Emotional Support Chicken – Page 2

Hannah and the CoalBear: Chickenitis Continues…

Hi. I’m Hannah.

I’ve really been keeping a close eye on the Mother of Cats.

The Mother of Cats has been completely out of control for a few weeks now. She spends all her time working outside and hunting for lavender plants to put in the garden. I mean, there is a lot of lavender now, and it kind of smells funny. What is up with that?

See. Lavender. She now has five different types of lavender growing in pots on the deck along with the baby roses that get way too much attention. Why does the Mother of Cats play with plants when I need her to play with the CoalBear so he doesn’t bother me?

The only good thing about the gardening is this wagon that the Mother of Cats bought for us to play in. Then she took it outside. Why does she do these things?

When she isn’t outside working in her gardens or hunting for more lavender, she is knitting CHICKENS. Lots and lots of chickens. I really don’t mind that she is knitting, because I really like to hang out with her while she is working, but this is getting ridiculous. The chickens are starting to take over all of the room on the back of the loveseat where I like to sleep.

Do you see this? One more chicken and I won’t be able to fit on up here. Why is she doing this????

To make things worse, she saw some photos of LITTLE chickens on Facebook that made her go crazy in the yarn stash pulling out yarn for chicken construction. Then she had some people ask for chickens. Then the people who got the chickens had friends who DESPERATELY needed a chicken for themselves. I think that the Mother of Cats should charge people for the chickens (TUNA FUND!!) but so far, she gives the money to her community knitting group, Frayed Knots. Why is she doing this? Now I’m getting pushed all around by the chickens, and I’m not getting any tuna out of the deal, either.

Here all of the finished big chickens to date. She has a couple of other chickens that still need their stuffing.

The three chickens in the individual chicken photos (did you notice the big lavender plant behind the chickens?) were mailed out this week. The blue one with the little shawl went to a lady whose husband is battling cancer, and the other two flew to members of the Mother of Cat’s family. Good riddance!!!

Sigh. Is the chickenitis getting better now that some are gone? No. No, it is not. She’s determined to make even more for some people she met on Facebook. Then she went away in the car for an afternoon a week ago and returned with EVEN MORE YARN for more chickens. She says the place where she went for the afternoon needs the chickens.

She says that chickens need to go here. I hope that they take flight soon!

I guess they asked for the chickens. She showed them pictures, and they got really excited when they saw how cute they were. I’d be happy to send them Mateo to keep patients entertained, but they weren’t interested in a cat. Just chickens.

So, that’s all I have to report for the last three weeks. Gardening, knitting, and chickens.

This is Hannah, signing off.

Happy Caturday, everyone!

>^..^<

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

The chickens are knitted from the Emotional Support Chicken pattern on Ravelry. I’ve lately joined a KAL group on Facebook, which is feeding me lots of ideas for more combinations. Today people started posting little hats and shawls that can go on the chickens…
I visited the Kaiser Infusion Center last week to get Reclast to treat my osteoporosis. This is the infusion center that I knit PICC line covers for, and when I told them I was one of their knitters a whole party broke out! There was cheering and general excitement all around, and when I mentioned emotional support chickens, they insisted on seeing the pictures. Yep. They want chickens.
One of my Facebook friends with systemic sclerosis has been accepted into a CAR T-cell therapy clinical trial. She will be receiving chemo and I’m going to send her a chemo hat and, (wait for it), a chicken!
What is CAR T-cell therapy, you ask? It is new technology that is now being adapted to address some autoimmune conditions, including systemic sclerosis. The video in the link above explains how it is used with cancer.

Hannah and the CoalBear: Baby Bunny, Robins, and Chickens!! Oh, My!!

Hi. I’m Mateo the CoalBear.

Do you see that I’m being a good helper?

This has been kind of a busy week in Mother of Cats Land. We’ve been outside most mornings checking on how things are going in the yard. The plants in the pots on the catio all look good. The bugs have been hopping around and they are SO MUCH FUN to chase. There were a couple of huge developments in the yard that I want to report to you:

The adult bunnies that used to live in our backyard are now gone. We were little worried about them, and wondered if there would be any baby bunnies this year when a single tiny bunny suddenly appeared in the garden by the deck. So cute. Hannah and I spend as much time as we can watching this little guy, and we are happy to report that he is growing like a weed and cavorting around the yard like a big boy. He isn’t even a little afraid of me and I get to get right up within inches of him,,, if it wasn’t for the chicken wire we would be having a great time.

Hannah: knock it off, CoalBear. We all know that you want to eat the bunny…

Shut up, Hannah. I’m telling the story today! The other thing that happened this week is all the leaves popped out on the trees. The Mother of Cats says it is called budburst, and it means that it really is spring now. I think that the robins know this too, because they have been singing like crazy all day and night. Literally, all night. They go crazy at 3am for some reason. I try to get the Mother of Cats up to let me out, but for some reason she won’t get out of bed. Lazy, lazy, Mother of Cats! Be like a robin! Get up and let me outside to see my baby bunny!!! This is what the robins sound like!

Hannah: CoalBear! Get on with talking about all the knitting and the chickens!!!

All right, Hannah. Why are you being so mean to me? You should go convince the Mother of Cats to give you some tuna and then maybe you can take a nice little nap. Outside where you won’t bother me!!

Now that I’ve put Hannah in her place, let me get back to telling you about the week. The Mother of Cats totally snapped, put her La Prairie sweater into time out on Sleeve Island, parked her dragon book back on the bookshelf, started a different book, and cast on a new Emotional Support Chicken. She has been completely out of control!!!! While she has been knitting the new chicken, she has dreaming about more chickens made in different colors; she keeps dragging yarn out of the stash and winding it up into little kits for MORE CHICKENS!!!! This is so out of control. What should I do? I’m just a little cat and it looks like we are having a huge outbreak of Chickenitis. Help! Who should I report this to? Hannah is no help at all. The only phone number she knows is 1-800-SND-TUNA.

Mateo: I have to admit that I have been helping with the knitting. Maybe that will help her get through this crisis… actually, I just like to chase yarn.

This is the chicken that she is working on now, but there is a dusty rose chicken on the way right after this one… and a sparkly blue chicken, and a rainbow striped chicken, and a chicken in fall colors…

It’s another handspun, handknit chicken to go on the couch downstairs.

The new chicken is kind of cute, right? Anyway, that was the week.

This is Mateo the CoalBear, signing off.

>^..^<

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

So, I spun out of control with the reading and knitting this week in response to sudden challenges. I had borrowed an e-book from the library that had to be returned in a couple of days. Oops. Emergency reading time! I have a couple of friends who are struggling with medical nightmares at the moment: obviously, they need chickens!! My cousin contacted me asking to buy a chicken to give a friend whose husband was just diagnosed with a serious illness. My phone blew up Thursday with the news that a member of my family was back in the hospital. The sweater was immediately parked (I was struggling with all the purling on the sleeves anyway…) and I launched the beginning of a flock of new chickens.

What was the book I was on fire to read before it was snatched off my Kindle device by the library?

This is a book that I kind of feel should be required reading for everyone, but on the other hand, it is so brutal and reality-altering I feel that it will be banned in as many school districts as the distraught (and completely misguided) ~~Karens on Steroids~~ Moms for Liberty can get to. If Charlotte’s Web, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games are too much for these people, this book will make their heads explode. I hope that they read it anyway.

So, this is the book: Chain-Gang All-Stars really made an impact on me. Imagine a system where convicted felons facing life in prison, or who received the death penalty can “volunteer” to join a system that is a reality show where the felons are on teams that compete against other teams and engage in gladiator to-the-death matches in arenas full of viewers. The teams, and individual players, are wildly popular; lots of merch is sold. Any player who survives three years will be freed, but it goes without saying that almost everyone will die. It probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the members of these teams are more likely to be minority citizens or people who lived in poverty: that is the current prison population.

Everything about this book is crushing in its believability. I am crushed by the possibility. I can see that this could happen in a world where incarcerated people are seen as less than full citizens and without rights. Think of the wildly popular Survivor reality shows. Think of American football, where evidence of concussive brain injury in players was covered up for years. Think of the laws that strip felons of some of their citizenship rights like voting. Think of the wildly misbehaving attendees at some of our political rallies. Think of the horrendous deaths of minority population members (sometimes in public with citizens begging the police to stop) at the hands of law enforcement. Think of for-profit prisons that work their inmates as almost-slaves. Think.

I highly recommend this book.

I’ve returned to A Day of Fallen Night again and I’m quickly finishing it. It has dragons, after all.

Hannah and the CoalBear: Snowy April Caturday

Hi. I’m Hannah.

I’ve been keeping my eye on the Mother of Cats all week long.

It is really cold and snowy outside. I mean, the really wet sticky snow that gets on your paws and squishes up between your toe beans and is just the kind that all cats everywhere hate. Mateo went out a couple of times today and that boy was back inside within 60 seconds flat. Anyway, the lavender and other cute flowers are all safely in the garage, Mateo is safely indoors, and the Mother of Cats and I have been really productive.

Right now, the weaving is a long, long scarf that has some fringe on it. The Mother of Cats washed it last night and it is done for now. Mateo likes to sleep on it, and since the fabric is a little scratchy the Mother of Cats is totally okay with that. She has been talking about cutting it up and sewing little stuffed cats from it, or maybe a sewn bunny, and frankly I don’t care as long as there is catnip involved. A pillow would be kind of nice…

She also has made a lot of progress on her La Prairie sweater. Now she is working on one of the sleeves and is pretty happy with how it is looking.

Looking good, right? This what happens when you get quality cat assistance!

The body of the sweater is a little longer than it should be, but she is happy about that. The sleeves are kind of a problem because she doesn’t want them to be soooo long, so after doing some funky math and checking out what other knitters did, she has shortened up the blocks of solid knitting and now we’ll see how it all works out. She does seem to still be a little stressed about the whole thing. She keeps muttering… I hope I have enough yarn… I hope this won’t be too long… thank heavens there aren’t so many bobbles on the sleeves… I don’t care. I’m a cat. As long as the tuna keeps coming, I’m happy to support any knitting that is going on.

So, that’s it. It has been a pretty good week. The weaving is done, the sweater is moving along, and the Mother of Cats is also halfway through her book about dragons. Someday soon the snow will stop falling, the Mother of Cats will put our lavender back outside, and we will visit the bunnies again in the mornings.

This is my favorite pose after watching Dune: Part Two with the Mother of Cats this week.

This is Hannah, signing off.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Notes from the Mother of Cats: the book Hannah mentioned is A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon.

I’m chomping at the bit to get all these lengthy projects finished up so I can knit more Emotional Support Chickens!! Also, I have books lined up from the library that I need to get read before next weekend…

These are a few of my favorite things…

Hannah is taking the week off, but she would like to remind everyone that they should have a good Caturday. Go outside and listen to the birds! Roll around and coat your fur with some nice dust to take the oil off. Look for a bunny. Demand tuna!! Run wild through the house, chase your brother, and sleep in a sunbeam.

I’m still struggling with fatigue, and even though I’ve been trying to eat iron-rich foods, my doctor has decided that I need supplementation. Ugh. I’ve discovered that iron supplements are pretty much evil. Seriously evil! Like, the awful goes on for at least three days after each supplement, but I am starting to feel better. I sleep better. I have more energy. My GI symptoms are starting to calm down. I’m more mentally alert and have an urge to write. Huh. Anemia. There is another post in here somewhere, but not today. Today is about my happy place, the crafting room.

For some reason that I don’t understand, Hannah has decided that I need to spend all my waking hours in the crafting room. She trills and carries on (like, she scratches the woodwork around the doors to make me come running…) until I come back to the room. She is okay if I’m up and moving about, but if I try to read in bed, she intervenes and makes me get up. Okay. Transferring my reading to the craft room… huh… there is lots of sunlight in this room. I have a little loveseat along with the indoor garden, my loom, and a television, so this is actually a good place to hang out while I’m iron-loading. Did I mention that there is a walk-in closet attached to this room with all things crafting inside? Maybe Hannah knows what she’s doing. Over the last week I’ve been gardening and moving things around, and I realized that I really have made a happy place for myself in this room.

Here’s my loveseat with my emotional support chicken, my knitting, and one of my favorite shawls.

Did you want the links for those knitted objects? Just in case you do, here they are. The sweater is La Prairie by Joji Locatelli. The shawl is another Joji creation called Julie’s Wrap, and here is the link for the Emotional Support Chicken.

Do you see all the popcorns on the edging of Julie’s Wrap? It took FOREVER to make all of those, and you would think that I’d learned my lesson, but noooo…. I went ahead and made those popcorn stitches on the La Prairie. Do I regret this choice each time I come to that row on the chart with the popcorns? Why yes, yes I do. And yet…

Look at how cute they are in this cardigan!!!!

If you commit to knitting this sweater, and it is a serious commitment, you might as well commit to the popcorn. I’m really pleased with how this is looking. I’m into the third color of yarn and can’t wait to get to the fourth one. This is going to be a fun light cardigan later on this year.

Back to the happy things. They have pretty much piled up on the table in the room that usually has my fabric cutting station on it. This is what has moved onto it over the last week or two.

That teddy bear is the one that my son gave me in the ICU after my lung biopsy. He’s wearing a hat that I’ve knit for Frayed Knots donation, and the little zebras are ones that my niece sent to me as happy surprises. The Amazon Echo on the table reads my audible books to me while I knit. Happy. This is happy stuff.

Did you notice the green cat tail in the last photo? Here is the knitted cat, in fun spring colors. He’s propping up my current dragon/octopus books and doing a great job at it, too. Those books make me happy! The watercolor painting in the background is one I bought with a girlfriend at an art sale one perfect fall day in Golden, Colorado. My friend died two years ago, but the memory of her and that perfect day lives on in the painting.

Some of the plants from the indoor garden have overflowed onto this table. (Actually, that’s what set off the rearrangement of happy stuff.) This white orchid is a rebloom on a plant from last year (yay!), and in front of it is one of the new little fig trees. To the right, in a little terrarium that MAKES ME HAPPY is an African violet that is blooming its heart out. Above them you can see a bit of the quilt that my cousin made and sold to me a few years ago. Hey, doesn’t this make you happy too?

If you are interested in knitting your own cat, the pattern is Grey Kitten, Calico Cat by Claire Garland. I think that some more things will be joining this assembly on the table. I have some little statues that were put away because… Hannah… that I can now take out and arrange with the flowers. I have some special skeins of yarn that might be fun to display. Maybe I should focus on weaving a little wall hanging on the loom.

Tomorrow it will snow again, but I will be safely indoors with Hannah in the craft room, embracing the popcorn stitch, and enjoying all the little happy things that have been collected in here that are emblematic of friends, family, favorite knits, and happy memories.

There is a little take-home lesson here somewhere. If you are struggling with extreme fatigue, shortness of breath, and everything hurts, just go with it. Make yourself a happy place. Make something beautiful. Hang out with your cat. Embrace the popcorn stitch. Read in the sunshine.

Don’t forget to take your iron supplement, though, no matter how nasty it is!

Hannah wants me to mention that the Chewy tuna fairy visited us yesterday.

p.s. MR, how could I have forgotten to post the picture of the whole quilt? Here it is, a ribbon winner by my wonderful cousin Ruth Ann. Ya’ll, MR is at Downunder with Boodz and sets me straight whenever I wander from the straight and narrow…

Welcome the Emotional Support Chicken!

She is done!!

This was a fast, fun project. The entire chicken was knitted in one piece except for the red parts and the underneath section. All garter stitch made it easy on my hands/wrists to knit, and the change in colors helped me keep moving along. Here’s the pattern for the emotional support chicken on Ravelry: I just noticed that there is a tutorial available with the pattern.

The red comb is knitted separately and was quick and easy to attach. The beak was finished in a grand total of about 4 stitches, and then it was pretty straight forward to seam the underneath to the two sides of the body as I closed the chicken. It was amazing how quickly the bird came to life.

The base is nice and wide, letting the chicken sit in place without tipping over.

I really am happy with the final product. This chicken is made solely from homespun yarn, and it makes me even more happy to see this yarn being used well. Here’s the problem with my homespun yarn; it is a little rough on my skin and as a scleroderma patient I’m giving my skin whatever it wants. So… I’m not wearing my homespun anymore, and it is even a little hard to knit with it. The chicken goes quickly, however, and I can have a beautiful, finished chicken to admire and then take a few days to let my fingers recover from the knitting. I’ve already gone stash diving to pull together ideas for another chicken or two or… don’t you think that it would be nice to donate a few emotional support chickens to patients at the infusion center or maybe to Ronald McDonald House? That’s what I’m thinking now. It depends on how well my fingers tolerate the knitting. It makes me so happy to get the homespun out and put to use; each skein and color is a memory, and it makes me feel so good to think of putting them to a good use.

Last night Hannah attacked the chicken and dragged it around, bunny kicking it from time to time. Poor chicken, it was defiantly Hannah pecked.

It is therefore named HanPeck.

Welcome, HanPeck. Hang on, the rest of the flock is on the way.

Hannah and the CoalBear: Chicken Caturday

Hi. I’m Hannah.

Do you see this knitting that is draped over my back? It is the chicken!!!!

So, yesterday the Mother of Cats started knitting away on the Emotional Support Chicken. I don’t know why she needs it, because she has me, right? Anyway, she got going on the knitting and Mateo and I were forced to entertain ourselves FOR HOURS while the Mother of Cats knitted the feathers for the tail of the chicken. Today she attached the two tail pieces together with a crochet hook and then started knitting the back of the chicken. This is what it all looked like.

Look at how big this chicken is going to be! I can wear it for a blanket on really cold days. Maybe it can be made into a little snowsuit for me so I can go outside with Mateo on cold days. I bet that there will be enough extra yarn to make me little snow booties to wear.

Mateo the CoalBear: Hannah should grow fur like me!! I never get cold.

The rest of the stuff that happened this week was playing with the loom. For some reason, the Mother of Cats wouldn’t let me near the yarns while she fixed up the loom for weaving; she was sneaky about when she did her work. The Mother of Cats did most of her stuff with the loom during the afternoons while I was taking a nap. When I got up from my nap all the loose ends of yarn were stuffed into bags attached to the loom so the CoalBear couldn’t get touch them. Here’s what happened while I was snoozing…

The part of the loom with the little slots comes out of the loom, so she sat on the loveseat while she threaded all the little yarns through the reed using a special little hook called a sley hook. Later Mateo dragged it off to play with it downstairs, but she was calm about it because she has two of these hooks. I’m pretty sure that she will find the hook that Mateo took eventually. Then she had to thread all the yarns through the little metal holders in the loom (the heddles) and finally she got everything wound up and started weaving. She made a few different starts with the weaving while she was working out the tension on the threads, but now she thinks that she is good to go. It is going to look kind of cool when she makes better progress because the yarn will keep changing colors while she works back and forth. Next up it starts to turn to grey.

So that’s it. The whole week. Tomorow we’re going to get more of the chicken done. I can’t wait!!

This is Mateo the CoalBear, signing off for Hannah who is asleep again.

Note from the Mother of Cats: March is the month that Hannah was born in 2020. This is what she looked like the first time I saw her in the animal shelter.

She was the last kitten in the room as she had been returned to the shelter after her first adoption didn’t work out. She evidently cried all night, so they returned her. How very lucky for me that they did.

I Need an Emotional Support Chicken!! (and a bunch of other stuff…)

I’ve been doing really well this year with knitting out the stash. So far, I’ve finished 19 hats and 4 PICC line covers and am well on pace to meet the goal of 50 donated hats this year. So… I should be able to take a break and get some stuff finished up and maybe I can start a new project or two. That sounds completely reasonable, right? I cleaned out my yarn stash a couple of weeks ago and came across a bin of homespun yarns and roving that I’ve been saving for ages… The minute I saw it, I knew that it had to be an emotional support chicken.

This is an emotional support chicken, in case you haven’t been keeping up with the latest patterns trending on Ravelry.

Doesn’t that chicken look great? Don’t you think a rustic homespun yarn will be just perfect for it? The chicken will need some great solid colored yarn for the stripes, and the minute I opened the storage bin and looked inside I knew that I had my chicken.

Look at that yarn!! It is marled looking because it was spun from some roving that I got on a field trip to a yarn mill. At the end of the month the mill gathered up all the bits and pieces of fiber that they had leftover and made a run combining them into this roving that I just loved and bought a pound of. The roving had mystery fibers (I’m pretty sure there is alpaca in there…) in cream, tan, brown and black with a little pink here and there. It was wonderful to spin, and I have 4 skeins of the yarn and more roving right now. Chicken yarn!!

This pink will look great on the chicken! I bet you never suspected that it is dog yarn, as in husky dogs.

I’m pretty sure that I am going to use this pink too. Do you see how fluffy the yarn is? That’s because it is spun from husky down blended with wool. (Yes, a coworker brought in bags of husky down from her dogs for me to spin. I kept some for myself.) I’m excited to find a project to use these yarns that I’ve been keeping for quite a while, and what a great way to keep using up the stash. I’m thinking that I have other homespun yarns that will make great chickens too.

Once I bought and downloaded the chicken pattern it was like the floodgates had opened. I have seen several sweaters that I would love to knit and I’m chomping at the bit to buy yarn for them. (NO, NO!! I tell myself. Must use stash!)

I took a look at this book on Amazon as it was one included in my unlimited subscription. Hey, there are lots of great patterns and they can all be adapted to fingerless gloves and wrist warmers. SOOOO CUTE!!! I found the size needle that I needed to do these, and I’m pretty darn sure that I have the yarn in the stash to make lots of cute mitts to wear and gift. The hard copy of the book is slowly (very slowly) making its way to me. At the rate it is moving the chicken may be done before it gets here.

Then I saw the latest edition of The Knitter magazine (also in my Amazon unlimited subscription) and there are two sweaters that I want. Maybe it is the color. You have to admit, that is a fabulous raspberry color in those sweaters. I’ve already tracked down the colors online and I really, really want to buy, but so far I’ve managed to not pull the trigger on the online sales. Stash. Must knit the stash… I need to find a hard copy of this magazine.

Then this appeared on Ravelry. When will it ever end…

Look at that sweater. That sweater is beyond cute (but not as cute as the chicken, you must admit!!) I probably do have the yarn to make this sweater in the stash. I must stash dive right away!!!! I need a Renaissance sweater.

And so it goes. My knitting mojo is back big time, and I am on fire to create beautiful things from the yarn I have. I also pulled out the sweater that has been hibernating for the last few months and I’m ready to get going on it again too.

Sorry hats. You are now paused for a few weeks while I fall down the chicken homespun rabbit hole, and if a couple of sweaters happen while I’m down there, that’s cool too.