Socks. Finished Socks.

Oh the excitement! I finished them on Sunday night and they are in the washing machine as I type. Hopefully the ends I painstakingly weaved will not be ripped out. I would really hate to pull a tangled mess of yarn out of the washer and not socks. I used the Universal Toe-Up Sock Formula and I won't go over the yarn again because I think I did that earlier. Just scroll down if you are interested. They are just plain stockinette stitch all the way up the cuff so that they roll, which is exactly what I wanted them to do.

I had to use a little yarn from my second skein, luckily I had a second skein, so next time (I have already cast on for next time using my Kool-Aid yarn and this pattern.) I will know to cut the yarn in half before I start so I will have enough yarn for both socks. Speaking of Baudelaire, I am slowly working my way up the toe and these things have the pointiest toes ever. It looks a little weird right now, but hopefully it will look better when they are on my feet. Also, they made me finally learn how to do a M1 the right way. I have looked up the technique before, but I always forget if you are supposed to pick up the ladder with the left or right needle or from front to back. So I usually just make it up, which works but does not look very pretty. Now I know to pick up the ladder from front to back with the left needle and to knit into the back loop, which I never did on my improvised increases. So now my increases are much nicer and they don't leave a big, gaping hole in my knitting.

Finally, Willow's birthday was Monday. Because I got her at Petsmart from an adoption agency who had her mother before her mother had her they actually knew when she was born, so I also know. It is kind of nice to know the exact day, because Kip was a stray that I caught and brought inside, the vet had to guess that he was about six months old at the time, so I don't have the exact date. She got some Whisker Lickins, moist of course because who likes to go to all the trouble of chewing on your birthday, and a new cat teaser. She is so obsessed with cat teasers that she even plays with the old ones that don't have any feathers anymore. She not only drags them around the room in her mouth, but you will sometimes hear the bell on the featherless stick jingle because she drags it up the stairs. She drops it and it slides to the bottom of the stairs, she runs after it and drags it back up the stairs. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. So, happy first year!

Introducing Bob

Bob joined the family last night. I love these tiny projects that can be done in a few hours. Bob is the definition of instant gratification. Sadly, one of Bob's legs is longer than the others. I originally thought that he is the Nemo of Bobs, but really Nemo's special fin was smaller than the other. So I guess he is the opposite of Nemo of Bobs with his special leg.


Bob had a very exciting morning. As you can see he went kittyback riding. Kittyback riding is so much fun until you slide off the cat and land on the floor, as Bob discovered.



I have a confession. A non-Bob related confession: I like movies about dancing. I have no idea why, because I am in no way a dancer, although there is a dance club kind of place here that is fun to go to just to watch people. Hours of entertainment are to be had sitting at a table in that place. One time there was a group of girls who were dressed up, and I would not even say they were just wearing fancy dresses, but they were more like prom dresses. One of the girls was so drunk she fell up the stair going from one room to another, in the poofy, glittery prom dress. It was fantastic. Anyway, off the tangent and back to dancing movies. I inexplicably like movies I can admit are pretty bad, but I also don't like some movies that are, I suppose, classics. For example, I do not like Flashdance (If you owned that strip club, why would you continue to let her try out her routines on stage? She doesn't even get naked and if you do not get naked while working at a strip club then what is the point?) But I did not mind You Got Served (don't judge me). Maybe it is not technically dancing, but Bring It On has been a favorite of mine for many years. I love, love, love Center Stage. The acting might not be perfect and the plot is not really original, but the dancing is amazing and I can't even tell you how many times I have seen it. I even bought it because I got tired of paying to rent it so often.

So, to further my love of dancing movies, I Netflix-ed Step Up. It was horrible! Not only was the acting bad, but the dancing wasn't all that great either. I assume the only reason to watch this movie, unless you are like me, is because of the lead actor. And really I don't even understand that, but he is probably very attractive to those people who like non-smiling, muscular, military-esque types. So whatever you do, avoid this movie at all costs!

Model Pets

I finished My So Called Scarf yesterday and put it outside to dry. It was so windy yesterday the scarf dried in about two hours.

















And because I have very little in my life, I made the animals try it on.

Surprisingly they dealt with it pretty well.






















Again with this cat's whiskers! Amazing, or maybe I am just biased.


















I saved the best for last. I think the reason Kip likes getting his nails trimmed and being held upside down and that he doesn't mind modeling things is because he is desperate for attention. Not because I completely ignore him, but because I could never give out enough attention. He loves to butt his head against my chin and believe me, he does it all the time. Usually after I have let him rub his face on my chin a few times I am done with it, but he is not. He gives me 'the look', which tells me to lean over again, and of course I do, because I'm pretty sure he has me trained.



So when the scarf was wrapped around his neck 'the looks' did not stop and I had to push him away and hold him back just to get him far enough away to be able to get a picture.













So I got the angry look after I kept pushing him away. I walked away from him, to the other side of the table he was standing on, so he would follow me. That is when I got this:

Kitty Concussion

Let me paint a picture for you. There are cabinets in the room we call the utility room, they are both connected but there are two doors, one above the other. The top part of the cabinet is where the cat and dog food and treats are, along with about a million other things crammed as tight as they can get. There is also a desk next to this cabinet. The cats have gotten into the habit of jumping up on the desk when someone opens the top cabinet door, thinking they are about to get treats.

