The Mother of Cats has been very unfair to me lately…
To be frank, the Mother of Cats has been out of control for days. She has been working on this shawl that is using a stitch that she calls “brioche”. Lots of brioche. Brioche in color after color.
All of these colors to be exact. Why does she have to use sooo many colors. Okay, I did help her wind these yarns, which was a lot of fun, but now she won’t let me touch them. She keeps them in a plastic container with a LOCKING LID! What is up with that?The second I get a paw into the brioche she goes all crazy on me and makes me stop. She even YELLED at me!
I cannot believe that she is acting this way. This brioche is the yummiest knitting that she has done in quite a while. So squishy. So wonderful under my paws. So perfect for a new cat blanket…
See what I mean? There is an ocean of this brioche so far, and if she would just give it to me I would certainly put it to good use.
Nope. She is refusing to let me take a nice nap on this blanket. She let the smelly starfish touch the blanket, but me, her most devoted kitty, not a chance! I am concerned about her priorities. I’m not sure that she still loves me the way that she used to.
Okay. Maybe she does love me a little bit.
Last night she finally finished the brioche portion of the shawl and started on the garter stitch section. Garter stitch! I like garter stitch too. The way this shawl is growing there is no way she will be able to keep me off of it. Ha! Take that Mother of Cats!
I’m such a good boy.
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats: This shawl is the What the Fade?! shawl by Andrea Mowry. My project notes are here on Ravelry. I am proud to announce that I found every single one of these yarns in the stash (with my sidekick MacKenzie helping me dig through bins…) and didn’t have to resort to any shopping to close color gaps in the fade. Yay, stash!!
The Mother of Cats finally finished her Mixology Shawl last week. I was so happy! She has been knitting and knitting on this for weeks and weeks, and it is so big that half of the time it was piled on top of me while she was working on it.
See what I’m talking about?
So, of course, as soon as she finished it I was thrilled. Another blanket for me!! The second she had that Mixology off of the needles and folded on the chair I jumped right up there. A blankie! My blankie! I don’t need it blocked at all and I love all of the strings hanging off of it. Thanks, Mother of Cats!! You’re much nicer than Yellow Boy says.
What? This isn’t for me?
The Mother of Cats is so mean spirited. She took my blankie away and dumped it into the sink to soak. In water!
Look at how huge this is.
Then she stretched it out on the floor to dry with towels under and over it. How can she be so mean to me? She knows how much I like to sleep on wet wool. Wet towels, not so much. Sheesh…
Today I helped her take off all of the little strings from the shawl and she gave me the pile of scraps to play with. Nice. I like scraps, but I want the whole blankie. I’m such a good boy. I helped her the whole time she was making this thing!
It is done. She says it is not a blankie for me at all, but a new shawl for her to wear to her knitting group tomorrow. It is exactly the right colors to go nicely with my fur, but no, she hasn’t put it back onto the bed for me to sleep on.
Tonight she started another big shawl with lots of colors of yarn. We wound all of the balls this afternoon (cat party time!) and I helped her with the brioche stitches tonight. I’m sure that she couldn’t do this work without me. She is so lucky to have my help.
I’m such a good boy!
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The shawl is Mixology by Casapinka. My project notes are here.
I have been working on this shawl for quite a while. I had some adventures settling on the colors for the shawl, which I shared in this post.
I do need to make the cats another knitted blanket. They actually fight over the one little one that I made for MacKenzie earlier. It is such a struggle to keep them off my knitted goods that I decided to just give them small blankets of their own that can be easily washed.
Tonight MacKenzie and I cast on a What The Fade?! shawl. Hopefully it will soon be big enough to cover him again while I’m knitting.
Today it was horribly windy here, so I stayed indoors. Here are some videos from the day; my favorite is the porta-potty blowing down the street…
The Mother of Cats and I have been knitting like crazy on her Mixology shawl.
The Mother of Cats says that it is spring today. Spring! The birds are coming back! Yellow Boy and I really like birds. Squirrels, not so much. Birds are awesome, though. And bugs. And snakes. We really like to chase snakes!!
Today the Mother of Cats did more cleaning and I got involved in the spring cleaning too; bath time for Yellow Boy.I helped the Mother of Cats put some cute little lights on her baby rose bush that she bought last month. The wire with the lights is perfect for chasing! She has to put the rose on the kitchen window ledge so Yellow Boy won’t eat it. He’s that way.Oh yeah. We knitted. I guess I should show you how far we have gotten on her Mixology Shawl. It is really getting to be a great size for a cat blanket… She can’t wait to get this done so she can wear it with her new denim hooded jacket. I can’t wait for her to finish so I can use it as a CAT BLANKET!!
I tried to get the Mother of Cats to let me outside to look for birds this afternoon, but she refused to do it. Something about snow on the ground and too much wind. What a silly Mother of Cats! Doesn’t she understand that it is now spring?
I’m just trying to take care of Yellow Boy… he hasn’t been able to hunt for bugs for sooo long.
See what a good boy I am.
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The project notes for the Mixology are here. If you don’t know this pattern, it is the Mixology Shawl from Casapinka.
Sunday night I drove home from a visit with my son through a thunder snow storm. If you don’t know about these things, they are pretty exciting. Lightening, thunder, and downpours of snow. So much snow. We had over 6 inches of the heavy slushy stuff before it was over. The cats were in the closet sheltering in place when I got home. Poor things.
The next door neighbors have a dog that has become a ferocious barker over the winter. She even ate a hole in the fence so she can keep a better eye on my yard. Poor cats. It’s going to be a difficult return to the great outdoors when the warm weather arrives.
The snakes are little garter snakes; mostly harmless, but surprisingly fast when a cat is hunting them.
My big brother MacKenzie has been a little under the weather this week, so I’ve been taking up the slack by being especially helpful to the Mother of Cats all week. While MacKenzie has been sleeping upstairs I’ve been helping her with all of her chores. I get lots of snacks and pets, too, since MacKenzie isn’t there to barge in…
Here I’m helping the Mother of Cats with the laundry. I flattened every single stack of clean clothes for her. So much work. Why she doesn’t completely understand that my help is essential for optimal folding?
Now that it is the end of winter I’m moving into prime shedding season. I love to sleep in the sunlight, and then as I run upstairs to check on MacKenzie the fluffs of fur just fly off everywhere. It’s almost like indoor snow! So cool! The Mother of Cats keeps brushing me, but thankfully she isn’t getting enough fur off to spoil my fun.
Look at all of this fur! Thank heavens it is finally getting warm enough for me to get rid of all of this extra fluff.
Anyway, since the weather has been warm this week we worked on finishing some little projects.
Remember these socks? I slept on her legs for two whole days while she got the other sock done. Here they are! The Mother of Cats has enough yarn left over to make me a toy mouse. It’s only fair since MacKenzie got a whole blanket earlier this winter.The Mother of Cats also whipped up a pair of arm warmers.
The Mother of Cats is so strange. I’m too hot and dumping off all of my long fur, but she keeps putting these things onto her arms and feet. Doesn’t she understand that winter is ending? She should come take a nap with me in the sunlight by the back door. Silly Mother of Cats!
She has also been knitting on her Mixology.
That Mixology is so long now it covers me while she is knitting, so I really don’t like it all that much. I had to go upstairs to hang out with MacKenzie since she was so annoying while working on it. Every time she turns the knitting over it flaps over my head. She kept whapping me with the needles, too. No self respecting cat would put up with all of that. I decided that MacKenzie could use some attention, anyway, so I sleep with him when she’s knitting Mixology.
Today she took out that dreadful instrument of cat torture known as the VACUUM and chased us all over the house with it. It was just awful! Every time she turned it off to empty it I thought we were done, but no, she just reconnected everything and vacuumed another room. MacKenzie likes to follow her around to keep his eye on what she’s doing, but I hid. Best to be safe! When she came downstairs she caught me and carried me up the stairs past the scary machine and I just couldn’t help myself: I squeaked in terror! Can you blame me? The last time she carried me somewhere it was for a bath… MacKenzie laughed at me for an hour after that.
Here I am, fully recovered. Whew! What a long day it was.
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The socks are knit from a sock blank I bought at the Estes Park Wool Mart from Bonkers. The sock pattern is Eugene by Rachel Coopey. My project notes are here.
