The Knitting Pirate

It is the final Feline Friday of 2011!

Kipling is snuggliest in the mornings.

It’s my favourite time to spend with him.

This is the official end of the year tallying-up post!

Incoming fibre in 2011:
33.5 ounces fibre acquired at Maryland Sheep and Wool

Outgoing fibre in 2011:
Er… I spun a little bit. Not a lot. Way more came in than went out.

Incoming yarn in 2011:
7 skeins of Red Heart for my first crocheting project
1 sock yarn for Michael
3 Lang Merino DK for Winterlude-inspired colourwork hat and armwarmers
1 skein sock yarn at Rhinebeck
2 balls Patons Kroy Socks FX
5 balls Sugar ‘n Cream for washcloths
1 ball Serenity Sock Weight in navy for heels and toes on socks
4 balls Elann Silken Kydd for shawl
—
24

Outgoing yarn in 2011:
1.5 – Baby Surprise jacket
2 – Michael’s Fleeps
3 – Winterlude Hat ™
2 – time traveling Jaywalkers
7 – Hexagon blanket
6 – Sweaters for the twins
1 – gave a ball of sock yarn to Mom
1 – white washcloth
1 – blue washcloth
1 – argyle washcloth
1 – greens washcloth
1 – Quick Relief socks
—
27.5

There are some fair amount of leftovers from the hexagon blanket and the twins’ sweaters, unfortunately. On the other hand, the leftovers may come in handy for swatching, experimenting, or knitting little toys. Still, more yarn went out than came in, and I’m pleased with that!

The Year in Knitting (and Crocheting):
2011 Projects

Favourite project:
I think that prize would have to go to the Winterlude Hat(tm), for being the only thing I knit this year of my own handspun. Between the wool and the fleece lining it’s a super warm hat, even if I think I made the lining a little on the small side. It stays on just fine when I tie it under my chin!

Least Favourite project:
Unfortunately, it was the Presto Chango sweaters. I am a little sad that I didn’t put as much love into my niecelets’ sweaters as I wanted to. Had I used a different yarn, I might have felt differently about them. The pattern was great, but the KnitPicks Swish and I didn’t get along very well.

Patterns Published:
None. But I have ideas! Many, many ideas…

For Next Year:
I know it’s a mistake to make too many resolutions, so here are the things I *want* to do, and if I get some of them done I’ll be happy!
- spin more
- knit something with handspun yarn
- design and publish two new patterns
- try a new sock architecture
- finish Napramach and the Stripy Socks
- finish the Dancing Cranes stole in time to wear to a wedding
- cast on for fancy cabled knee socks
- use up more yarn and fibre than I purchase
- get some stock in the Etsy shop

It’s been cold here on top of the mountain, and we’ve been setting the thermostat low to keep the electric bill down. With the chimney freshly swept, a brand new cap installed thanks to Pirate-Husband’s handiness and skill, and a sky threatening snow, I thought it was the perfect time to light a fire. (Even though this does very little to warm the house past a three-foot radius around the fireplace, there’s still something about a roaring fire on a cold night that’s quite comforting.)

Kipling had no idea what was going on. He sniffed at the new fire for about thirty seconds and then wouldn’t go near it again. I tried to convince him to sit with me on the hearth, but he wouldn’t have any of it. Even after the fire had been going for an hour and was putting out significant warmth, he stayed up on the coffee table looking from a safe distance. After about two hours, he realized that hey, it’s *warm* over there! and moved closer to the fireplace.

Sir Not Appearing In This Post, AKA Floyd, wouldn’t go near the fire either, even though I asked him to just pose in front of it for a moment. For the sake of a picture, of course. He said that he would do no such thing, turned up his nose, and stalked away. What kind of crazy cats don’t like sitting near a warm fire on a cold night? There really is nothing like it; I’ll sit on the hearth if they won’t! And I’m certainly not complaining that the house smells of woodsmoke now, either.

When I lit another fire the next day, Kipling didn’t hesitate to sit near it. It’s good to know that he’s got a few brain cells in his spotted head. Floyd, on the other hand, still hasn’t figured it out. He slept on the couch the whole time the fire was lit. Silly cat!

Once upon a time, I had two wool sweaters – one in solid blue, and one in an all-over colourwork pattern. In the style of their time, they were rather boxy and unfitted, but they were warm and wool, and I wore them to do things like shovel the driveway or go ice skating. One sweater was lost to the washing machine (“But I washed it on the gentle cycle!” he said. “It hasn’t shrunk that much, maybe you could– oh.”) and the other has worn thin.

I went looking in the stores and online for new wool sweaters, and quickly found that the only place to get an affordable, 100% wool sweater is… in the men’s department, and those wouldn’t be too flattering on me. Sweaters that are sold in lady-shapes are cotton or cotton-blend or altogether synthetic, or they’re expensive and cashmere. They’re not meant for shoveling snow or ice skating at all.

Since I can’t buy what I want in a store, I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to get new wool sweaters I’m going to have to knit them myself. I’m not sure if I really want to knit a sweater, and I’m also not sure if that’s my perfectionism talking (Ack, a fitted garment? That’s an awful lot of time and yarn for something I might get wrong…) or my lack of desire to take on another larger, non-portable project while I’ve got that lace stole on the needles.

