This is just a fast check in to let you know what has been going on the last couple of weeks. First of all, I want to mention that the Mother of Cats has been going away in the car WAY TOO MUCH lately. I mean, she should always be here to play with me and WHAT IF I HAVE A TUNA EMERGENCY??? Seriously, she needs to take her responsibilities and duties a little more seriously.
Mateo would like me to mention that it has been snowing almost every single weekend this year. He no longer things that it is amusing. The Mother of Cats should do something about this, too.
The Mother of Cats has also been reading in bed (but I try to put a stop to that whenever I can) and knitting her little hats. This weekend she drove to her knitting group to turn in the hats that she has knitted this year to date: there are 16 of them!
The Mother of Cats also got six PICC line covers knitted; she donated them along with the hats on Saturday. She filled a big bin with shawls and socks and cowls that she doesn’t wear anymore and took that with her too; they were all donated to a refugee assistance organization. She’s happy to put the knitted stuff to good use, and I’m so happy to have an empty shelf in the closet to hide from Mateo on. The Mother of Cats even put a cat bed on the shelf for me to use. As long as Mateo doesn’t find my secret hiding spot, I’m going to have long naps without any annoying interference from that CoalBear!
We got cute little African violets for Valentine’s day along with a little pink zebra. Mateo thinks that the zebra is for him and he bunny kicks it, but I know that the zebra is really mine!!
Well, I think that’s all I have to share for now. I do want to mention that it is sunny most mornings of the week and I’m really enjoying sunshine again. It makes me shed! I just love getting combed with the grooming brush. Mateo, not so much!
I look a little like the cat quilt on the wall behind me…
This is Hannah, signing off.
>^..^<
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The pattern for the hats is Barley DK by Tin Can Knits.
I knit for Frayed Knots, a Denver-area community knitting group. These wonderful ladies also provide services to the homeless/refugee communities in our area along with the many items produced for local hospitals and cancer centers.
I’m making the rounds to doctors again and getting testing done. I’m still really struggling with fatigue, pain, and shortness of breath; my lips are bluer than ever. Initial testing results show that I’ve developed anemia. It is an unusual type; I have enough red blood cells, but they are too small and don’t have enough hemoglobin. Next up… more testing!
It has been much warmer here this week and the Mother of Cats has been up and about doing lots of… stuff. She has been moving furniture, fussing with the plants, working in the kitchen, and she even… <shudder>… vacuumed this week! I just don’t understand why she is doing stuff like this when she really should be spending more time playing with me and the CoalBear instead of scaring me with the evil vacuum. You’d think that Mateo would be calm after the vacuum chasing, but no, that dang Coalbear has been in all kinds of mischief all week. He pulled quilts and wreaths off the walls. He left toys everywhere. He ate my TUNA!!!
Mateo: What? Are you talking about me? I’m a feline angel!
Seriously, CoalBear, you are a pouncing disaster. You have been driving everyone crazy with your chirpy toys. The Mother of Cats has to put you outside while she cooks in the kitchen so you won’t trip her. I have photo evidence…
Mateo: … and another wreath bites the dust… and another wreath down, another wreath down, another one bites the dust… What? The Mother of Cats listens to Queen.
See. Trouble. I think that he was acting up so much because the Mother of Cats was doing all of this Meyer lemon cooking and he gets excited when she keeps running around the house, moving things and bringing stuff in from the garage. Look at what she made this week.
The Mother of Cats made the yummy lemon bars early in the week, and then she made the marmalade over two days. The marmalade was a LOT OF WORK and she had to actually drag a chair into the kitchen to sit on while she was taking care of it on the stove. It looks really nice, but to be frank, lemons aren’t my thing. I like it better when the Mother of Cats sits down to knit.
The Mother of Cats is now knitting on the 10th hat this month. Boring. All the hats look the same, so she decided to not show them off this week. She is knitting the hats with two strands of fingering yarn held together, and she is liking how cool the marled knitted fabric looks. I wish she would knit me a catnip mouse from the yarns instead of hats, but there you are. Luckily, I get to sleep curled up by her when she knits, so it is a good time.
