G. Knerd

I really thought I was getting much better about not leaving yarn out for Monkey Kitty to find.  There haven’t been any major incidents in quite a while, to the point that I almost suspected that he might even have gotten over his love of yarn destruction.

Just goes to show that you can never be too vigilant.  I apparently let down my guard for one night, and what happened?

Now, I say I “apparently” let down my guard because I would have sworn that I had remembered to put the yarn and notions bag on the high shelf, but obviously Monkey Kitty got to it somehow.  The only alternative to me leaving it out would be that he’s figured out how to get stuff off of the 6″ tall bookshelf, and that doesn’t bear contemplating.

When I found the yarn, I might have lost my mind a little bit.  I picked up the whole mass and chased Monkey Kitty around the room, shaking it at him and yelling, “Yarn is scary!  You should hate yarn!  Run away, run from the yarn!”  The whole process probably made the yarn even harder to untangle, although after a couple hours I managed to take the pile of knots and turn it back into a ball of yarn.

For the record, while it did scare him, I don’t think he understood what he was supposed to be scared about.  I got the impression he just thought I was crazy, so he left me alone for a few hours before forgetting what had happened and curling up on my lap.

Yeah, I don’t think he picked up on that “yarn is scary” message at all…

While I was on my honeymoon several months ago, I decided to start knitting a pair of socks.  I had grand plans for the pattern, but in the interim took a bit of a break and then realized that I couldn’t remember what that plan was.   I also started feeling a bit of animosity toward the pattern, but since I am delusional and I am not a quitter, I kept going.

Anytime someone would see me knitting those socks, they’d ask who they were for, “Like, a kid or something?”  And I’d laugh, and say they were for me, and demonstrate that they were actually quite stretchy.

Unfortunately, they’re not stretchy enough.  They barely (and only with a lot of swearing and some lost skin) fit over my heels.  Once they’re on, they fit like a dream, of course, but if it takes me five minutes to put on my socks in the morning I’m not going to be a happy camper.

Of course, I blame the yarn.  This was the last set of Deborah Norville yarn I had in the stash, and I haven’t had a single positive experience with that stuff.  With any other yarn, 72 stitches would have been enough to fit around my heel (I’ve got some socks with 68 stitches in them and they fit just fine), but with this yarn…no.  It’s just not working out.

I don’t think I’m the only one that feels that way either – Monkey Kitty did the usual thing and came to investigate the knitting as soon as it hit the floor…

…and not 10 seconds later, he was walking away again – apparently, this yarn isn’t even good enough to chew on.

So now, I just have to find someone who has smaller heels than I do, that I don’t really like too much, but who I like enough to give them hand knit socks.  Thoughts?

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently went to Fiber Weekend up at my Mother-in-Law’s house.  I don’t know where she came up with the idea, but this was apparently the second annual iteration of it, and I gotta say…

…it was awesome.

I’ve been craving some spinning time for months, since last year’s Stitch & Pitch, actually.  I apparently didn’t reveal this at the time, but when I was at the game I may have walked away from the Serial Knitters booth with this:

It’s been burning a hole in my stash since I got it, but I’ve been a good little knitter and worked on the Wedding Blankets rather than indulging.  But, Fiber Weekend!  What better time to indulge, really?  If you can’t play with fiber during Fiber Weekend, something is very, very wrong with the world indeed.

Of course, it’s been so long since I spun that I didn’t even think to check if I had all the parts to my wheel before I trucked the whole box I keep it in up to Canada, only to discover…

…that the screw to hold on the flyer was not there.  In fact, as soon as I started to put it together I thought to myself, “Wait a minute, there was something about this that I was supposed to remember next time I spun, something about being in the Office…on my desk…oh crap.”

But I was not going to be deterred by so simple a piece of hardware.  After scouring my Mother-in-Law’s garage for the right screw (she didn’t have it, of course), I decided to embrace Fiber Weekend a little more completely and solved the problem in the most appropriate manner possible…

…with fiber.  I used some kitchen twine to weave through the two pieces and then around them both a bunch of times, tying at each crossing for stability.  It took a few tries, but once I had it up it lasted all weekend, which is saying something because I spun a lot that weekend.

I split the 4 oz of fiber into three roughly equal sections along the length, then split each into smaller, mostly random sections and started each bobbin at a different point in the color repeat.  The goal was to have a fully marled yarn with lots of color shifts, similar to Trekking XXL.

The plies were gorgeous, the colors perfectly suited for each other.  I had the first bobbin filled by the end of the first night (I might have stayed up late to make that happen, but it was totally worth it).

