Knitting and spinning. The fun never stops.

Some more about my new kitty friend.

(Sorry guys — not a whole heckuva lot of knit content today, but if you’ll bear with me, there’s a knitting bit at the end!)

I found Lucy online, at a local rescue shelter, through Petfinder.org.

Her original name, by the way, was Grace. I renamed her because I had a Great Aunt Grace who Would Not Have Liked Having a Cat Named After Her. Why Lucy? She’s slightly cross-eyed. Get it? Her full name is Lucy Liu. Besides, it suits her.

This poor little kitty found herself in a shelter because her previous owners had her declawed and let her outside. She was attacked by a dog and was badly bitten because she couldn’t defend herself. Her owners didn’t want to pay her vet bills after the attack, so gave her up.

(Note: I’d like to find these people and put them in a cage of hungry tigers so they could see how it feels to be defenseless against a larger animal with teeth and claws.)

I emailed Lucy’s foster mom about her, and we made arrangements for me to meet her at an adoption event at a local pet store the weekend before last. Of course I fell in love with her as soon as I laid eyes on her. The adoption was finalized Sunday night when a volunteer brought her to my home for a combination home visit/delivery.

The organization I got Lucy from is Capital Animal Care, in Arlington, Virginia. Their list of pets available for adoption is here. If you are in the Washington DC area and thinking about adopting a pet, I encourage you to check out their listings. They have beautiful cats and dogs, and some smaller furry animals too. And you couldn’t deal with a nicer group of people. Lucy’s foster mom, Barbara, was wonderful throughout the process, and her love for, commitment to, and bond with the animals is obvious.

When the volunteer brought Lucy to me, she came out of the cat carrier readily enough, did a perimeter check of the room, and climbed in a bookcase. But fifteen minutes after he left, she was in my lap, being brushed, and purring in ecstacy.

She has gotten over a lot of her timidity, though she still looks concerned if she hears a noise outside my condo. I’m pleased to report that she ate some food last night and while I was getting ready for work this morning, I saw her stroll into the kitchen and eat some more. She spent most of the night curled up at the foot of my bed. I think she’s decided she likes this place.

She has a shaved spot on her side — she went back to the vet to have her bite wound checked recently and was shaved then. I can see how badly she was bitten, the poor little thing! She is still taking some antibiotics (and she even lets me give them to her!) but the wound has healed well and should cause no further problems.

You can see that her fur is uneven where she was shaved in this photo.

Sorry the photos aren’t the best — she’s been on the move, checking out her new home!

Knitting Content Here

See? Toldja there’d be some!

I did a wee bit on the bottom facing of the Roscalie Cardigan. Lucy seems quite taken with the Hebridean 2-ply wool, rubbing her face against it happily. So said WIP is being carefully put away in a zip-top knitting bag when I’m not around. Don’t want Lucy knitting on it without me! But she doesn’t seem overly concerned with me knitting — doesn’t seem inclined to chase the yarn.

Hopefully I’ll get into the pattern by the next blog entry, but I wouldn’t count on it. Not when I have such a cute little fur-face to play with!

Happy Monday all. May I present . . .

. . . drum roll . . .

The May Contest

Here’s what you gotta do. Using 8 characters or less, email me (see the contact me link in the sidebar) your choice for a personalized license plate. Said personalization must have to do with knitting. One entry per person, please, and I’ll draw a name after 5pm on Friday, May 16.

The Prize

The prize for this contest was generously donated by a reader who asked to remain anonymous. (But I can tell you that it is no one connected with Knitty, in case you were wondering if this was an advertising ploy. It ain’t.)

An adorable Knitty license plate frame and bumper sticker. See how the contest and the prize go together so well? Aren’t I clever?

Lunch with a Knitter

On Friday I had the good fortune to meet in person Pamela McGarvey, a knitter I previously knew only through online contact. Pamela emailed me and very kindly offered to take me out to lunch. We met on Friday and had a lovely lunch, lots of knitting talk, and I got to see her great MDS&W photos. Thanks, Pamela!

Photographic Memory . . . huh? I Forgot the Question

I mentioned last week that I easily memorize charts for arans. In my comments Friday, a question on exactly how it is I do that.