The Mother of Cats also finished this book this week.
The book, The Priory of the Orange Tree, was a really long one. I got to spend lots and lots of time sleeping on top of the Mother of Cats’ legs while she was reading it this week. She says that the book was really good: lots of political and court intrigue, adventures traveling to strange places, an ancient prophecy of the return of a horrible monster that will bring an age of grief, dragons, magic, pirates, a sword and jewels made from starlight stuff, and NO CATS. What is up with that, right? The dragons were pretty cool in my opinion, however. Almost as cool as cats.
Well, that’s all for now. It’s time for me to go help the Mother of Cats finish up her dinner.
I can see bunnies and squirrels from here…
This is Hannah, signing off.
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
The hats are all knit from the Barley DK hat pattern by Tin Can Knits.
My yarn is wound into a cake for knitting. I’m knitting two stranded from the same cake by pulling yarn from the outside and inside at the same time, which also reduces pooling. So far it is working pretty well, and there is enough yarn to make one hat and one PICC line cover in each skein.
The lemon bar recipe is The Best Lemon Bars from Allrecipes. I adjusted the recipe to 2/3 cup of lemon juice and added one tablespoon of flour to compensate.
Allright, I have a little bit of smutch on my forehead… I bet you wondered how that got there. I finally got to go outside again this week (!!) and of course I did some serious rolling around! I mean, it had been days and days since the Mother of Cats let me have some fun outside with the bunnies.
Look at this. It is finally above freezing again, and I have some dry spots for my feet. You know that there was rolling around under the patio seat.
It is still too cold to spend a lot of time outside, so the Mother of Cats spent most of the week knitting and reading again. There was some excitement late in the week when a package arrived that had these Meyer lemons and a little stuffed zebra.
Meyer lemons are sweeter than your usual lemon. The Mother of Cats says that they aren’t even real lemons, but whatever. I don’t like the way they smell because I’M A CAT!!
Who would send such a box? Well… the Mother of Cats has a knitworthy niece who lives in a place that almost never snows with this Meyer lemon tree, and it got a little out of control this year. The Mother of Cats has been secretly longing for some of these lemons, but she didn’t want to ask, and out of the blue they arrived this week. With a zebra! She was so happy. There was even crunchy brown paper in the box for us to play with.
Hannah: Lemons? Whatever. If the niece really cared about us, she would have sent some TUNA!!! I also want to mention that the zebra didn’t even smell a little like catnip and obviously wasn’t a toy for ME!!
Just ignore Hannah. She kind of has “center of the universe” syndrome and thinks that everything is about her. I’m almost 3 years old now and I’m grown up enough to understand that chasing bunnies is much more important than silly ol’ tuna. Let’s get back to the knitting and the reading.
It is a little ironic that those lemon things arrived at the same time that the Mother of Cats was reading a book with Orange Tree in the title, don’t you think? The three hats that were finished this week look nice with the lemons (that are really something else that has to do with mandarin oranges and citrons…), and the newest hat that she just started knitting really coordinates will with the book.
Well, that’s all for now. The Mother of Cats has been hunting around on the internet for recipes to make Meyer lemon marmalade and lemon bars, and I think that I should go make a commotion so she will let me outside again. I may even have to meow to get her attention.
Hannah: Outside?! Time to get out of the box!!
This is Mateo, signing off.
Note from the Mother of Cats: I think that I need to order some jam jars, too. I found this recipe for Meyer lemon marmalade, and then there is this one for lemon bars…
My exceptionally knitworthy niece showing off some mitts I made her years ago. Somewhere, out of view, is the Meyer lemon tree.
You can read the story of those colorful mitts that were made for my niece in this post here. If you are wondering why my niece is so exceptionally knitworthy (the exact language I used was… “never, ever, was there a more knitworthy person than my niece”…) you can read about it in this even earlier post that explains the launch of the color explosion mitts in the picture and why my niece deserves the knitworthy designation for life.
