Well, This Sucks!

Grumble. I broke my hand today. It's not looking good for my knitting in the near future. I will work on rigging my cast (it's in a splint until I meet with the orthopedic surgeon) with a knitting needle holder. But for now, I'm just going to feel sorry for myself.

Homer

My cat Homer died today. I wasn't with him, but my Mum was. I found out from a voicemail that he had passed. I don't know why this has hit me so hard- he was 12 after all -but it did. So, I decided to acknowledge his life in my blog.

I thought long and hard about how to write about my furry friend; whether to tell a linear tale about how he featured in my life or a more sentimental piece about what he meant to me. It all fell short and was deleted as quickly as it was written. I feel that my mother's email said all that could be said in words:

The vet confirmed that he had cancer and showed me the lab report... Anyway, he had to give poor Homer two injections of a valium type drug which Homer naturally resisted! It wasn't pleasant holding him while the vet did it, but Homer did soon relax and lay down and I petted him and the poor darling was purring as he died. His eyes glazed as the drug hit his brain and he was dead though his heart was still pumping and the vet was going to give him another shot, but the heart did stop then.

Homer died as he lived, a real sweetheart. Even as I had him in the cat carrier in the surgery waiting room, children gathered around him and said how lovely he was and poked their little fingers through the bars of the carrier to stroke him. I was trying not to cry, but Homer seemed to like their attentions.

I can honestly say I have never loved any animal as I loved Homer. He was a true friend, always there for me as I hope I was for him. He 'nursed' me in his catty way through my thyroid illness, fussing over me as I lay wearily on the bed and cheering me up greatly in his catty way. He always welcomed me back when I was away, almost tripping me up in his enthusiasm to greet me. He had a huge appetite for food, much greater and greedier than his brother's and a bit like me in that respect! He was gregarious and sweet natured, rarely bad tempered... All in all, he was the best cat that ever lived which I told him as his little spirit slipped away. Anyone who thinks that only human animals have a 'soul' is greatly mistaken.

Goodbye Homer.

FOlympics!

I entered, and completed the 2010 UFOlympics. In case you don't know what that means, it's a Ravelry group in which you declare one or more WIPs that are foundering. You work on them furiously between the opening and closing ceremonies, and get a gold medal if you finish everything you proposed during that time. I declared my baby blanket that I started back in July, and a grown-up's blanket that I was given. I am glad I joined the group as the two projects I declared for the event had been my guilty WIPs for quite some time! Now I am down to 2 WIPs, and I am contemplating COing another project.

A Tale of Two Mitties

It was the best of times, it was the worsted of ti... sorry. I am a slave to even the most belaboured of puns. Besides which, the knitting project I am going to speak about was made from sock weight yarn!

I made some mittens for a design collaboration with my friend, Kristine. Thankfully, I test knit the adult size, because they do not fit quite as well as I would have hoped. There is too much room above the fingers and not enough room between the cuff and the thumb, meaning they always feel like they are just about to fall off. I corrected the pattern and sent it off, but that left me with a pair of slightly ill-fitting mittens.

I was finally motivated to make a new pair when I started cycling, and was given the gift of an iPod (Thanks Ben!). Both activities necessitate the use of my hands, so I set about making a pair of Broad Street Mittens using the 100 Purewool Merino Fingering I purchased quite some time ago. The pattern has some gaps in the instructions, but I was able to improvise and I was really happy with the end product. The last part of the project was completed in Ireland, where my brother, Sam, saw them and asked that I make him a pair. I adapted the Knucks pattern, which has a child's size, and made him a pair in Noro Silk Garden Sock.

289 reprazent!

I got back to the US, and wore my mittens all of twice before losing them. I searched high and low for them. I phone-stalked the Olive Garden I had been to that day, ransacked a friend's house and even had my realtor search her office for them. They were gone. I don't deal with loss at all, and found this particularly hard to cope with as I was homesick and they were a memory of a fun time with my brother.

I tortured myself with the idea of finding them for over a week before deciding that I had to come up with a more productive way of forgetting about them. I have more of the yarn I used to make them, so decided to reknit them in time for my Father and Brother's upcoming visit in February. I prefer the colourway of the new mittens and once I repose the silly photo of me and my brother in our matching FOs, I will be chock full of closure.