The management would like to apologize for the lack of pictures in this post. It has been too dark by the time I get home from work to get good shots of anything. Hopefully this situation will be rectified over the weekend. But it is still Feline Friday, and so here is the latest about the Dynamic Duo:

One morning this week I woke up with Kipling snuggled up to my chest. At ten pounds he’s a little small to spoon with, really, but he was trying. And he was also mashing the top of his head into the underside of my chin. “I love you!” *headbutt* “I love you!” *headbutt* “I really really love you!” *wet nose and headsmoosh*

Pirate-Husband often filks songs to or about the cats. The latest goes something like this:

Don’t stop the feeding
Hold on to that fee-eeli-iiine
Kipling wants kibble
all the tiiiiiiime

I’m sorry. That’s going to be a terrible earworm. It was for me; I couldn’t get it out of my head, so this morning I tried to work out the rest of the song.

Just a spotted cat
living in a mountain house
he walks the hallway rail going back and forth

Just a small black cat
playing with a furry mouse
He’ll pace the other cat going back and forth

Two cats in my living room
roll in catnip and act like loons
in a second they will steal my seat
They’ll meow on and on and on and on

I can’t believe I’m doing this.

Kittens waiting, sitting by their dinner dish
their pink mouths meowing in the niii-iigght
Sunbeam kittens, living just to take a nap
Hiding, somewhere in the night

Please don’t kill me.

The “Black Paw of Death” is one of Floyd’s favourite games. I think it’s one of Pirate-Husband’s favourites, too.

Happy Feline Friday!

It’s been a hard year in many ways, but I have so much to be thankful for.

Pirate-Husband. The amount of work that he has put into the house in the last few months is incredible. Scrubbing, sanding, washing, staining – the logs look amazing, and the house is more ready for winter than it’s ever been. Okay, so we still have the scaffolding on the porch, but if the weather holds out we’ll be done with that soon too. I am so grateful that he has the knowledge, skills and ability to take on a gigantic project like refinishing a log house. Not to mention, he’s a heck of a good cook. We eat better at home than we could in most of the local restaurants. Last week we had new friends over for dinner and they were seriously impressed with our crepes manicotti and crockpot cobbler – and I thought it was just a normal sort of weekend meal! Also, he takes the garbage out and does the laundry. Those seem like small things to be thankful for, but I really appreciate them.

The cats. Losing Aubrey started the whole year off on the wrong foot. Kipling isn’t really any kind of replacement for my kitten, but he’s pretty awesome in his own right, and he’s a perfect companion for Floyd. They are always together, whether they’re playing or sleeping. Floyd is coming around to be fairly cool himself; he pretends he doesn’t want any love but every morning I wake up to find him curled up against my stomach. Unless they’re sleeping, both of them follow me around the house wherever I go, and make sad kitten-faces when I go somewhere they can’t follow. And to think, I was afraid that they wouldn’t like me at all. I had nothing to worry about.

My blood-family, too large to appear all in one picture, but here are the two newest members of the clan. I have a big family and we’re kinda spread out across the world, but when we need each other, we’re there with no questions asked other than “what can I do to help?” Some of the hard stuff this year has brought us closer together, and I’m thankful for that even though we had to go through the rough times to get here. I’m going to see a bunch of the far-away relatives for Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday and I can’t wait!

My sworn-family. (Here we are at one Winterlude or another!) I don’t even know how to begin to express how much the three of them mean to me. They fill a place in my heart that I didn’t know was empty before I met them. They love and accept me for who I am and at the same time cheer me on to become an even better person. I would do anything for them, and I have no doubt that they would do the same for me.

I’m thankful for my job. (These are the monkeys who live on my desk, since there is no way to get an interesting picture of my office.) Sure, I have to get up early for it. Sure, it’s a long drive to work and home again every day. But it’s a good job, and I like it, and I like most of the people I work with too. This year I got to learn how to use Illustrator, which I’ve wanted to learn for years, and they sent me to a JavaScript class just ’cause I asked, and to a conference in Florida. Overall, it’s a pretty fine job indeed.

And of course, since this is a knitting blog after all, I’m thankful for my knitting and crocheting and spinning skills, for my stash of yarn and fibre, for my spinning wheel and spindles and drum carder, for the knitter friends I’ve made, and for Ravelry, without which this would be just a little hobby instead of one of the defining aspects of my life. I’m so excited about the projects I’m working on right now, and for the designs and ideas that are percolating in my head! I have so many fibre-ish plans for next year, including my first for-sale pattern, blending some batts on the drum carder, getting some stock into the never-used Etsy shop, and at least two projects made with my own handspun yarn: a hat and a pair of armwarmers.

And maybe I’ll finish some of those projects that keep lingering on…

There is absolutely no progress to report on the Dancing Cranes stole. I spent Wednesday after work configuring my new computer (yay, new computer!) and so didn’t have time in the evening to knit. Last night when I sat down to put my two rows on I completely misread the chart and knit, then painstakingly unknit, about 80 stitches. Unknitting the SSKs was not particularly enjoyable, but eventually I’d gotten back to my mistake and worked forward again until I realized that my eyes were crossing from tiredness. Since sleepy lace knitting is a recipe for making mistakes in lace knitting, I put the stole down halfway through a row and went to bed.