It has been a pretty darn boring week for me. It has been snowing and cold, and the Mother of Cats has NOT been letting me out as much as I would like. I can see the bunnies and those horrid squirrels all running around outside, but do I get to spend time on the deck, belly flat against the wood, slowly creeping up towards the wire, digging in my back claws, dreaming of the rush towards that big fat bunny in the garden… NO. I hardly got any time out at all. The Mother of Cats was full of so many excuses that involved snow, wind, cold… whatever. If the bunny can manage, I’m sure that I’d be fine. To be fair, I guess I should admit that things have been a little extreme lately weather-wise. Check out today’s weather and what the City and County of Denver had to say about it.
The Mother of Cats has been home and staying busy reading and knitting this week. She cleaned up the yarn stash early in the week and I have to admit, there is a lot of yarn. This is what the stash looked like when she was done.
Most of those plastic bins have yarn in them! There are also drawers with all the little fun things that she uses while sewing and knitting (like knitting needles, stitch marker sets, and her pin cushions), but the vast bulk is… yarn.
The Mother of Cats has been making decisions for the new year (she calls them resolutions, but that’s a crazy word. The better phrase would be The Wishful Thinking List, because that’s what it really is), but she seems almost perked up now that she has organized herself for the coming year. She wants to read 50 books, knit 50 hats, plant milkweed in her garden, and maybe convince the jade plant to bloom. That’s it. She has decided that she will only knit and work with yarn from the stash this year.
I mean, look at these sock sets that she found in the stash. She should knit these up before she buys any new yarn, right?!
The Mother of Cats still has some projects that she needs to get finished up with, so she is also working on them for a couple of days each week between the hat knitting. This week she focused on some socks that were started last year, and this evening she got them finished.
These are knitted from the Pressed Flowers Socks pattern. She still has a sweater to get done and Hannah wants her blanket!!
She has also been cranking out the hats and PICC line covers since the start of the year. This is what she has managed so far:
Those hats are DK weight Barleys by Tin Can Knits. She has been knitting them with doubled fingering weight yarn and they are turning out nice.
So, that is all that has been going on around here. (yawn) Maybe I can get Hannah to get up and chase me for a while. Maybe the laser light will come on pretty soon. Maybe I can find one of my chirpy toys. I think that they are all under the bed… what?… don’t you keep your important stuff under the bed?
Or maybe I’ll just take a nap…
This is Mateo, the CoalBear, signing off.
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
There are some other projects lurking in the wings, but I don’t want to commit to them. I bought another quilt pattern, and I pulled out my little tabletop loom too. Those are just side projects and I really plan to commit to producing hats for the community group that I knit for. Last year there were more than 900 hats donated, and somehow, we have acquired even more requests in the last few months.
All of a sudden, everything that I’m reading and watching has Asian (and publishing or Chinese triads) elements. It was a compete accident: I had put holds on the books in my library months ago, and they arrived in my inbox withing a couple of days of each other. While I was reading Yellowface, The Brothers Sun appeared on Netflix. Synchronicity, right?
These are two really great books, and I really, really enjoyed The Brothers Sun. Thanks to synchronicity, I kind of understood common references (snakeheads, the one-child policy of China, auctions in publishing…) as they popped up in each book or episode of The Brothers Sun. Whew. There were common themes too, such as the relationships between children and their mothers, the struggle to find your own way, racism, the debt we owe to each other and our family, plagiarism, bullying, deaths, you name it, these media sources had it.
Now I’m reading The Maid. Would you believe that there is some bullying and a death already? Of course there is!
I also have to share this picture that was posted on Facebook today of an old newspaper picture of my high school gymnastics team. How fun to see my younger self now that I’m old and walking with a cane. 🙂
Do I look annoyed? Yes, I am! That dang Mateo is whapping my tail!
Excuse me while I take a moment to put that young man into his proper place. The CoalBear has been a handful all week long. He chased the bees on the catio and there were some close calls. He catches grasshoppers and brings them into the house to play with. The Mother of Cats especially didn’t like that! He runs wild with his toys at 3am. He has been attacking the Mother of Cats’ knitting.