The second day saw the completion of the second bobbin, which I also might have stayed up late for, but which was also totally, completely worth it.

The third bobbin took a bit more time, so it wasn’t until I was back home on my own couch that I managed to get to the plying stage – but I was so excited to see what the yarn would actually look like that the bobbins didn’t stay like that for long, and soon:

They were totally empty.  The best part was that there was almost zero waste – two bobbins were done within a foot of each other, and the third only had enough to create a few yards of two ply yarn:

And the actual yarn?  It’s some amazing amount of marled three-ply goodness.

I haven’t wound it off to set it and figure out how many yards I have yet, but I’m already dreaming of what this is going to end up being.  I’m thinking maybe a scarf, some pattern that would use up every last drop of this gorgeousness I have created.  Any ideas?

Also, in related news, I apparently seem to have slipped on the whole keeping-yarn-away-from-Monkey-Kitty thing.  I looked away from the leftover mini-bobbin of yarn on the table for about 2 minutes, and next thing I know…

…Monkey Kitty has dragged it into the corner and is pretending to be ready to defend his kill.  Luckily, he’s actually a complete pansy, so he ran when I went after him and left the yarn behind for me to return to its high shelf safely out of reach.

Sometimes, I quite outsmart myself.  And, actually, if I’m quite honest with myself, I outsmart myself with surprising regularity.

Take, for example, the issue I was having with the Wedding Blanket II, where I was apparently missing a square.  I was sure I’d knit sixteen blocks, but only had fifteen in the shelf where the blocks were supposed to be, and I didn’t have enough yarn left in any of my “kits” to create another one.  Still, I couldn’t find the missing block, and I’d finally decided to give up and risk knitting an extra block just so I could continue making forward progress on the blanket.

Even after I’d made another “kit”, though, something was nagging at me.  I was sure I’d knitted another block, and I really, really didn’t want to knit an extra (after all, what would I do with it?).  But days passed, and I didn’t find it (not, mind you, that I was really looking – I think I expected it to fall out of the ceiling on my head or something).  Plus, it seemed like the universe didn’t want me to start it – any time I had some free knitting time to start it, I would manage to do something to damage my hands, preventing me from knitting at all.  Once it was sticks of wood left over from my massive home improvement project slicing my fingers open when I went to get the yarn from the bookshelf.

A person should listen to messages like that.

Last week, I was grabbing some yarn and fiber for Fiber Weekend at my Mother-in-Law’s house (details on that forthcoming in the next post), and without warning, I found the missing block!

As soon as my fingers touched it, it all came flooding back to me.  I’d decided to try blocking one of the squares to make sure nothing bad would happen and determine if blocking was either strictly necessary or just kind of a good idea for the rest of the blanket.  Once the square was dry, I’d wrapped it up in the normal package structure and put it on top of a pile of yarn, thinking that I’d soon be cleaning the office and would move the block when I put the yarn away.

Obviously, I did not end up cleaning the office like I thought – instead, I apparently ended up adding more yarn to the pile (where the new yarn came from is unclear, as I’ve generally been good about sticking to the yarn diet) and covering up the square entirely.

Monkey Kitty immediately investigated the new discovery, and there were some flashes of teeth before I scooped it up again and put it safely with its breathren.

Meanwhile, I decided to use the “kit” I’d made to start swatching a border, since that’s coming up next.  I tried a slip stitch thing first, but…

…well, I really just wasn’t thrilled with it.  It looked kind of odd, and it didn’t match the character of the blanket either.  Unfortunately, that was the only border in the whole Knitting On the Edge book that I thought was even close to right.

Then I remembered an article I’d read once about mathematical series of stripes being pleasing to humans, so I thought I’d try out a border of stripes built on Fibonacci numbers.

Bingo.  Plus, added bonus, it can be knitted on to the blanket instead of needing to be seamed.  It’s win-win.  The only question that’s left to answer is: should it be grey-blue-grey-blue-grey, or blue-grey-blue-grey-blue?

Thoughts?

It’s T-2 days until the wedding, the one for which I’ve been breaking my fingers trying to get the blanket done.

I’m not going to make it.

Really, it’s been a valient effort.  The last few weeks have really been a lesson in what’s possible (and what’s not), what point my fingers will start to ache, how long I’ll knit through the pain before giving up for the day.  It’s also been a reminder of why I tend to avoid knitting with cotton yarn – there’s no stretch, there’s no give, and the pain starts to set in rather a lot more quickly than it would if I were knitting with a nice, squishy merino.

But here we are, less than 100 hours from the big event, and I am throwing in the towel.  I’m still going to finish…eventually.  However, I have it on good authority (okay, from a complete stranger) that I have up to a year after the wedding to deliver the present.  I’ve never heard that before, and I have no idea if it’s “true”, but it’s certainly convenient, and I’m not going to question it too hard.

These next few days are for parties, for festivities, for celebrating love and commitment.  The knitting will get finished…eventually.

Even Monkey Kitty agrees.

This morning, Monkey Kitty crawled up on my lap, wormed through my circular needle, and got comfortable.  Can’t you just hear him saying, “Mommy, give it a rest!  This will still be there after wedding (unless, you know, you leave it out and we become mouth friends…).”

I’ve got exactly one month until the Wedding Blanket is due.  One.  Luckily, it’s a 31-day month, if it were February I’d be screwed.

Who am I kidding?  I’m screwed no matter how you slice it.  I’ve been knitting on this thing since May, and I’m not quite 2/3rds done.  I’m only marginally sure that I’m more than half way done.

Unfortunately (for the knitting, at least), last week The Blanket Thief and I were in a cabin in the middle of the Wisconsin wilderness.  Given the lack of running water (bathing involves jumping in a lake with soap) and large amounts of dirt, sunblock, and bug spray present in the cabin, however, I felt it prudent to leave the Wedding blanket in the safety of our home.  Which is a shame, because the amount of down time you have in a cabin without electricity or cell phone reception in a week?

I can measure it in feet.  11+ feet, to be exact.  I figured that rope by definition should be durable enough to wash, and if that’s the case then the cabin is a perfect excuse for me to indulge in my latest obsession.  That disk in the center is what I picked up at Old Navy, although now that I’ve worked with it for a while I’m pretty sure I could recreate it from any decently large, pliable, round disk.

Still trying to figure out the patterning, but the experimentation on that has been postponed until after the Wedding Blanket and the cARGHdigan are done.

Monkey Kitty wanted to give you some sense of scale, so I tied him up a bit in the rope.

You can’t see it in the picture, but he was purring hard and kneading the air with his paws the whole time.  Monkey Kitty is truly his mama’s son the way he loves yarn.

In fact, in the time it took me to run down the stairs and back to fetch the camera to take pictures, Money Kitty got very familiar with the yarn – I didn’t catch it on camera, but I came back to find him with the rope in his mouth.  He’s learned that I don’t like that, though, so while I had the camera nearby he resigned himself to dreaming about chewing the yarn mere millimeters from his fangs.

Dream on, Monkey Kitty.  Meanwhile, now that I’m back in civilization I’ve got to get back to that Wedding Blanket.

Every now and then, I realize that Monkey Kitty is great training for the eventual day when I might have children.  Sure, as long as there’s enough food and water I can potentially leave him alone for a weekend, but at the same time, if I leave anything “dangerous” around?

Five minutes.

For example, I was working on the Wedding Blanket when I decided to ask the Blanket Thief a question.  I left a ball of yarn attached to a swatch on the coffee table while I went upstairs to consult with him.  I wasn’t out of the room for more than five minutes.  And when I came down?

To give you an idea of the damage he wreaked, here’s a close up:

That used to be a slightly blockish ball of tightly wound yarn with a neat ball band on it.  At this point, it’s roughly three times normal size.  Meanwhile, Monkey Kitty made it clear that he did not understand why I was yelling about being “gone for five minutes!” and that if I would just go away again, he’d like to finish what he started.

And that neat little ball band that had originally been around the ball of yarn?  The Blanket Thief found it hidden in the bottom of Monkey Kitty’s hide-away bag, without a single tear or mark on it.

It’s really quite amazing what that cat can do in five minutes.  Especially considering that he doesn’t have opposable thumbs.

…Monkey Kitty will find it.

It’s like he has a sixth sense about where to find knitting and related supplies, and I swear he must have some kind of extreme instinctual imperative telling him to “Destroy!  Maim!  Kill!  Bitebitebite!”  I’d say he could smell the animals that were involved in making the yarn (see exhibits A and B) except that he also seeks and destroys polyester (exhibit C).  I haven’t given him the opportunity to get at any cotton yarn (yet, although the wedding blanket will be 100% cotton), but something tells me he’d be an equal opportunity yarn attacker.

A few weeks ago, I started another pair of go-everywhere-while-doing-anything socks.  This is what they looked like right after casting on.

