I'm Such A Slacker

This is the cat toy that I finished a few months ago. I guess I forgot to post pictures because about ten minutes after I finished it (and the cats even liked it, it was amazing) the dogs shredded it and I threw it away. It seems like a pretty familiar story, the dogs tearing up something that I've worked on. I have to say, it gets a little old.

Also, I have been needing some sort of cuticle cream because my fingers are horrible. Instead of chewing my actual fingernails off, if I have a hangnail or anything on my finger I absolutely cannot leave it alone until my finger is bleeding. As you might guess this can get quite painful and definitely not very attractive. So I decided to quit tearing up my hands and started looking for products to put on my fingers. Well, if you haven't looked around for stuff like this, the stuff you can buy in stores seems expensive and it is hard to tell what the texture and smell of the stuff on Etsy is going to be. I even looked up recipes so I could make my own, the only problem is around here it is pretty much impossible to find some of the ingredients. Plus, most of the recipes have about twenty different oils and waxes in them, and if I can buy a tube of this stuff on Etsy for three dollars, buying the ingredients just doesn't seem worth it. So, long, pointless story short, last night I gave up and bought the Etsy stuff. Good story, right?

Guess Who Came To Town

Well, technically not this town, but one that is only an hour away.



If you can't tell, yes that is our future President speaking at a stadium in Springfield, Missouri on Saturday night. I heard there were about 35,000 or 40,000 people. Now, that may not be the 100,000 people in St. Louis, but for this part of the state, which is pretty convincingly Republican country I think it was a very impressive crowd. Actually the whole Obama family was there and the four of them looked like tiny little specks from where we were sitting.

I have totally been slacking in the knitting department, so I have nothing to say about that. What I will say, in all seriousness, no matter what your politics are VOTE ON TUESDAY! Seriously, voting is cool and I think it is fun and everyone should do it (if you doubt any of this, let me just say that I am such a nerd that I actually registered to vote on my eighteenth birthday).

Vote, vote, vote, vote.

How Knitting Makes Me Green

These little squares are what I have been using instead of cotton balls. I have not used a single cotton ball in over a month. It is a small way to reduce the amount of stuff I throw away, but really if you think about it, using two cotton balls per day really adds up. I was actually using four cotton balls every day, one in the morning, one at night and one for each eye to remove makeup. So I made some of my squares into rectangles to use for makeup removal. I love them and I can't believe I did not think of this earlier. I still catch myself going toward the trash can out of habit, but that should decrease over time. Unfortunately the yarn is just that cheap Peaches & Creme stuff you can find at Wal-Mart and just about everywhere else and the colors fade very quickly. Although, with mine, it is not a big deal partly because I just don't care and partly because the green stripes fade to yellow, which still makes them yellow and white.

Next topic:
I don't know how I heard about this or how I found it online, but there is apparently a raw food diet for cats and dogs. Now to me, feeding your animals raw makes perfect sense. Depending on the food you might buy at pet stores there are different amounts of nasty stuff in them. Whether it is meat by-products or grain or corn or even ash(I have seen that on a cat food ingredient list) even if those things aren't doing anything bad to your animal, at the very least that is the stuff you are picking out of the yard or cleaning out of the litter box. Cats and dogs have no use for corn or ash, that stuff is just filler. Now, that being said, if I had the money and the places to buy quality organic meat for my animals (granted I don't even eat that well) I would do it. But I don't have a lot of resources, plus I am not an animal nutrition expert so I would not feel comfortable feeding my cats random kinds of meat and nothing else. I would imagine that feeding cats and dogs whole animals like rabbits or small chickens with fur and everything else still attached would be ideal, and you probably would not have to add vitamins or vegetables. But, that assumes the whole animals you buy were able to run around and eat flowers and grass and were not pumped full of hormones and other bad things. Also, raw bones are supposed to be good for keeping teeth clean (apparently chicken or turkey necks, as gross as that sounds, have softer bones so there is less worry of the animal choking). If I can do something to make my cats' teeth and breath better without spending hundreds of dollars at the vet for teeth cleaning, I am willing to do that. So basically, I have decided I am going to try to add raw food to my cats' normal kibble/canned food diet whenever I can get it. I have a feeling it will take some time to get them used to the idea of eating bones, but I think they will like it eventually. It might even make them feel like big wild cats, and what house cat wouldn't like that?

Mmm, Yarn

It's here!!!!!!

It is even better in person than I expected it to be. The colors are so saturated and bright and wonderful that I found out it is nearly impossible to take pictures of it that show the true colors. The colors are Red Hot Chili and Pfefferminz Prinz (Prince Peppermint in German, or Bavarian, I'm not sure which is correct or what the difference is) and I'm not sure what color that little guy is (it is just a test skein/freebie) and I have no idea what to do with it other than just look at and pet it. Now, I have read a lot about how this yarn is supposed to smell really good because of the kind of soap it is washed in. To me it just smelled lightly of laundry soap, possibly a little like what Gain smells like, which is a good smell, but I guess I was expecting it to smell like candy or something.

Luckily I got into the Wollmeise Sock Club, so I will have more opportunities to smell this yarn. This Sock Club and the fact that I actually got into it is excellent and surprising news. You see, for those of you not familiar with sock clubs(yes, I am aware how ridiculous that statement might sound to people who are not knitters or who do not care about it at all), and I am by no means an expert, but they are basically any number of shipments of sock yarn spread out over a period of time. In this case there will be four shipments every three months for one year. For each shipment the colors are a surprise (I suppose depending on the club, even the kind of yarn could be a surprise) and there is also a pattern in every shipment and some double pointed needles in the first one. The process of getting a spot in this club is the surprising part. There were three days for people to sign up and then there was a lottery for the actual spots in the club. So, as I understand it she had about 500 spots available and ended up with over 1,000 entries. Typically I am very unlucky when it comes to winning things, so I signed up for the club assuming I would have no real chance of getting in. Then, as the day for confirmations approached, I started to think that I possibly should not have even signed up because I most definitely do not have the kind of money required to pay for it (I will spare you and myself from having to see the obscene amount in print). As soon as I started to regret signing up I knew I would get in. But all has been worked out, because it is now going to be the Christmas gift that keeps on giving. Sadly, because I have no control over myself and because some people already have their first shipments and because of those dang spoiler threads, I have already been spoiled. But I don't care, it was worth it to see those beautiful pictures.