For the most part, aran designs are symmetrical around a center design, one side sometimes mirror image of the other. After I do the set-up row, I scrutinize the chart. It’s easy for me to memorize what the cable twists are and on what row they occur. Generally each pattern on an aran is divisible by the same number. For example, you might have a motif that has an 8 row repeat, one with a 12 row repeat, and one with a 24 row repeat. If the 8 row repeat has a cable twist on row 7, I put in my head that on row 7, 15, and 23 I have to do a cable twist on that 8 row motif. So I define all the motifs according to the one with the most rows. Make sense?

After one pattern repeat, I have each motif memorized (and it usually doesn’t take as long as a full repeat to do that). I just have a really good memory. I can still remember every word of the Christmas pageant my second grade class put on (and that was a million years ago).

A few years ago I won a bet with my brother — he refused to believe that I could recite all the lyrics in the Who’s rock opera Tommy. So I did.

What can I tell you? It was New Year’s Eve and we were drunk.

Oh . . . I almost forgot

I finished St. Mortiz yesterday, didn’t I?

Happy Mother’s Day To Me

Meet my new furry friend, Lucy. She’s a two-and-a-half-year-old Siamese Himalayan mix kitty. She just came to live with me at 7:00pm last night, so we are still very new friends, getting to know each other. More about her tomorrow!

A question in yesterday’s comments:

“What type of project is the most exciting and challenging for you?”

Good one!

My answer to this is different today than it would have been a few years ago. I used to be the Queen of Arans. Nothing gave me a knitting thrill quite as much as a cable could. The start of a new aran would be desperately exciting — I couldn’t wait to get a couple of repeats under belt so that I could see the pattern pop out at me, in all its 3-D glory.

But alas, no longer. The last couple of arans I’ve made were deadly dull for me. I have a photographic memory and can memorize cable charts by the time I’ve completed the first pattern repeat. Yawn. It’s just the same thing over and over and over. Again, yawn.

(I don’t know why the repetitious nature of this never used to bother me. I’ve gotten crankier and harder to please, apparently.)

So what floats my boat now? Colorwork! Woo-hoo! And non-repeating all-over patterns are particularly alluring. Like the Virgin Sweater I made in January. That was great fun.

Dale of Norway ski sweaters fall into this category to a certain extent. Once I get past all that gawdawful stockinette stitch, it’s very exciting watching the yoke pattern grow. Lillehammer was a particularly fun design — vertical panels and each one had a different motif in it. Ooh!

St. Moritz

Just for grins, I bound off the shoulders and picked up the neckband stitches.

Here is the whole body of the sweater, relaxing on the couch.

And I did a bit on the first sleeve too.

Note to Auntie Lolly

So you think the tornado warnings were something? This is what was going on in my neighborhood last night.

A manhunt is underway in northern Virginia Thursday night for a 17-year-old boy who escaped from the youth detention facility in Alexandria. Police say the inmate may be dangerous.

Crawford says Taboko is not taking his medication and is considered dangerous.

Know where that detention center is? Directly across the street from where you parked your rental car.

I heard helicopters all evening, but they did catch the guy later that night, so I can safely (I guess) leave for work this morning.

May Contest

The May contest will be announced on Monday. Watch this space!

And St. Moritz goes on.

I stitched the armhole steeks last night, as well as the front and back neck steeks and cut the neck open. Like so:

I’m going to do a three needle bind-off on the shoulders, then I can pick up stitches and knit the neckband. But I’ll probably finish the first sleeve before I do that. Here it is:

No SIP?

That is the question. Yes, we have no SIP. I have indeed been working on my secret project as commuter knitting. And I’ve also done some of the plain knitting on the St. Moritz sleeves on the train.

Sneaky, ain’t I?

A question in my comments yesterday — am I doing the neckline decreases according to the pattern instructions?

Nope. I’m not.

Because I’ve elected to do a neckline steek rather than knit back and forth, I’ve had to alter the neckline decreases a bit. The pattern directs you to cast off x number of stitches for the center of the neck on the first row, then to decrease x number of stitches (i.e., more than 1 stitch) on subsequent rows to shape the slope of the neck.

Well, you can’t quite do it this way with a steek. You can decrease one stitch at a time on either side of the neck steek on each row. So that’s what I do until I get the proper number of decreases. Yes, it does alter the shape of the neck slightly, but not enough to make a difference, in my opinion. I’ve done this on most of the Dales I’ve made without any problem.

And I find it sooooo much easier to simply do a steek rather than knit back and forth.

I’ve finished the body of St. Moritz. Here it is a couple of rows from completion.

And I’m starting the colorwork on the first sleeve.

And I’m still waiting for my home visit to be scheduled for the kitty adoption. sigh.