Last Saturday I went to the cabinet to decide what I wanted to make for breakfast (the bottom part of the cabinet is where cereal, rice and other things are kept) and the little girl cat followed me. I opened both doors and as they swung open the cat, who was in the doorway, jumped towards the desk but smacked into the cabinet door pretty hard. It was obvious that it hurt quite a bit, her left eye was closed and she ran away from me when I tried to pet her, which she never does. I watched her all day and am still watching her. Her pupils are the same size and they are responsive to light and she is walking and eating like normal. So, I guess she is fine, but I was pretty worried. I'm not sure if cats can get concussions, but if they can I would guess jumping into a door would be enough to cause one.


Enjoy the videos, I know they make me laugh. But attempt to ignore my extremely messy room.

Now for my knitting related incident. I am working on a very popular pattern called My So Called Scarf. Just to let you know, on Ravelry 2,497 people have already made it or are working on it. It was going pretty well if you don't count the two times I had to rip and start over when I first started it. It is now about two and a half feet long and I was knitting away when in the middle of a row I had some sort of brain block. I could not for the life of me remember how to work the next stitch. I tried as many ways as I could think of and nothing looked right. I finally had to look up the pattern again to remind myself and it turns out I had forgotten an entire part of the pattern. It was so crazy I don't even know how to describe it. It would be one thing if I had not been working on the scarf for a while and forgot how to do it, but I was in the middle of a row! One stitch before I had known what I was doing. My brain is a weird, weird thing.

Dyeing Is Fun

I ordered this yarn a few weeks ago from knitpicks.com and was so excited I read everything I could find about dyeing yarn with Kool-Aid. Apparently 100 percent wool takes dye better than wool blends. So, being the loser I am, I ordered 2 skeins of sock yarn that is a wool/acrylic blend. When I first ordered the yarn I thought I would take my time before I got around to dyeing it to figure out exactly what I wanted the yarn to look like, the best way to accomplish it and to look around in more than one store for just the right flavors of Kool-Aid. In my brain I could see a mixture of blues and greens for one skein and a mixture of reds, pinks and purples for the other and I knew it would be either variegated or self-striping. I have to say, that yarn looked amazing in my head.

So I immediately ran out to Walgreen's to buy Kool-Aid. What do you know, Walgreens does not sell Kool-Aid in the typical little packets, they only had bottles of pre-made Kool-Aid. So I sucked it up and went to Wal-Mart where they had the full Kool-Aid collection. I started grabbing packets and ended up with Grape, Pink Lemonade and Cherry for the red/pink/purple skein and Lemon-Lime, Black Cherry and Berry Blue for the green/blue skein, don't ask me how I thought Black Cherry fit into that category.

A few days later when I got the yarn I broke out the baby shampoo and gave the yarn a bath, rinsed it a few times and left it to soak while I mixed each Kool-Aid packet with a few tablespoons of water (I bought three packets of Grape and Lemon-Lime and two packets of the other flavors). Then I went looking for a turkey baster or something similar to use to squirt the Kool-Aid on the yarn in stripes. This is also when I realized we do not have a turkey baster or anything remotely like a syringe in any way. I had to get super creative, so I used a spoon. Not ideal, but it worked well enough. It looks a little weird in this condition. Like a colorful toy snake after being washed. I originally decided to hang the yarn outside to dry, but I heard thunder and brought it back inside seconds before it started to rain. The yarn took a full day to dry and somewhere along the line it turned into a huge mess and I spent three days untangling it and rolling it into a ball.

On to the next skein, I wanted to try out another approach, so I washed the other skein and set up the Kool-Aid glasses in a circle, or triangle I guess, since there were three of them. I put a third of the yarn into each glass and microwaved it. It was kind of strange because the Kool-Aid/water combos in the glasses before I put the yarn in them was very dark, and after it was a slightly cloudy white.

I was extremely careful with the second skein, so it did not tangle as badly as the first one, and despite all the problems, I enjoyed myself thourougly. I recommend everyone dye some yarn, and then send it to me. So there you have it, just look at those balls.










By the way, has anyone seen the commercial for these crackers that are a pretzel on one side and a cracker on the other side? It is just weird. Why would you ever need a double-sided cracker pretzel?

Wide As A House Or Broad As A Barn?

What a dorky picture. I sometimes wonder if it's not that I don't photograph well, but maybe I am just ugly. Who knows.

The sweater is finally finished! I'm pretty sure it took about six months to finish. But I go through phases, as I have explained before, where I knit on it obsessively for a while and then don't touch it for twice as long. Anyway, I was trying to decide if the sweater makes me look as wide as a house or as broad as a barn. Technically a barn would be bigger, so I will go with broad as a barn. By the way, I am not fishing for compliments when I get all self-deprecating, I am just kidding.

After I blocked the sweater I left it to dry on a towel on a table. Not so surprisingly this happened:

Who knew drying sweaters become cat beds? The funny thing is, if I actually knit her a cat bed, she would not go near it.