I am feeling very wordy today, apparently yarn does that to me.

I have already decided what to make with the Pfefferminz Prinz (a Clapotis if you are interested) and after I struggled with wanting to knit versus keeping the yarn in the perfect skein, I decided to knit. So I wound the yarn into a ball last night and discovered something else about this yarn:



There is a ton of it in each skein! The other two balls are different kinds of sock yarns that I have. The middle one is my hand-dyed stuff which I got from Knitpicks.com and according to their site, the skein has 462 yards. The smallest ball is Regia 4 ply, which has 231 yards. The Wollmeise skein has 574 yards. Wow is the only thing I can say about that.

Two other off topic comments: I fixed the double title thing in the corner. I actually saw the same thing on someone else's blog, but I have no way to explain it, the extra title just showed up one day. Second, what the heck? There is a new season of Project Runway on and I had no idea about it. I kept seeing it on the satellite guide thing, but thought nothing of it because reruns seem to be on literally every day. I don't even know how long this new season has been on. What is with the lack of advertising or have I just not been paying attention? I am very disappointed in you Heidi Klum. Also, and I do not mean to pick on Tim Gunn, I think he is great, but hearing him walk in to check on the designers and say, "Suede," in that voice of his is too funny.

Decisions, Decisions

While I am waiting for my Wollmeise to get here I am going to occupy myself with torturing the animals. However, with so many wonderful animal torture devices, I am having trouble making a decision. So, look here, skip over the baby hat obviously, and help me decide. I am leaning toward the ninja or the beret, just because some of those look like a lot of work and the ninja hat would be harder for them to get off.

Also, more uselessness.

The pattern is called DoKnit, of course. It is now hanging on the wall underneath what else but a beautiful piece of "art" that involves a mouse and a doughnut that looks exactly like this one.

And then,

Yes, they are cute, but I hate them. For such small things, they caused me a ridiculous amount of trouble. I had to rip them not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES! That is just stupid.

I am also working on a cat toy right now. It is my mission to find a toy that my cats will play with, one I don't have to buy at Petsmart and that is not a rabbit fur ball. It is impossible, I am aware. So basically, very soon I will have a cat toy to give away.

Wollmeise Is Mine!!!

I have not mentioned this yet, but I am a huge, dorky yarn stalker. But it finally paid off. I got two skeins of Wollmeise this morning! Now, if you don't know what, or who, Wollmeise is allow me to explain. The Wollmeise is a yarn dyer in Germany, she is just one person and she usually updates her site on Fridays, which is usually very early in the morning here. She makes beautiful yarn (either look around her website or look here, I suggest clicking on any of those pictures and going through the slide show). I heard about her while listening to the Knitters Uncensored podcast, and if you are like me, when you see the pictures of her yarn you will see why I was instantly obsessed with it. The yarn is wildly popular with the people who know about it, and when she does update her site, the yarn is usually gone in less than an hour. Just to prove my dorkiness, the last update was on August 8th, and I set the alarm on my phone for every hour, starting at one in the morning. When I woke up at 3, the yarn was gone, and the site was updated at 2:30. I am so beyond excited. I cannot wait to get the yarn and take pictures of it and pet it. (By the way, if you look at that Flickr group slideshow, keep in mind that each skein averages out to a little over $20, so when you see those huge piles of yarn, try to add up the amount of money people are spending on this yarn.)

Okay, I need to get these out of the way:

This is the treat bag for dog training class. the training is working, by the way, it is so cute to see her start to understand things. Especially stay, which has been really hard for her. But she is really good, she just sits there and stares so intensely at the hand the treats are in and wags her tail the entire time.




Also,

Sorry for the terrible picture, the camera battery was about to die and it did not want to focus. These socks are called Crazy Monkeys. The non-crazy Monkeys (at least you can see what they look like better there) are knit from the cuff down, but the Crazy Monkeys are toe-up. Other than that, they look the same.

That's it for now, except that I would like to say that sushi is really good (and that is in no way a dirty joke about Michael Phelps[see my last post], I promise).

Knitting Takes A Backseat To A Fish

A real, real purdy one. Good grief.
(As if everything else has not been saturated with Michael Phelps pictures, but I can't help it.)

I am finding it difficult to knit and watch men's swimming at the same time. In fact, I can't be expected to knit and watch at the same time. I really don't know how anyone can drag themselves away from the tv. By the way, just for this post, and for research purposes only, I was forced to look through 55 pages of a Michael Phelps image search. Oh the torture.

Edit: Somehow I must have forgotten what I was going to say. While I fully support Speedo wearing in men's swimming, what I don't understand is why the women's volleyball players have to wear little bikinis. Don't get me wrong, they look amazing in their little bikinis, but it seems like a pair of shorts and a tank top would be just as functional. The men volleyball players don't have to wear skimpy little things, but most of the women marathon runners I am watching now are wearing practically nothing. By the way, why would you air a marathon run live?


Another Edit:


How's that?

Just to be completely sure, I also had to go through every page of a Ryan Lochte search. I definitely deserve a gold medal for each picture.