The arm warmers are the pattern that I worked out a few months ago when the cold weather started. I didn’t put in a thumb hole this time and the warmers just bunch up around my lower arms and wrists: just what I wanted this time. Here are the project notes.
MacKenzie had a cold for a few days: sneezing, cranky, and sleeping. Can cats have allergies? He’s back up to full speed again today and once again is the dominant cat; Yellow Boy has resumed his role of the little cat brother that MacKenzie alternately babies, grooms, and then roughs up. More yellow fur on the carpet…
Yellow Boy doesn’t know it, but he’s going to get a bath and clipping soon… Shedding season comes right before hair ball and matted fur season, and I hope to keep ahead of things this year.
I’ve been wanting to make a Mixology (by Casapinka) for quite a while. One night I printed out the pattern, shopped the stash, gathered up some yarn, and casted on with a sense of reckless abandon. Great yarns, great colors, and I couldn’t wait to see how it would look as I mixed them up in the shawl.
Look at these happy colors. Won’t these be a lot of fun in the mash-up of Mixology
Okay, I have to be honest here; I just don’t do any swatching. Ever. I’m lazy. Maybe I need instant gratification. Anyway, I like to just throw the yarn onto my needles and launch into the project. Besides, how could these colors not work out?
The knitting has a lot of colors changes at the beginning. So far, looking good! MacKenzie: cat toy!! As I kept knitting I began to question my choices. Gee, the pink is awfully bright and the yellow variegated yarn isn’t really pulling its weight. Where did all of that green come from and where did the blue go? What can I actually wear this thing with in my closet? I should have asked myself that sooner, but in my defense, I was seduced by the yarn…
I ripped it off the needles and recycled all of the yarn. I was pretty cheerful about it. I had just bought a few new items for my wardrobe in indigo blue and thought that I should build a Mixology that would go with them. Back into the stash I dived…
There. Don’t these look like they would like to play with my new denim jacket and dress?Here it is. Mixology 2.0. I love the colors. My best friend said something about it being dark, but I had faith in the colors to come. I went out to look at the shop sample to see how the whole color sequence would work out.
The shop sample was a lot smaller than mine. Like 6 inches smaller across then my knitting. Oh, oh. I was first drawn to the shawl/scarf because of the size of this sample. If it is too big it won’t work right. I checked my needle size and the pattern again. Yep. I was using the right needle. Then I checked the gauge. Holy smokes, who ever checks the gauge on a shawl? Well, it might have been nice if I had…
My best friend Deb helped me rip it all out. She’s fearless that way, and is know for her ripping (and cutting) episodes. Hmmm… what a good opportunity to make some yarn color changes. Since I just happened to be in a yarn shop…
Behold: Mixology 3.0. I added a couple of Baah! La Jolla yarns that added more variation and bridged the red and blue a little better.I went down a needle size and I’m exactly at the gauge that I want. I just love how the colors are working together. It’s a keeper!
I’m approaching the half-way mark on the shawl now and the colors are working out great. I’m going to get a lot of use out of this, and I learned a lot while going through the process. As you can guess, it has taken several weeks to work my way through the different iterations of the Mixology, and there were some big breaks where I just lost myself into a book for an evening and let the knitting sit in a corner to think about what it had done for awhile.
Meet the knitting break books.
I read a lot, and I’m doing a reading challenge at Goodreads. With a sense of optimism I committed to reading 50 books this year. Book after book, week after week, I have been chomping my way through mysteries, science fiction and popular novels. I rate all of the books at Goodreads, and they almost always get 3 or 4 stars (out of a possible 5). I usually like all of the books that I read, and they certainly keep me entertained, but I long for a book that is well written, with characters of real depth, and a sense of magic. I don’t want to know where the book is going before I get there. I want to feel impacted by the book. I want 5 stars!
Well, during the various Mixology melt-downs and knitting breaks I found two treasures lurking in my Nook and on the bookshelf. Two remarkable books that deal with death and loss, family dysfunction, grief, crisis, and the eventual coming into their own of the young people who make their way through the emotional storms in each book. Seriously, I’ve been up half the night with each of these. I had no idea that they would deal with similar subjects, but somehow I launched into them back to back, and will treasure each book for quite some time. Here they are: Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt and Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. I highly recommend both of these books.
You know, I did all of that knitting with yarns from the stash (until I got to the last version of Mixology), and both of those books have been with me for months. I need to toss the house to look for other treasures. I wonder what is in the fridge, although things abandoned there are usually dangerous. Still, I’m feeling really hopeful as I write this. I’m going to poke around in the kitchen as soon as I finish this. Chocolate. I bet there is chocolate down there.
Yellow Boy: and maybe you could find us some cat cookies while you’re own there!!
The Mother of Cats has been working really hard on her sweater for the Ravellenics competition. I’ve been helping her all week. She is upset about all the cat hair in the sweater: totally ungrateful!!
It has been almost a whole week of knitting on the sweater. She is mostly cheerful, but there have been a few incidents where she got snappy about me chomping yarn and chasing the needles. It is so hard to support her when she gets like this, but Yellow Boy and I continue to contribute as much as we can. Really, we don’t need all of our fur; happy to share.
The sweater is now so big that is covers me while I’m sitting in her lap.See what I’m talking about?
Last night towards the end of the ice skating event she spread out the sweater to admire her work and started making sad noises. Really sad noises. Yellow Boy came running to see what was wrong and if she was giving away food.
What has happened here?
She took the sweater off the needles and did a lot of ripping. RIPPING! WOOHOO!!! I just love ripping! Lots of yarn flying. The ball got away from her and I chased it across the floor. The issue seemed to be about the pockets being on the BACK of the sweater instead of the front, but I have to tell you it was major cat party time. Yay! We cats even chased each other around the house afterwards and Yellow Boy’s fur was just flying everywhere!
Once the party was over I helped her pick up her stitches again. Ugh. BORING… I closely supervised so she wouldn’t make any more mistakes.
Finally she got all the stitches back into order, moved her markers and got ready to start knitting again. This time the pockets will be on the front of the sweater where they belong.
But instead of doing that she packed it all up, got an ice cream bar and went to bed. Seriously? Hello… I think we should get back to work here!
Nope. She stayed in bed. The sweater is still packed up but she plans to get back to work tonight when the Olympics start. Downhill racing. Ice Skating. Skeleton. We will knit then.
Right now I need some cookies!!
I’m such a good boy.
>^..^<
Note from the Mother of Cats: The sweater is Cushman by Isabell Kraemer. My Ravelry notes are here.
As you can see, I’m catching a little nap on the Mother of Cats’ Find Your Fade shawl. So nice. So squishy. Nothing quite like wool for a nap blanket.
For some reason the Mother of Cats gets upset when I sleep on her shawl. She keeps putting it on to wear and then she gets crabby when I try climb in and sleep on it on her lap. No matter how much I knead and purr she gets snippy about “snags” and pushes me off. She is so difficult sometimes. Really, she needs to learn to share her things a little better. Yellow Boy and I try to share when we’re sleeping on the shawl, after all.
Look at these yarns that she got out to make me my own blanket!!
Last week she went digging though her yarn stash (Woohoo! I got to go exploring in the stash while she worked!) and found these leftovers from socks and shawls to make me a blanket.
She used a really simple pattern just like the one that makes the wash clothes for the kitchen.She changed the colors every time she started to get bored, and did some fading of the colors while she worked. Not as nice as the Find Your Fade shawl, but still not bad.Last Friday she finally got my blankie all done for me. This is mine, mine, mine. All mine!! Forget what I said about sharing with Yellow Boy!Maybe the Mother of Cats isn’t that bad after all. Now I can sleep right next to her while she is wearing her shawl in bed knitting.
I’m such a good boy.
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The cats have developed such an attachment to my Find Your Fade shawl (Okay, it is half silk/alpaca…) that they jump on it at every opportunity and even have taken to circling like sharks while I’m wearing it trying to find a loose end to sleep on. This is one big shawl, so there are ends for them to take advantage of.
I’ve been keeping their claws trimmed but they still managed to snag the shawl. Bad cats!! Well, not all that bad. They just need their own wool yumminess to sleep on. I wanted something simple that I could wash regularly.
The pattern I used was Grandmother’s Favorite Dishcloth on Ravelry. I knitted using yarn bits (including the silk/alpaca leftovers) and size 4 needles. The final blanket is MacKenzie sized.
I still need to make a blankie for Yellow Boy. For him I’ll double up the yarn and knit on size 6 needles; I have lots of projects calling my name, so he gets a marled blanket.
I know that it has been a long time. I hope that you haven’t been missing me.
The Mother of Cats has been a severe disappointment for just weeks and weeks. She caught some kind of cold early in December, carried on like a baby for over a week (nasal spray, salt water gargling, boxes of tissues… Yellow Boy and I became quite concerned about her mental health…) and COMPLETELY ignored our needs. As if that wasn’t enough, when she finally got over the virus, she then became even worse. She slept for hours and hours, stayed in her bed even when she was awake, and totally failed to deliver our cookies on time. SHE DIDN’T EVEN DO CHRISTMAS!!! which is totally our favorite time of the year. Hello… Christmas trees = world’s best cat toys. How could she have failed us this way?
She said she was in a flare. Whatever.
When she was awake she worked endlessly on these socks for her cousin’s Christmas present.
The yarn for the socks was from this sock blank that she bought at a yarn festival. She made it into a ball and wouldn’t let me help even a little bit.She wanted to make these complicated socks for her cousin. This cousin is special… they were born two days apart and are kind of like displaced twins. This cousin once gave her a whole quilt for a present. The least she could do was to make these socks! She started knitting the first week of December. Lots of time. I looked forward to days of great knitting together.But she was too tired to knit very long on them at a time, and can I be frank, she was pretty stupid with brain fog. Lots of mistakes. Lots of stress. She kept chasing me away while I was helping. She tried to knit in bed, which is MY place. So I ate the yarn a couple of time. If she gave me cookies in a timely manner these things wouldn’t happen.Her lack of energy and general stupidness was really obvious when she knitted the heels. It took her THREE HOURS to pick up those stitches to knit the afterthought heel. She started sighing and pushing me off the bed. She began to refer to the knitting project as the Turkish socks from hell. The Mother of Cats was really in trouble.I just kept on encouraging her. I purred a lot. I settled for fewer cookies. I even stopped eating the yarn. She was really in pitiful shape.By Christmas Day she had finished this much. Her cousin reminded her that Christmas continues until January 6th.Finally, finally they were done!Those horrid and ill behaved heels look pretty good, don’t they?
The Turkish Hell socks were packed up last week and mailed out. On Saturday, the last day of Christmas they arrived safely in their new home. They had better behave themselves and last for years and years; I would hate to travel all the way across the state to whack them into shape!
I’m such a good boy.
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
These socks, called Classic Kilim, are from the book Around the World in Knitted Socks by Stephanie van der Linden. The socks were supposed to have tassels and embroidery; that so did not happen!!Here is the info on Ravelry with more info about the book. My notes on Ravelry are here.
On December 1st I got my pneumonia vaccine even though I had been struggling a little that week. That night my youngest son became ill with complications of diabetes and was rushed to the ER . I spent the next 2 days/nights at the ICU with him. Yep. About the time my son returned to work and I moved back home I was sick; my autoimmune diseases flared while I was fighting through the viral illness. My Sjogren’s symptoms have been off the chart and crushing fatigue and brain fog appeared along with them. This week I am better and have been knitting up a storm and planning blog posts. Hopefully I’ll be online again in a couple of more days.
I’ve been helping the Mother of Cats for the entire week getting these socks done. It is a lot of hard work; the kinky yarn from the sock blanks is really hard to get a good chomp on! I’m sure she doesn’t appreciate all that I do. In this shot I was warming up her needles and the sock blank by napping on top of it. Isn’t that nice of me?! Why does she get so snippy with me?
These are the socks that she ripped out a few weeks ago and restarted using fluffy white yarn with rabbit fur in it. Wow. This stuff is really yummy! For some reason she is keeping it closed up in a plastic bag so I can’t play with it after I dragged it upstairs to play “roll the ball” under the dining table. Whatever. She is just horrible about sharing her toys!
Here are the finished socks!! Aren’t they totally cool? Much nicer looking than the other attempt with the ugly brown lace yarn. I think that the sparkles are especially catchy.
I really like these socks, and they are just perfect for napping on whenever she leaves they out. So nice and toasty to sleep on. Just the right size to kick and bite when I’m feeling a little frisky. I think that she should keep the in the kitty toy box with my catnip-stuffed squirrel.
I’m such a good boy. She really should give me these socks.
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
These socks are make with handpainted sock blanks by Greenwood Fiberworks. The minute I saw the blanks at a trunk show this fall I knew they had to be these socks. Even the name of the colorway was cool: Paper Roses. The sock pattern is Dave by Rachel Coopey, which is basically a nice vanilla sock. I made the version with afterthought heels to maintain the color sequence down the sock. The fluffy white yarn for the lace cuff is Knit Picks Bare Hare.
Check out this heel! This is really nice fitting on my foot and feels great. I’d never done a heel like this, but I’m glad that I tried it.
I’m really happy with the cuff at the top. I made good notes of what I did and recorded them into the Ravelry project page, but I also got some nice pictures and am thinking of blogging the pattern later in the week.
The Mother of Cats and I haven’t really been neglecting all of you. We’ve been very, very busy working on her Marled Magic Sweater. This thing is huge! And very squishy.
See what I mean: squishy!
Every part of this HUGE sweater has mohair stranded with it. The Mother of Cats says that is what makes it “marled”. Whatever. I’m just glad that she is paying attention to my needs.
The best part of the sweater is a section that the Mother of Cats called “brioche” stitch.
The brioche stitch section has cashmere and mohair mixed in the yarn. So nice with my fur. I totally could get into a blanket for my cat bed made out of this stuff…
See. Here’s a close-up. Doesn’t that look like it would make a great cat bed blanket?
The Mother of Cats has been working steadily on this project, and we are making really good progress. This afternoon she finished the 6th section of the sweater and took it out for a picture or two. She did not let me go outside with her because I jumped the fence again last week (Hey, there was an ENEMY CAT in my yard again!!) and I’m currently under house arrest. The Mother of Cats is so unstable… why does she overreact like this?
Look at this! This is the right side of the sweater (front and back) and the part with the vee shape is the center front. Wouldn’t you like to see what those stripes look like?Here they are. The Mother of Cats used 2 yarns for each color in the stripes, so I had a total of 4 different yarns to chomp on while she was knitting. I had SO much fun! I wonder why the Mother of Cats get so snippy with me?
So that’s all that is going on here. The Mother of Cats and I have been knitting and knitting and knitting while she binge watches Netflix and I help her keep all of her little yarns organized. The sweater is already big enough to be a really nice blanket, but she says there is still a lot of knitting ahead of us. I’ve been such a good boy and so much help she brought me home a present yesterday!
Her best friend and knitting buddy Deb made this little friend for me!
It’s a little knitted cat that looks just like me! The Mother of Cats says it is for her birthday, but I know that it was really for me. This afternoon it slept with me in my cat bed. So nice and cuddly! I think that the next one should be stuffed with catnip.
Well, that’s it. The Mother of Cats found some nice purple yarn and a grey mohair to use in the next section of the sweater. She is champing at the bit and can’t wait to start knitting the next section.
Back to the knitting salt mines!
I’m such a good boy.
Can I have some cookies now?
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
I actually made an Excel spreadsheet to figure out the colors that I’m using as I make the sweater as I wanted to balance things out and needed to plan ahead. I’m not out of control at all!
I’m struggling with the Ravelry project page: so many yarns to record! I finally started listing the yarns for each section in the notes section, and I need to update the list of yarns that I’m using. I plan to do that when I finally get done.
It is clear that this sweater will be large; I can’t wait to be folded in its cushy yumminess this winter.
My friend Deb is developing the patterns for the floppies that she creates for her daughter and others. She has made a bunny, panda, and now my cat. I’ll alert you all as soon as her patterns go up on Ravelry.
Isn’t this the cutest? He sits up really well and is the most perfect floppy cat ever!!
Yarn, Books & Roses 