been unnecessary, but he could certainly use a warm hat now that he’s living in the land of eternal winter. I ran over to Needles in the Haymarket and found some Cascade 220, my go-to hat yarn, in a lovely heathery grey-green. Unfortunately the selection of superwash colourways was limited, so this isn’t a machine washable hat, but Stephen assured me that he would be fine with hand-washing as long as I gave him instructions.

I cast on for the hat while I was waiting for my flight. I knit at the gate, where I met some knitters who were winding balls of yarn. I knit for the full duration of my flight, while sitting next to a woman who used to knit but now prefers crochet. I knit while watching television later that evening, and about 36 hours after I started, I was weaving in the ends of a new hat. This is a speed record for me!

There was already snow on the ground and more fell while I was visiting. I think this expression is, “Take the picture already, it’s cold out here!”

I chose the free Cousteau Hat pattern and made a few adjustments to it. From comments on other projects I knew that the hat comes out large, so I only cast on 100 stitches instead of the 140 called for. I changed the decreases to a simple K2tog, and started doing double decreases towards the top to make the hat less pointy. I should have gone with a K3tog instead of slip, k2tog, psso, and I should have started them sooner – ah well, there’s always next time. Knit and learn, knit and learn!

Of course, when the hat is on, the top doesn’t appear to be pointy at all. I really like how the sections come together in quarters at the top. It’s different from the more spiral decreases that I’ve made on previous hats, and quite distinctive.

I’m seriously tempted to make a matching hat for myself, though the next size down might be a little tight at only 80 stitches, and the fabric might be a little loose if I went up a needle size to compensate. (Or it would fit me perfectly, as I do have a small head, and the hat could always be blocked larger. Besides, it will stretch.) Maybe I would try working the decreases every other row for a more rounded top, but I’m not sure if that would look odd in the way the ribs get cut off by the decreases. It would be worth the attempt, I think, and if it doesn’t come out well then it will be easy enough to rip back and redo.

My name is Floyd, cat of cats. Look on what used to be your slippers, ye human, and despair! (He actually doesn’t really mess with the slippers too much. He just likes to guard them so that no one else can have them.)

He is such a handsome and dignified cat. At least, he likes to pretend that he’s dignified. There is something incredibly undignified about falling off the back of the couch, or deciding that one’s left rear foot has become a mortal enemy.

Kipling is considerably less dignified. What can you say about a cat who sleeps upside-down, other than “awwww!”

He sure does know how to work his cuteness to its maximum potential.

Thanks to my new camera, I was able to get some pictures of Floyd that are more than just a black silhouette of a cat against a blurry background. Here’s my sleek and handsome cat-loaf sitting by the front door, pretending that I don’t exist. It’s better than running away and refusing to have his picture taken!

Floyd has actually been very lovey lately, which is a nice change from his previous emo-cat behaviour. He likes to sit on my lap when I’m on the couch; there is no convincing him to sit next to me the way Kipling does. I think this is just fine except that it’s very difficult to type with his head draped over my wrist and his paw covering the spacebar. I also have a hard time knitting with him in my lap, because he hasn’t yet learned to leave the yarn alone.

And, marvelously, he’s been better-behaved through the night. A few nights ago I had to evict Kipling from the bedroom at 04:00 when he had an attack of the crazies and started building a fort with the surplus sheets at the bottom of the bed, but Floyd stayed with me, curled up against my side, and snoozed quietly until my alarm went off.

Because he was so well-socialized as a kitten, we can do all sorts of torturous things to him like pick him up and snoogle the daylights out of him, as demonstrated here by friend Stef. He just sighs, puts on a long-suffering look, and lets us do whatever we need to do. I can even trim his claws by myself without assistance! Even his rare baths usually go smoothly, though that’s better managed with two people involved. He might complain about it and give us the cold shoulder for an hour afterwards, but he rarely argues (and he never turns down the treats afterwards). For all his quirks, he’s growing up to be a great cat.

Kipling, on the other hand, is not at all fond of being picked up and snoogled. Have you ever seen a cat look so worried? We’re trying to teach him that being held is a good thing. With gentle patience I think he’ll eventually come around.

Progress on the Dancing Cranes stole comes in fits and spurts. I neglected it over the holidays and came back to it with a vengeance in the last few days – this picture is already several rows out of date!

Each 300-stitch row takes me about half an hour, so it feels like a real commitment to make myself sit down and work on it. I don’t like stopping partway through a row. But once I get started, I want to keep going for hours! “Just one more row…” has kept me up past my bedtime more nights than I want to admit. I like the yarn (even if it sheds a bit while I’m working with it) and I’m really enjoying watching the pattern form. It’s not a very complex lace pattern at all, and I’ve gotten it in my head firmly enough now that I can put on music or YouTube videos while I work. When I first started, I wanted total silence and concentration, but now some background noise is fine.

Each 28-row repeat will use up about one ball of the yarn. The pattern calls for three repeats and I have four balls of yarn, but I probably won’t make a decision about doing the fourth repeat until I’m closer to being finished and I can see what size the stole is coming out to be. If I decide to stop at three repeats, I have the thought to pick a lace stitch and an edging from one of the dictionaries and make up a one-skein decorative scarf (a scarflet?) to wear at work.

On Saturday, Pirate-Husband and I stopped at Knit and Stitch = Bliss in Bethesda. He was in search of a bulky-weight yarn for weaving his utility strap, and I was looking for a skein of superwash Cascade 220. Neither of us found what we were looking for, but I did find this Trendsetter Tonalita that just called out to me and demanded to be my first yarn purchase of the year. The colours are very ‘me’ and I love gradients in yarn. The Tonalita is an aran-weight singles yarn, 52% wool and 48% acrylic. It’s supposedly non-feltable but I still wouldn’t want to toss it into the washing machine, as it seems a little on the delicate side. At first I was thinking of making armwarmers with it, but then I decided that a new hat would be even better. My Manos hats are showing their age and the Winterlude Hat(tm) is too warm for anything but the coldest weather, so I thought a wool blend would be just right for a medium-warm hat. After some searching I settled on the Hurricane Hat pattern, which can be found free at String in Motion. A more complicated pattern wouldn’t show up well against the colour changes, and I really like the purl swirls of a Hurricane, especially the way they come together at the crown of the hat to form the eye.

Sometimes it’s difficult to take pictures of yarn without a cat getting involved. Fortunately for him, Kipling was more interested in the wrist strap dangling from the camera than the yarn! I spent a good amount of time over the weekend playing with the new camera and learning the ins and outs, and I’m quite pleased with it and the quality of pictures. I had fun trying all the different settings, and I think I took more than a hundred pictures. For the first time ever, I even got some good shots of Floyd! I’ll post them later this week for Feline Friday.

I suggested that Pirate-Husband might have more luck finding a reasonably-priced bulky washable yarn at a crafts store. The first place we tried didn’t have anything, but I did get a replacement pocket measuring tape for the one that died last week. Then we went to Michaels and found Lion Brand super bulky Wool-Ease in burgundy, black and gray. We knew that one ball of burgundy and one of gray would be plenty but we weren’t sure how much black he would need, so we bought a few extra knowing that it could be returned. While we were at the store, I bought a small hole punch that’s exactly what I need for making the right-size holes for jump rings in stitch marker charms. That’s going to be my next non-knitting project! Now I just need two pair of tiny pliers, and I’ll be ready to go.

On Saturday night Pirate-Husband followed the advice from Eadwyn’s comment last week to make new heddles and warp the loom, and by Sunday evening he had finished his new strap. It came out to be almost exactly ten feet long, and used up almost a full ball of the black yarn, since it was the majority of the warp and all of the weft, but there’s plenty of the burgundy and gray left over. The yarn was a learning experience for him. Since it’s not smooth like the crochet thread he used for the first project, it was much harder to get it to slide through the heddles. On the other hand, the super bulky yarn weaves up super quickly, and the finished product is exactly what he wanted! Sometimes yarn is like that, I told him. Sometimes you just dislike the yarn but love the finished product (like everything I’ve ever knit in cotton). That’s a lot better than loving the yarn but hating your finished product…

Maybe I will ask him to make a matching or coordinating strap for me. Hmmm!

Unfortunately, all the pictures I tried to take for this post came out horrifically blurry. Oh cats, why won’t you hold still for me? Don’t you know how many people wish to admire you?

Fortunately, my incredibly talented sister the Ninja drew an adorable portrait of Kipling, so this post isn’t completely without pictures! She is having a sale on toony-style pet portraits this month. If you’re interested, you can read more here, and see some pictures of her border collie Finnegan looking ridiculous while playing “catch” with snowballs.

Unfortunately, Kipling’s sensitive stomach is acting up again, so he’ll be visiting the vet next week. We’re not sure if it’s just stress from having bunches of people in the house over New Year’s weekend, or if it’s something else. Floyd has been turning into a nine-pound Napoleonic bully about the litterbox, lying in wait for Kipling to step out of it and then pouncing. That probably doesn’t help much, either, although I can’t blame him for being annoyed about the smell. My ninja-sister (who knows a *lot* about pet care and nutrition) suggested adding a little bit of canned pumpkin to their food, and I started that this morning. I was afraid that the cats would turn their noses up at the new taste, but both of them dove right into their breakfasts and happily nommed away. Floyd doesn’t need the pumpkin, but since the cats switch off on their bowls, I’m putting a little bit into each dish. Hopefully it helps, because the next step for Kipling might very well be an expensive biopsy to find out what’s wrong with his innards.

Fortunately, I got a new camera, and that means there should be much better pictures on the blog from now on. It’s a Canon SX230HS, which is one of their medium-level point-and-shoots. It’s a lot more complicated than my last camera, with all sorts of scene settings and facial detection. It even has modes for aperture priority and shutter priority, which I didn’t expect on such a small camera. And, friend Stef is going to lend her DSLR to me for a while, since she isn’t using it very much at the moment. It’s a Canon T1i, very similar to the one I’d buy if I won the lottery, so I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to learn how to use it properly, and to taking non-blurry pictures of the Dynamic Duo. Especially Floyd – I realize that I don’t write about him nearly as much on Feline Friday, but he’s so hard to photograph. Having a better camera should help with that.

Several years ago, one of my friends in the SCA gave me an inkle loom. I bought a couple of books and swore that I’d learn to weave, and then… well, I didn’t. This past summer I picked up a set of cards for tablet weaving, which can be done on the same loom, and re-promised myself that I’d learn to weave. Pirate-Husband seemed interested too, so over the holiday weekend we warped the loom for our first attempt at weaving, and then got to it!

On Friday night I read through the instructions about warping while Pirate-Husband picked the colours and pattern that he wanted to use. We made a bunch of heddles, and then I kept track of the pattern while he did the warping. We used size 10 crochet thread for the project, and the balls of thread were too large to fit through the heddles, so we had to wind some off. First we tried using my ball-winder, but the ball collapsed in Pirate-Husband’s hand twice and we lost a lot of time to untangling. Eventually we did some math and wrapped the warping yarn around the shuttle, which was time-consuming but worked much better. We got so into it, and so determined to finish, that we didn’t realize how late it was getting. Even though he would have started weaving right then and there, we decided that three o’clock in the morning was a good time to stop and go to bed.

Inkle weaving creates a warp-faced fabric, one in which you can’t see the weft threads at all except for a tiny bit on the selvedges. Since the sides of the pattern we chose were brown, we used the same brown thread for the weft, and it comes out to be almost completely invisible. He got started on Sunday night with the football game, and was making such good progress with the weaving that I asked him to slow down and leave it unfinished to show my parents, who were coming over on Monday for the afternoon and dinner. I knew Dad would get a real kick out of the loom and seeing us weave, and I was right. Pirate-Husband wove through the afternoon while we all watched. We had a good discussion about the meditative nature of hand-work like weaving and knitting, and how much better we feel when we’re being either meditative or creative, but both at the same time is an extra good thing!

It wasn’t long before he was done, and pretty soon we we’d cut the band loose and were tying off the fringes. The strap has 67 ends; it came out to be an inch wide, and nine-and-a-half feet long. I think the total time was about ten hours, but the next piece will definitely go faster as we won’t have the same troubles with the warp tangling – and we shouldn’t have to make more heddles, either. A thicker piece could probably be done in half the time! He is going to use this piece as trim on SCA garb, and of course we’ve already made plans for several more projects. I want to make a piece that I can sew d-rings to and use as a belt with jeans, one to use as a much longer belt for my SCA dresses, and then I want to try fancier designs with tablet weaving. Pirate-Husband wants to make a heavier utility strap in simple dark colours that will have a multitude of uses.

It’s only a few days into the new year and we’ve already learned a new skill. How cool is that?

It is the final Feline Friday of 2011!

Kipling is snuggliest in the mornings.

It’s my favourite time to spend with him.