I’ve been thinking about design again! The weather is getting colder and that makes me want to knit cozy warm things. I had the idea for a double-thick fingerless glove/convertible mitten, with colourwork on the outside mitten. Already I’m sketching out how it would be constructed. Both the inside and outside would be worked in DK weight yarn, possibly using different yarns for each. The outside would use a strong and smooth yarn so the colourwork would show up well, while the inside could be made of a softer luxurious yarn.

Happy Feline Friday! Could these two be any cuter?

Yes, Floyd does have bald spots around his lips. When he was a young kitten he had an allergic reaction that gave him horrible skin crusties in his ears and on his pawpads and lips. Poor little guy! We’re still not sure what caused it, but fortunately the crusties cleared up quickly and have never come back. Usually it’s difficult to notice that the fur doesn’t grow well around his mouth; the camera flash reflecting off his skin makes it seem worse than it really is.

If I’m only knitting two rows of lace per day, I’m not going to have much progress on the Dancing Cranes stole to blog about in every entry, but here’s the progress so far: four rows of edging, and four rows of first repeat of the lace pattern. On the wrong-side row I discovered a mistake I’d made on the right side, and had a moment of gratefulness that I was able to read my knitting and know how to fix the error, because there would not have been any unknitting of nearly 600 stitches to repair the problem. It was fix it or move on. Fortunately it was a simple fix; I’d missed the second stitch of a SSK and all I had to do was pass that stitch over. Whew, problem solved.

The yarn is so light and airy; when I pull a new length from the ball it floats back to the table like down instead of just falling. It’s also, as I mentioned, almost completely unforgiving. I keep noticing as I knit how the mohair fuzzles work their way in and around each stitch, which is why unknitting more than a few stitches is all but impossible. On the plus side, the yarn-ends from where I change skeins are unlikely to work themselves out after the stole is washed and blocked! It does shed a little bit, but I’m hoping all those pieces fall out while I’m knitting and not while I’m wearing the finished piece. I guess the shedding could always be blamed on a cat, if I need to place blame.

More procrastinating with math: If I decide to work four pattern repeats of this shawl, then every six rows is another 5% completed. If I can knit four rows tonight instead of two, the project will be at 10% completion already! Not bad progress, eh? For someone who claims to dislike math and numbers, I sure do a lot of figuring out stitch counts and percentages complete…

I had planned to cast on for the Dancing Cranes stole on Friday night, but the discovery that my size 7 needles were regular blunt-tipped circs and not Addi Lace needles gave me pause. The last time I tried knitting lace with blunt needles I nearly gave up on lace altogether, and I have no desire to repeat that experience. Saturday was a day for hunting down needles! I went first to Knit and Stitch = Bliss in Bethesda, but they didn’t have the Lace circs in size 7. Apparently they’re going to stop carrying the Lace needles; they aren’t selling well enough to justify stocking them anymore. They did offer me the Addi Click Lace set, but that’s unfortunately at $185 that’s out of my budget right now. Maybe in the future I’ll sell off all the Addis I have to fund the Click set, but for now… no. Later in the day I stopped by Needles in the Haymarket and was lucky that they were still open, even though it was half an hour after closing time. I bought the very last size 7 Lace needle they had in any length, and it was even the 32″ I needed. Whew! I guess I could have made do with a shorter cable, but I’m sure I’ll be glad to have the length. If not for this project, then for something in the future.

On Sunday afternoon I got out the yarn and my new Lace needle and contemplated casting on three hundred stitches with the yarn held double. I’d never done a cable cast on before, so I had to look up instructions for that before getting started. It seemed easy enough… I cast on the first three stitches three times but the yarn refused to slide free for a fourth attempt, so I cut off those few inches and began again. This time instead of trying to use the right needle to bring the new stitch through, I used my smallest crochet hook. It worked like a charm! After a while I had gotten into the routine motion of pulling new stitches through, and all three hundred stitches were on the needle, with stitch markers at each ten stitches, which were counted three times each just to be sure. The Silken Kydd is really unforgiving of mistakes, which is typical for fuzzy mohair. I shall simply have to refrain from making any mistakes over the next 35,700 stitches or so.

It was some time before I could bring myself to actually get started on the first stitch. I procrastinated by re-doing the math: the stole has a 28 row repeat and calls for three repeats; I bought enough yarn for four just in case. If I work one row per day, that’s one repeat per month, which means even if I decide to do the fourth repeat the stole will be done in mid-March, well before the end of May deadline.

Before bedtime I’d purled the four-row edging and went off to dreamland feeling quite pleased with my progress. The yarn is actually quite nice to knit with, less slippery than I’d guessed it would be and a *lot* more fuzzy. Tonight I’ll find out if I can concentrate on knitting lace while watching Monday Night Football – it’s the Vikings at the Packers, and it should be a good game.

Do cranes really dance, anyway?