There has been no end to his mischief all week long!
The Mother of Cats has been knitting hats lately. It all started when she bought a box of yarn at her favorite yarn shop that were dyed in Barbie world colors.
The Mother of Cats thinks that these are happy, happy, happy colors. She is using all of the yarn to make hats for her community knitting group called Frayed Knots; the hats need to be done in the next two weeks before the next meeting, so she has been knitting a lot.
I’ve been lots of help with the whole knitting effort as she cranked out the hats. Today she finished the 4th hat, and there are two more to go. Look at how nice they look!
Today has been cold and rainy all day so we didn’t even get to go out on the patio. Mateo is just beside himself and causing trouble endlessly. He knocked over an orchid plant. He pulled the tablecloth off the table. He dragged off one of the knitted hats.
Seriously, I’m almost ready to rent him a kitten!
Well, that’s all the news. Time to go help the Mother of Cats with her next hat.
This is Hannah, signing off.
Notes from the Mother of Cats:
That box of really cute yarn came from Spun Right Round. The yarn is Squish DK, and it really is wonderful to knit with. Don’t you love the Barbie-esque colors?
The hats will be given to patients at either the Kaiser infusion centers in the Denver area or to the patients at a cancer treatment center that Frayed Knots also donates to.
Whew. I made it through the holidays okay and now I am on the downslide to the end of the year. The world is still brown out front; there was a tumbleweed on my front doorstep this morning (blown in from who-knows-where overnight), and the squirrels continue to run like crazed maniacs through the trees, over the roof, and through the leaves in the back yard. I never rake the leaves in the back as they are good mulch for the lawn over the winter… who knew that they also served as squirrel entertainment? The snapdragons are still blooming out front! It sure doesn’t seem like winter, but the days are short now and the Canada geese are here in their winter thousands with noisy flocks crossing the sky over my house late each afternoon, winging their way through the growing dusk towards the evening star and the lakes to the southwest.
Knitting
There was a whole lot of community knitting going on this year, and very little Christmas knitting. I did make several of these excessively cute coffee cup cozies that are designed to snazz up your morning Starbucks drink. I gifted them with a Starbucks card and a Snow Man cookie to some family and friends this year. Fast, easy, simple, and I hope they are the perfect thing on an outing this winter. I’m keeping my cozy in the car for my trips through the drive thru!
Pretty darn cute, right?
I also paused the community kitting for a couple of weeks to work on my new Kevat sweater (Caitlin Hunter) which is going to be a great addition to my winter wardrobe because… winter is awfully warm this year.
It is going to fit!!
I am pretty sure that I mentioned before that I am absolutely reckless with my swatches before I cast on sweaters. Like… what swatch? It isn’t like I haven’t knit this particular yarn on these size needles before, right? Still, there is that moment of anxiety when I take the stitches off the needles and try on the WIP to check for fit and length. Yay! Huge sigh of relief! I’m going to add a few more inches to the body and then I will make decisions about the bottom ribbing. I am so very happy with the knitted texture of the body since I used another stitch instead of the lace pattern in the sweater design. This is a win!!
Garden
Since it is the end of the year I’ve been kind of thinking over how things have been going. You know, kind of like that “How it started; How it’s going.” meme that seems to be popping up everywhere. Let me present to you now my jade plants.
How it startedHow it’s going
That’s three years of growth on those jade plants and I do hope that someday they will bloom for me. Look at how well cared for they are!! Everything a jade needs plus the attention of cats.
Cats
It’s been a big year for the two cats. Little 3 months old Mateo (AKA the CoalBear) arrived in June to a desperately in-need-of-a-playmate Hannah.
How it started!Um… help?Whapping time!How it’s going.
Watching these two over the last 7 months has been a riot. At times I think it was a little much for Hannah (Mateo would not leave her tail alone!) but now, at the end of the year, they have finally settled down and are sleeping together: best buds and playmates.
That’s it. Have a great week everyone!
Read a little, knit a little, and garden like your heart can’t live without it.
Yarn, Books & Roses 