Wendy Knits

I’m already getting lots of emails requesting my address so you can send me completed mousies. Wow! I think we’re going to have a lot of rodents to donate!

In the interests of keeping Lucy’s spirit of generosity intact, it’s a good thing that I have a guestroom where I can store incoming mice and keep the door shut. This is the room where most of my stash resides, so I keep the door shut anyhow. Lucy is pretty good about not messing with my yarn, but I don’t want to put temptation in her path!

And she looks so innocent, doesn’t she?

As I receive mice from you all, I’ll post at the end of my blog entry who I received mice from the previous day (first name and city only) — that way you’ll know your package reached me.

And don’t forget — if you can’t get catnip where you are, or if you live outside the U.S. and are concerned about mailing catnip, let me know — I’ll put you in touch with Jen, our wonderful Volunteer Mouse Stuffer. She’ll stuff the empty mice you send her and mail them to me.

I’ve got an extremely warm fuzzy feeling about this project!

Ian and I discussed how to package the mice and he came up with a great idea. Yesterday I ordered a case of 4″ by 6″ ziplock plastic bags, 4 mil thick. These will make perfect mouse packaging, keeping them fresh, but displayng them nicely. Now I need to design a label that has the pertinent information — handknit mouse, made from wool or wool-blend yarn, stuffed with catnip. I’m going to do my durndest to get a good photo of Lucy with her mouse, so she can be the covergirl for the label. I think 3.5″ diskette labels that come on sheets that I can run through my printer will be just the right size.

I have a feeling that Ian and I are going to spend more than a few evenings sticking on labels and putting mice in bags. It’s gonna be fun!

Frogner

I’ve got a fair amount done on the second sleeve, so the end is in sight! I ought to be able to finish up Frogner by the endof the week.

I can tell you now . . . the next project will be texture, not colorwork.

Ah, but what pattern?

I’m not telling.

Just for grins, I’ll post progress photos each day and see how it takes before someone figures out what it is.

Yes, I can be very annoying at times!

But I Will Show You . . .

The Opal Inspiration color #5026 socks. They even match!

That’s the second pair in a row that I’ve gotten to match perfectly. I’m leading a charmed life.

A lot of you out there are cat lovers. I’d like to ask for your help.

Some of you might recall that I posted a while back that Lucy’s foster mom paid us a visit. She was quite taken with the catnip mouse I had knitted for Lucy and offered to sell them for me (she works in a pet shop), saying that people would snap them up. I said I’d rather donate mice to her rescue organization, Capital Animal Care, for them to sell at fundraisers.

Well, I can only knit so many mice.

Here’s what I propose: a raffle.

I have the Heilo, pattern and Dale patches to knit Norge 2000. There is enough wool to knit the XL (approx 50″ chest) size in the dark teal colorway. Pictured here:

Everyone who sends me a catnip mouse will be entered in the raffle for the Norge 2000 kit. You will get as many entries as the number of mice you send me. Five mice, five entries. We’ll put an ending date on the raffle of . . . say . . . September 30.

What do you guys think? I’d like some idea of how many of you would make at least one mouse and send it, before I commit to the raffle. The kit is worth over 100 bucks so I’d hate to raffle it off in return for 5 mice. Not meaning to sound greedy here, but it’s for a very good cause and my purpose is to donate more mice than I can make to raise as much money for Capital Animal Care as possible. To help other kitties like Lucy (and not just cats — they rescue all sorts of animals). I’d love to send them a whole boatload of mice!

If the Dale kit is not to your personal liking, you could always auction it off on eBay. Or trade with another knitter. (I’ll post a better photo and more full description of the kit later.)

If we do this, I’ d ask that all mice be knitted from wool or wool blend yarns, and of course stuffed with catnip, and be approximately 3 inches long, for the sake of consistency of quality. Other than that, anything goes. You can use the pattern we used in the Mouse-Along, or make up your own.

So let me know what you think, ‘k?

(By the way, Capital Animal Care has a Lucy-look-a-like up for adoption right now (as well as a lot of other adorable cats and dogs.)

More on Frogner

I was asked about button loop spacing yesterday.

According to the pattern for Frogner, you are supposed to make the button loops in three sets of three, with extra space between each set. I didn’t like the way that looked in the picture — I prefer my button loops to be evenly spaced.

The directions call for nine buttons and button loops. I marked with a pin on the button band where I wanted the top button (about half an inch down from the top) and where I wanted the bottom button — a coupla-three inches up from the bottom.

Then I marked the space halfway between those two pins. That’s the middle button loop. Then I marked halfway between the middle and the top pin, and halfway between the middle and the bottom pin.