(Also, I’d just like to point out that I’m giving Deborah Norville another try here.  I’ve got yet another set of a different colorway in my stash as well, so here’s hoping this one works out better than the last…)

Apparently, I forgot to put the knitting away properly (it was in a bag, but not out of Monkey Kitty’s reach).  In the morning, this is what I found:

A close up of the yarn under Monkey Kitty’s feet:

Notice that both balls of yarn are on this floor of the house, near the table (one is actually wound quite effectively over, under, and around several chairs as well).  That doesn’t really explain why there’s yarn going here:

Or why my knitting is here (almost hidden by the jacket):

Or why the yarn got wound around the stair posts at the top of the stairs before winding its way back down:

And yet, even then, all that was recoverable.  Sure, I had a lot of yarn wound around the outside of the balls, which was annoying, but overall the damage was actually rather superficial.

Then Monkey Kitty upped the stakes.

I had this pair of socks in a bag in my purse, which I apparently didn’t zip closed last night.  Quietly, sneakily, Monkey Kitty took the knitting out of my bag and hid it (note: he didn’t pull the yarn out of the bag until after we left for work, thus having all day to play with it).

On the way home, the Blanket Thief and I were talking about how my purse was much lighter than it normally was, and since neither of us could remember taking anything out of it, we were pretty sure who the culprit was and what we’d find when we came home.

At first glance, it might not look like there’s even anything wrong here – there’s barely any extra yarn pulled out at all.  But this time Monkey Kitty took a more subtle approach to his knitting destruction:

That’s the current state of the once-neat balls of yarn.  Somehow they both still seem to work as center pull balls, although the yarn now comes out the side of the ball instead of the top, but they’re about twice as big as they used to be and seriously more disordered.  And even then, I would just shrug it off and keep going, except…

Monkey Kitty took out the cable on the needle too.  I think we can conclude only one thing from this: Monkey Kitty has declared War on Knitting.  In between bouts with the scratching post, that is.

I’ve been trucking along on my Knitting Olympics project, but it seems that the kitties really don’t want me to finish.  First, Monkey Kitty took apart a ball of yarn, then he chewed on the cable for my circular needle (luckily, not enough to break it), and now Bear Kitty is joining the fray – last night while I was brushing his teeth (I, er, may, in fact, be a crazy cat lady) Bear Kitty bit down on my thumb hard enough to break the nail and draw blood from multiple locations.  I’m fine (and I’m not going to horrify you with pictures), but one of the wounds is exactly where I rest my thumb against the needle tip, which…well, it doesn’t feel great.

I’m continuing to soldier on, but I don’t think my progress will be as great as it was before the injury.  I’m going to call this part of the “Fortius” part of the Olympic motto.

Four years ago, the Yarn Harlot declared the start of the Knitting Olympics – and I didn’t do it.  I could use any excuse I want about how I was in college, it was a weird time for me, I didn’t have the yarn for a good project, yadda, yadda, yadda.  The real reason I didn’t go for it was…er…well, if we’re going to be quite honest here (and when are we not?), I was just too lazy to put the effort into picking a pattern, and finding the yarn, and waiting to start until the right time, and so forth.  When I have the urge to start a project, very little can get in my way – even the Knitting Olympics.

This year, though, I’m in.  I’m doing it.  I’m signing up for the Knitting Olympics (in fact, just did, right here).  I’ve got the pattern (Anjou from French Girl Knits), the yarn (Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine in the 1275 colorway), and the needles.  The yarn is wound up.  I’ve swatched (although I’m living dangerously, because I’ve decided to skip blocking the swatch and fudge the numbers a bit between my inability to get gauge and the lack of a size that really fits me well).  I’m ready to go.

Or, I was ready.  Then Monkey Kitty got involved.

Now I like untangling knots more than most people (I’ve actually begged some of my friends to let me untangle skeins they got into a mess), but this was not what I wanted to wake up to this morning.  Luckily, only one of the three balls was really unwound (but boy was it ever!), and Monkey Kitty didn’t break the yarn in too many places.  Still, I’ll be spending a bit of time tonight turning this:

Back into this:

Because tomorrow, I get to cast on and go to town.  This will be interesting – the pattern doesn’t look too challenging technically, but it does have lace which has to be blocked (actually, the whole thing needs to be blocked), and I’ll need to plan accordingly for that one.  Also, there’s miles of stockinette down the body – that’s the endurance section.  And then there’s the seaming, which based on the description seems fiddly at best.

Really, I can’t wait.  Except I have to.

Damn rules.