I just hope that someone out there is enjoying my orange mittens.

21 Miles to Redemption

Just as cheerleading on the sidelines of football has become its own sport, so too can collecting yarn become a bona fide hobby, distinct from that of knitting. There is so much to the world of yarn. The different weights, colourways, fibres and blends. Once you venture out of the chain stores and into the LYS's, there are so many unique and rare yarns that you have to pounce when you see them.

Then there's the dye-lot issue. You can't risk buying a mere 200 yards of a yarn you like the look of. What if you later decide to make a sweater? A few months from now, you may reach the end of the skein only to find out that your dye-lot is nowhere to be found. Better play it safe and buy ten.

And the chain stores pose their own pitfalls for your wallet. As your husband is rounding in on a straight hour of looking at Guitar Hero games*, you're four aisles over, boredom-talking yourself into buying yet another cone of Lily cotton.

The subject of yarn stashes has been featured in two of my friends' blogs over the last week. EMoaOG decided to put a halt on her yarn purchases until she knits her way through some of her stash. I remember thinking that I too buy faster than I knit, so it may not be the worst idea in the world for me to consider making a similar promise to myself. But that thought proved fleeting as I was passing the time in Joann's while my husband was doing whatever it is that men do at Best Buy. Buy 1, Get 1 50% Off on Patons Merino? Sold!

Then I read Unravel Me's post about her yarn stash. A friend challenged her to calculate her stash yardage. It turned out to be a whopping 19K yards! Hmmm, seems someone's addicted to adopting yarn. I wonder how many yards I have...

I have documented my stash at Ravelry so tried using that information to determine the yardage on a calculator. That proved unsuccessful, so I turned to an Excel spreadsheet and worked it out one row at a time. Some yarns didn't have yardage available and were excluded from the calculation. Similarly, yarns that haven't yet been entered into my Ravelry stash were also omitted. I have one more than one occasion bought 10 skeins at a time (see above for pertinent rationalizations), and each time I came across one on my alphabetically arranged Ravelry stash (the C's were particularly nerve-wracking), I could see the total climbing. I was, however, still taken aback when I typed Sum() and then dragged the cursor over the cells only to find that my stash was 37,868 yards!

Wow! When did that happen? I can, and did in the initial draft of this post, make justifications such as the fact that friends have given me yarn, I picked up a number of skeins in bargain bins and yard sales, a yarn crawl or two have been bankrolled for me as gifts... But none of that explains the ludicrous amount of yarn I have accrued. It wouldn't get to the moon and back, but I could climb it halfway into the stratosphere!

So, I too will enter a vow of woolly poverty until I work through, or donate away most of my stash. Oh, and that Patons deal in Joann's? That brings the total to 38760 yds. Yeah, I got two.

---

*Yes, Nick. I am directing this at you! It's absolutely ridiculous that you own no less than nine of these fricking cacophony-generating collections, yet you are somehow completely incapable of walking past an electronics department going through their entire collection on the off-chance they have something you don't!!!!!

Sideline Call: Substitution!

My 10 things challenge has stalled recently. I approached the projects in descending order of preference, and easiness. The unfortunate, yet painfully predictable, consequence of this approach is that, with each successive FO, the projects are becoming less and less appealling.

After finishing the Deborah cardigan, I looked at the remaining books. There was nothing I had any desire to make, nor was there anything with an acceptably low time burden in order to get through the necessary number of projects. It occurred to me to "suck it up" and make the smallest possible size of something I don't like, and for which I would have no foreseeable use. But it occurred to me that this was a self-imposed challenge, and it would be ludicrous to turn my beloved hobby into such an abhorrent chore.

That said, I don't want to give up on my challenge altogether. You may have guessed from the title what my solution to this conundrum is. Instead of admitting to my failure, I am opting to reclassify it as a deferred success. I have four other knitting books from which I am yet to make anything, so I am calling them my alternates. In penance for this light cheating, I promise to sell or donate the books from which I cannot bring myself to make anything.

The Rejects:

The Replacements: