PICC Line Covers – Yarn, Books & Roses

Hannah and the CoalBear: Purple Glam Caturday

Hi. We’re Hannah and Mateo (AKA the CoalBear).

We’ve been hanging out with the Mother of Cats today.

The Mother of Cats has been friskier lately. She’s been working with her indoor garden, and went shopping to buy a whole bunch of new flowers to put outside. She did a lot of cooking. She expanded the indoor garden and repotted a bunch of plants.

The indoor garden now has three shelves. The bottom shelf has the miniature rose, some lavender plants, and the seedlings. The middle shelf is mostly African violets and the baby fig trees. The top shelf is mostly orchids, but there are a couple of African violets up there too. We really like the new shelf and extra space, and Mateo especially is walking around among the plants keeping tabs on how they are doing. The Milkweed is growing great! The baby lavender seedlings are growing more leaves. The planted rose seeds: NOTHING!! The Mother of Cats also fixed up the catio some and has been reading outside with her morning coffee with us every morning. Things have been kind of great lately. She took some great photos of us.

Don’t we look great? The Mother of Cats says these are our glam shots.

The Mother of Cats then spoiled everything by going off and leaving us overnight while she visited her son. What is up with that?

While she was gone, she read this book about dragons and made two PICC line covers with yarns that have dragon colors: the green is called Green Dragon and the purple is called Purple Dragon. How come she went playing with dragons and left us alone? Did the dragons get OUR TUNA?

We absolutely were not surprised to see that she knitted with a purple yarn while she was away. Everything has been kind of purple lately.

Her new sweater (which is kind of purple) is getting longer. It is so big it covers her legs and Hannah while she’s knitting on it. Hannah really like the sweater and want one of her own.

The Mother of Cats say that the name of the sweater is La Prairie. What a crazy name, right, but the Mother of Cats likes it because we live right at the edge of the prairie and that is why there are so many wild things in our yard.

Her weaving is getting bigger and now the weft has changed to a purple color. The CoalBear likes to whap at the purple yarn while the Mother of Cats is moving the shuttle back and forth.

So, there seems to be a lot of purple lately. Enough with the purple and the Mother of Cats. It’s time to talk about us, right. After all, it is Caturday!!! Look at how big our bunny is getting in the back yard. You can barely see it in the first shot of us watching it (it hangs out at the bottom of the tree) so the Mother of Cats took a closeup of the bunny. Look! It looks just like the tree! What a clever bunny! Besides the bunnies, there are lots of birds and GRASSHOPPERS outside and it is kind of exciting on the catio now. The Mother of Cats even moved out some plants for us.

So, that’s about all. Guess it is time for us to go pester the Mother of Cats to get up and play with us. She’s been more active lately, but we still like to keep her busy taking care of us. Hannah is pretty sure that we need TUNA because we were left alone one night last week.

But first we are going to grab another nap… Did you notice that our blanket is purple?

This is Hannah and Mateo, signing off.

Happy Caturday, everyone!!

Hasta la ByeBye, 2022: These were the Knits

I can’t believe that this has happened; I had just gotten used to writing 2022 and it is already over. I’ve been reflecting on the year and decided to talk about the yarn, the books, and the roses in separate posts. This one, of course, is about the knitting that went on last year.

First, the goals. I wanted to learn how to double knit: did it. I wanted to knit something using the Cocoknits method: did that too. I wanted to get at least 100 skeins of yarn out of the stash: absolutely did that too. Seriously, it was a pretty good year.

I knitted 6 sweaters. That’s a lot for me.

The top-down sweaters of 2022: these are Goldenfern, Emma, Salty Air Tee, Lace & Fade Boxy, Kevat, and Cushman. There was a lot of grey knitting going on last year so I’ve started out knitting a Simple Thing scarf thingy to wear with the neutral sweaters to give some color. I plan to make some wristers too, and I want to say that I am getting absolutely excellent knitting support from the CoalBear while I’m doing this.

Won’t those colors look nice on the grey sweaters?

Let’s see, what else did I knit… glances at Xcel spreadsheet… this year? I knit a bee. There was a pair of baby booties. I knit a lot of hats (33), even more PICC line covers (52) and 6 pairs of socks. I knit that cat paw sample of double knitting. I also knit one shawl that was a MKAL that sent Hannah on an adventure around the world chasing a worm that had stolen a priceless golden bag of cat treats from a museum in Cairo. Altogether, it was quite the year!

That bee is now hanging in my indoor orchid garden. The hats and PICC line covers all went to the Kaiser infusion centers in the Denver Metro area though an organization called Frayed Knots, and there is Hannah home from her adventures on Sharon Air.

After watching lots of YouTube videos and downloading a chart I found online I created the double-knit sample of… of course it is a cat paw!! I also got those baby booties done for the next-door neighbor who had a new arrival last April right before my surgery in May.

So that’s it. Whew. You didn’t want to see the socks, did you? I mean, they are all the same picture of the same pattern on the same feet knitting in different colors of blue and grey. I was pretty boring this year, so I feel that I should spare you those photos.

Here’s a picture of Hannah instead, because she is the cutest girl ever and that’s that!

I did mention that I got a lot of yarn out of the stash, right? Almost 120 skeins of yarn were culled from the stash and used up in knitted projects or donated to other knitters through Frayed Knots. Yay!

Time to buy more yarn!

Happy New Year, everyone.

Hannah and the CoalBear: The Mother of Cats may be Broken…

Hi. I’m Hannah.

Don’t I look like I’m a take-charge kind of girl?

I’ve been really busy supervising the Mother of Cats for the last couple of weeks as she has been knitting a multitude of projects with not even a little bit of discipline. I mean, she is all over the place and I never know what she is going to pull out of her knitting bag next. Let me show you what I’m talking about…

First, she started knitting all of these little hexagon units that will get turned into a blanket someday. Like, maybe when I’m too old to make the jump to the top of the bookshelf anymore she will get this done. She stopped after knitting the four units in the picture and then started knitting all of these…

PICC line covers!

Yep. PICC line cover after PICC line cover started to happen as she kept pulling out new colors of yarn from the stash. I thought that she was settled down and would stay with them for some time, but no, you would be wrong if you thought that! Did she go back to the hexagon units for the blanket? Nope.

She found some nice wildly dyed zebra yarn in the stash and started knitting some socks and then switched over to wristers because she was cold that afternoon. Do you see what I am dealing with here? NO DISCIPLICE AT ALL!!!

I gave up and took a nap after that. When I woke up that evening, I discovered that she had gone back into the stash to find some charcoal grey yarn that she wanted to make into a sweater. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS MOTHER OF CATS!! I am concerned that this model might be broken, but I have put so much work into training her just right I hate to quit and start over with another one…

She evidently had seen the weather report and dug out this book to use in making the new sweater. The yarn and needles are really big, so she is making fast progress, but seriously, what about the blanket that we started a few weeks ago? I could use a new blanket more than she needs a new sweater!

She finished up the wristers last night and seems to be devoted to finishing the sweater. Sigh. What about the blanket? I kind of give up, but she is pretty good at keeping Mateo and me supplied with kitty cookies, so I guess I’d better keep her.

But I am a little concerned that she might need a little tune up to help her with her focus issues. I do kind of want that blanket, you know. Who knows what she will decide to knit the next time she visits the stash?

This is Hannah, signing off.

Happy Caturday, Everyone!

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

The hexagons are for the Nectar Blanket by Ysolda Teague.
I’m learning the Coco Knits method of knitting by following along with the book and knitting an Emma sweater, version B with bulky yarn and long sleeves. I have the colored stitch markers to go with the worksheet and everything! I was a little intimidated, but now that I’m below the yoke I am so impressed with what is appearing in the knitted object. I’m going to get this one done fast!
That sock yarn is from a trunk show at my local yarn store and I just had to knit it right now!!! I’m sure you understand.
I think that I’m going to get that blanket done next, but there are so many PICC line covers to get done before the end of the year…

Month’s End Report: May 2022

This month passed in a hurry. I spent most of a week in the hospital, and then the rest of the month recovering from the surgery. I haven’t been exactly frisky for the whole month, but I have been making some progress on several projects.

Hannah: The Mother of Cats has been spending lots of quality time with us!

Doesn’t Hannah look pleased with her box? The house is pretty much full of boxes at the moment as I have been making use of all the shopping services that cropped up during the height of the pandemic. I’m getting everything that I need with little effort and Hannah and Mateo are having the best time ever. From their prospective it has been a really great month!

Knitting

I worked on a sweater and community knitting this month. I really pushed and got the body of my Goldenfern sweater done early in the month and then immediately lost it on sleeve island. Poor sweater. It languished for the rest of the month in its knitting tub while I knitted chemo hat after chemo hat with a few PICC line covers thrown in for variety.

I have lots of brightly colored yarn so that’s what’s getting knitted right now!

I know that this is the end of month report for May, but I want to acknowledge that now that we are in a new month, I have pulled myself together and taken that sweater off of sleeve island. I made some good progress over the last couple of days, and I finally got to the colorwork section of the sleeve today.

I’m knitting the ferns onto the bottom of the first sleeve now.

I also made a couple of more passes through the yarn stash culling out yarn that I will never use and throwing out scraps. (So hard to do; I deserve a gold star!!) Altogether, I knit 6 chemo hats this month (Barley Light by Tin Can Knits), 5 PICC line covers, and used up or removed 38 skeins of yarn from the stash. I think that I deserve more than one gold star for the destash efforts this month… I am kind of thinking that I will get more than 100 skeins out of the stash, and to be truthful, things are looking a lot more tidy in the stash room.

Garden

Everything is growing like crazy now. The roses all made it through the late season snowstorm and there are buds everywhere but very few blooms. The snapdragons, however, are blooming their little flower hearts out.

All of these snapdragons are volunteers growing from last year’s plants. Look at all of those colors; they are the descendants of pink snapdragons that were originally planted a couple of years ago. Also, those flowers are NOT in a flowerbed where they belong!

This plant is my favorite in the bunch. It is growing with reckless abandon in the rocks along the driveway.

With absolutely no effort on my part these snapdragons have spread through the front gardens (and rocked landscaping…) and have brought lots of early color in reds, oranges, pinks and yellows. There is a BioGeek story here, but I will save it for another day. 🙂

Books

I managed to read 5 books in May. Not great, considering that I was a slug for most of the month, but I’m still on track to make my Goodreads challenge goal of 50 books this year.

I’m reading the most amazing book right now.

I read A Visit from the Goon Squad, so I had some idea of what I was getting into with this book. The book is organized like a series of short stories about people who are connected to each other. There are a lot of names flying past, and there are also embedded themes within the stories, so there is a lot to keep track of. I am creating a flow chart showing the linkages and themes as I read which is helping me immensely. How I long for a book group!

So, here’s the simple backbone of the book: what if there was an electronic, open forum vehicle that let you store all of your memories? Think of this like Facebook on steroids where it is open to the world and people can access and search other people and memories. What would such a thing do to us; what would we lose, and what would we gain?

The people and themes that I am meeting as I read the book are engaging and I’m really enjoying myself. Also, I am going to need some really big chart paper to map out all of the interconnections the way things are going as I read.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

Month’s End Report: March, 2022

All of a sudden, the season has changed on me. There are birds in my yard, the light is brighter, my backyard bunny is once again entertaining the cats, and shoots of green are starting to peek at me from under the winter bedding of leaves that I put in the gardens last fall. The cats are much more active as they rocket from window to window through the house tracking squirrels traveling from my front tree, over the roof, and then along the back fences (this is known as Squirrel Route One in my house). The fatigue-inducing storms of winter are transitioning to spring rains, and the first flowers are right around the corner. Bye, winter. Glad to see you gone.

When the cats take a break from squirrel tracking and bunny watching they hang out on my bedroom bookshelf keeping their eyes on me. Since I spent most of the month in bed, they have been up there quite a lot.

Knitting

I really have gotten a lot of knitting done this month. Since I’m tracking my knitting for the year (well, actually, the number of skeins that I can get out of the stash), I thought that I would also give a quarterly update on my progress.

I’m continuing to knit hats and PICC line covers for the Kaiser infusion centers.

So far I’ve knitted 20 hats and 19 PICC line covers this year. Early in the month I delivered all the hats and covers to one of the infusion centers on my way to an appointment with the rheumatologist. The infusion center had a huge impact on me; it was located in a spacious room with large overhead windows; sunbeams streamed down from the windows lighting up the room. There were almost 20 stations in there, along each wall under the windows, each one with a patient receiving treatment. I was stunned. So many people! I must knit faster.

I finished a simple sweater made with merino/cashmere yarn that is like a comfy sweatshirt to wear. Also, it goes with all my shawls, cowls, and mitts.

The sweater is Cushman by Isabel Kraemer. This is the second one that I have made so I was really confident with the fit and raced right through it.

I cannot stress how helpful the cats are in getting these pictures.

I have also been knitting along on a Goldenfern sweater (Jennifer Steingass). In another couple of inches I will start on the colorwork; the three golden colored yarns are for that. I plan to shade from the lightest to the darkest as I work my way down the chart.

Altogether I have knitted my way through 894 grams of yarn this month making the grand total of destashed yarn 3,154 grams (or the equivalent of 31 skeins) for the year. Okay, I did go through bins and pulled out several hundred grams of yarn that needed be thrown out… like many knitters I have saved the leftovers from almost everything I’ve knitted; at this point I need to let all of those scraps go! I had hoped to get 50 skeins out of the stash: now I’m thinking that I might manage 100 skeins. Knitting all those hats is paying off!

Garden

The outdoor garden is still dead, and the indoor garden is kind of pathetic. I’ve been buying some ferns and a spider plant to get more greenery into the house. The cats are fans of the new plants!

Books

I’ve been reading like a champ so far this year. Mostly science fiction since I am not in the mood for thrillers, mysteries, or anything that is going to require the serious use of brain cells. I’ve been spending long blocks of time in bed with short outings to accomplish tasks in the house in the house all year. I’ve been relying on audiobooks heavily as I can listen to them when I’m too tired to hold a book (the fatigue is real, people!), and listened to more books while I was working on the quilt top that I got done this quarter too.

I was so happy to discover this little gem!

I usually don’t listen to the forward of a book, but this time I did, and I was glad that I took the time to let the author explain his book to me. John Scalzi struggled with writing a book in 2020 that he had contracted with a publisher for. Basically, he was kind of crushed by the whole Covid situation and the book wasn’t happening. He finally had to let his publisher know that the book was a no-go, only to think of another book idea a day later. A fun book. An upbeat and slightly ridiculous book with wisecracking characters and lots of fun. A book that celebrates scientific knowledge, jobs that you love, and sticks it to people who are kind of unethical in the pursuit of money/power. A book with Kaijus: those enormous monsters of Japanese fame… think Godzilla. The exact book that I needed!!

I even bought myself a Kaiju cat tee-shirt to go with my ridiculous, feel-good book.

So, how many books have I read this year so far? 19 books! The goal for the year is 50 books, so I am well on my way to meeting that goal.

That’s it for the month.

Hannah: Have a great April, everyone!! If you should come across a Kaiju, don’t try to play with it!!

The Saturday Update: Weeks 45 and 46, 2021

It is finally getting cold, but there still haven’t been any official snowfall in our area. As of today we have set the record for the longest recorded gap in snowfall in modern recorded weather history for the state of Colorado. I have moved all the potted plants outside again and all indications are they will still be healthy and blooming on Thanksgiving. Okay, there was a little issue with the potted geraniums that I brought into the house a couple of weeks ago… I found a caterpillar on a geranium cutting in the indoor garden!

That dang caterpillar appeared on a shoot I was rooting… it had already finished off the African violets in the garden.

The cutting had rooted successfully, but with that caterpillar it was immediately tossed outside with the remains of the violets and all of the other geraniums that had come indoors for the winter. Poor geraniums. In a few days they should succumb to an overnight freeze. Life is cruel, little guys.

Yarn

I am still knitting like crazy for Frayed Knots, the community knitting group comprised mostly of Kaiser employees in my area. Last week one of the infusion centers that we knit for requested that we supply them with some PICC line covers, so I did a little search on Ravelry, found a pattern, and started knitting some of the covers along with the hats.

This week I produced 6 hats and 3 of the PICC line covers.

I have settled on a few hat patterns that are easy and should be comfortable for chemo patients. They are Barley Light, Barley, and the Sockhead patterns. The pattern for the PICC line cover, designed for one in the upper arm, is here. I am so happy to be putting the leftover and unused yarn in my stash to a good use.

Garden

Well, the garden sure took a hit this week. The African violets are toast and you already know about the geraniums. I am happy to report that the orchids, however, evidently weren’t all that tasty for the caterpillar as they seem to be unharmed.

These gorgeous bloomers are the plants that I bought this fall. Inside the garden, under the grow lights, the plants that bloomed last year are flourishing with lots of new growth, an explosion of air roots, and new stems for blooms are emerging!

The green shoot pointing upwards is a new stem for blooms. Yay!! The silvery new growths on the leaves below are a couple of new air roots. Yay! Happy plant.

A couple of other orchids are also putting out stems; one plant has three new stems on it. What is that liquid on the orchid, you ask? I sprayed Neem oil on all the plants left in the garden after the caterpillar was escorted out the door…

Books

I’m back to reading science fiction. The main character in the book I’m reading right now is a sentient space ship called Trouble Dog and of course the captain of this ship is a woman facing down the monsters in the dark of space. I just finished the first book in the series called Embers of War and I’m hooked. Luckily I get the audiobook for no additional cost so I can listen to the books at times while I’m knitting away on the hats and PICC line covers. I have to laugh a little as I knit and listen to Trouble Dog’s tale as I manage my yarn around my own little Trouble Cat…

That’s it. Have a great week everyone!

Read a little, knit a little, and garden like your heart can’t live without it.