I’m now up to five pins. I marked halfway between each of them and I’m up to nine — which is the number I need. No fuss, no muss.

I’m still working on the first sleeve, though closer to the end than the beginning. I think I’m moving a bit slower on this because I’ve been feeling not great lately.

Though I’m feeling better now, thank-you.

Whatever Happened to Beadwork?

As y’all know, I abandoned Beadwork because it caused my repetitive stress injuries to flare up.

Shortly after I stopped work on it, Peter, of Knitting Naturalist fame. emailed me and offered to knit it for me.

To once again quote one of my favorite actors playing one of my favorite characters (Christopher Walken as The Continental on SNL):

“Wow! Wowie, wow, wow!”

So of course, I bundled up Beadwork and dispatched it to Peter post-haste. He’s got it, he’s knitting it, and he quite possibly might be cursing the day he made such a generous offer.

I was surfin’ around blogs yesterday and came across a surprise.

I went to a blog I’d never seen before from a link on another blog. I started reading and halfway through the current entry I opened up blogrolling and added a link to this blog from my blog because I enjoyed what I was reading.

Imagine my surprise when I got to the last paragraph of the entry. The blog author was bemoaning the fact that her blog was the only knitting blog that I don’t link to. She said it made her feel bad.

Yow. That made me feel bad.

In this case, the only reason I hadn’t linked to her was because I hadn’t discovered her blog until yesterday. I left her a comment explaining that, and saw another blogger had left a comment earlier telling her not to feel bad because I don’t link to her blog either.

Double-Yow.

Okay, now I feel really bad.

Linking to other blogs. It’s an art, not a science. And an uncertain art at that.

I have a long list of blogs that I read on a regular basis, and the list changes from time to time. I post this list on my blog for my convenience. If someone hasn’t updated their blog in ages, I generally drop it from the list, because I get tired of checking it and finding no updates. If I stumble across a new blog that I like, I’ll sometimes link to it on the spot. Sometimes I don’t, meaning to go back later. Then I can’t find it again.

I’ve had people who email me and say — “Here is the URL to my blog. Please link to it because I know I’ll get lots of hits from referrals from your blog.”

Okay, this one makes me feel really really bad. Particularly if it’s a blog I’ve visited and am not interested in readng every day. For whatever reason. If the main blog content is something I’m not remotely interested in, I’m not going to add it to my regular reads.

So . . . uh . . . no. Sorry. I’m not gonna link to something I don’t read just so the linkee will get more hits. (And I think the individual who emailed me that, verbatim, has incredible chutzpah to tell me out-and-out that the only reason he/she wants a link from my page is to ride on the coattails of whatever popularilty my blog has.) If I read it and like it, I’ll link to it. Besides, contrary person that I am, if you tell me to do something, I’m more likely not to.

What do my fellow bloggers think? What is good blog link etiquette?

So just in case you wondered . . . my list of blogs I read is not necessarily exhaustive, nor is it my final answer. Subject to change from time to time.

Note to the blog owner mentioned at the start of this post: I hope you are not offended by my mentioning this. I bring this up as an ongoing issue. Yesterday’s incident brought it to the front of my somewhat addled brain.

And another thing (while I’m whining). If you are a commercial enterprise, please do not email me and ask me to put a link on my site for your business. I have no commercial links (apart from occasional links in my entries for places I’ve bought stuff from and liked) and I don’t want any. I’ve been getting a lot of emails like this recently and I don’t want to have to spend good knitting time emailing back and explaining my policy (which is stated clearly on my blog etiquette page).

So there. (stamps foot)

On to Knitting

Whenever I knit a Dale, I always get a question about the neck shaping. Did I do it according to the pattern directions (back and forth) or another way?

I lifted this from my May 7 blog entry:

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.

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

Straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were (whinney).

You’ve plowed through all of the above, so you are rewarded with a photo of Frogner, front bands and neckband completed.

And I’m working on a sleeve too.

Senility

I haven’t yet forgotten to feed Lucy. She would never let me. She has dry food available all the time and in the evening she gets some Fancy Feast.

When I get home after work, she is always waiting at the door for me. She says:

“Mommy, it’s time for dinner. Meow! Dinnertime, dinnertime, dinnertime. Don’t forget the Fancy Feast, Mommy. Fancy Feast, meow, meow! Dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner, dinner! Meow!”

She repeats this until I serve her Fancy Feast. I’m surprised she doesn’t require a sprig of parsley on the side.

Here, Lucy offers her opinion of Frogner.