A Little Yarn On The Side

Theo has discovered my secret morning crafting time, darn it.

Two days in a row completely out of bed now, though my bedtime might be creeping up just a bit each night.  Yesterday I was out and about some, meeting my Great Decisions group in the afternoon and rummaging through some charity shops for a cheap but not too icky desk for the back bedroom, and just did a short walk at night to limber up the muscles without pushing them too hard.  Today I got up, maybe a little less enthusiastically than the previous two mornings, and took the cats to the vet for their annual check up and shots.  Since I've been hauling Theo around so much, I had bought a bigger carrier for him, so this was their first joint visit, and I can assure you that hauling around 35 pounds of cats is a lot of work no matter WHAT has been going on with one's back.  The room has pheromone mist for the cats, but they could really use a martini dispenser for the humans--or at least free chocolate.  After their ordeal, I brought the cats back home, grabbe...

In the morning, Theo needs half a capsule of his "de-stress" meds, and both morning and evening, he needs a capsule of the glucosamine blend which treats his peeing problems.  They are capsules, and the vet said that it was easy and cats loved it, so all I needed to do was sprinkle the powder on his food. I want to send Theo home with him for a weekend.  Because I am trying to give Theo wet food, he prefers dry.  He prefers his food in the new blue bowls because the disposable cat food containers I was using last fall are now no longer acceptable.  Leftover cans from the fridge must be left out to warm up slightly.  If I put the bowl too close to him, I'm too eager and obviously trying to poison him.  Seafood works best, except the expensive tilapia cat food, which neither cat will eat.  Beef is fine, but no chicken, though turkey is acceptable sometimes.  And it can't be pate--it has to be shreds or slices in gravy.  And sometimes for no...

Thursday night I had some spare time, so I thought I'd get a head start on Finishing Friday with three new icicles,   and three new patchwork ornaments, trying some new methods of tracing the pattern onto the felt, none of which worked any better, and I seem to have not photographed the third one.  Oh well,  it's a heart--pretty much like the last one.  I think we can now say that THREE strips of fabric was maybe an over-estimation of how long my interest in these would last.  They are a great way to catch up on my ornament tally, and I do like them, but I am now counting the days until I can buy fusible webbing and new marking pens. I like the hand-stitched look on ornaments, so both to solve the tracing problem AND try a new look, I made a stocking which I could cut out first, THEN stitch.  It worked reasonably well, though I need to practice a bit to get my stitching a bit more even, and it's hard to see in spots, but I thought it turne...

It may not look like it, but this is a cat with stress issues.  We flew out to Indiana for Andy's family reunion obscenely early on Thursday morning.  Because it's such a busy time of year for our friends, how much I would worry about fires with the drought this year, and because I wanted to poison the little vole-monsters who have been plaguing the garden all spring, I thought it would be a brilliant idea to board the cats while we were gone.  Because of our travel times, the cats were due to check in the day before we left and get picked up the day after we arrived.  I made the reservations well in advance, made a copy of their immunization records, and thought I was really pretty clever for coming up with this whole idea in the first place. STILL feeling like I was planning ahead, we dug out the suitcases Tuesday night.  I have joked many times about Theo getting upset when he sees suitcases come out because he hates change so much, but I always thou...

In spite of help from Theo, the gardening dress is finished and got 4 out of 6 buttons while I was waiting for Blogger to upload pictures.  I will never stop having a button stash, partly because I like to buy buttons on sale when possible, and partly because the buttons I think will work when picking out a project aren't always the ones that I like when a project is finished, but it is rather exciting to be using up some of my stashes without adding to them right now.  I wasn't exactly bothered by the buttons, but since I'm using them, it's a "supply."  If I'm buying them and not using them, that's a "hoard."  This is not a definition I like to explore too closely when viewing the yarn hoard stash, but it works for the other stashes. I also dug out one of the in-progress blue mittens from the mitten garland, and put together a green felt mitten ornament for good measure.   Then, thinking I should explore some OTHER stashes-borde...

Items needing to be blocked: Blocking day beginning: Blocking day after Theo's "rodent gift episode:" Tomorrow:  Blocking Day part two...............

Just in case you haven't tried it, walking in a pool for an hour is exhausting.  Or it is if you've spent the majority of the last 7 weeks laying on heating pads.  I think, though, that it is helping my back, so I have been able to do another small sewing project: Music coasters.  I've made two sets of 6--one for us to keep and one to go in the gift bin.  They aren't very elaborate, and I could only sit long enough to sew one set at a time, but somebody was very happy: I think he might have enjoyed "get well kitty" status, but nothing compares with sewing.  Taking advantage of a day without any need for even the smallest bit of Valium, I finally did the math and laid out the plans for the Valentine's basket vest, and have almost completed the ribbing.  I've decided on a pattern that will have the ribbing stretching into a ribbing and cable pattern, so I think only two inches of ribbing with the smaller needles will be necessary.  I haven...

This has been my view much of the last 2 weeks: Theo has been quite a good get-well kitty, though I think he's a bit relieved to see me making enough progress that he feels he can leave my side--or my chest--for a while.   And I'm quite relieved that Andy headed him off with the live mouse get-well gift he found the other day.  Kitty nursing has a few drawbacks. I had a bit of a set back yesterday so there were pain pills AND valium (though not at the same time, obviously), but after they wore off a bit I was able to finish project number 109: and of course, I have immediately cast on another project.  This will be a new hat with a doubled-over band, which explains the teal yarn used as waste yarn.  I'm almost there!  And some pictures of past projects that haven't been on here yet.  The latest chemo cap: and the red hat: It's really a pretty cute hat, especially for a free pattern .  I saw the spine specialist yesterday, a...

I have decided to do a musical theme for Christmas this year, and thought new stockings would be one of the best ways to pick up the theme, so I'm going to use this fabric which would be tricky enough with the lines just as it is, but when you add this it might be really difficult.  I'm not sure how easy it is to see, but these are pictures of both selvedge edges.  The first has the staff lines pretty much perpendicular.   The second one shows them being quite far from it.  So, I decided to lay the fabric out as a single fold and just cut out the pieces I needed where the print and the fabric worked together.  I was cutting along on the first piece, turned around to change scissors, and When I tried to move around him a bit, when I gave up and decided to cut out some little stocking ornaments to make, so while the dog did NOT eat my homework, the cat DID take my sewing.  I think that's a fair excuse........

I love all the suggestions of embroidered shapes on the table runner instead of buttons--I think that will work much better.  I've been working on the reverse side, which I had originally planned to appliqué as well, but I started messing around with stitch options, found one I liked, then found a second one I liked, and I think they make a nice contrast to each other.   I think Theo likes it as well... It's interesting to stick only with primary colors as I've never really done it, but it definitely feels very cheerful and vibrant.  Now to pry the cat off of it and get it sewn together!

After cherry-picking yesterday, I finally had a chance to give Jeeves a test run, and decided it would be fitting to try to finish the summer towels that I had started a year ago  when I found out that Holland's Sew Shoppe had sent Jeeves home with more problems than he went in with.  I stabilized, hooped, and everything was going along swimmingly until I apologize for the blurry pictures, but until I actually take the time to A) find my camera manual and B) figure out how to focus said camera, I take a lot of blurry zoomed pictures.  It's a much smaller jump, but it's still a jump.  Now, I have a LOT of faith in Larry at the Twin Falls Sewing Center, and Jeeves had certainly improved, so I took several pictures, explained the problem, and emailed them to Larry so he could look at it when he came in today.  I turned Jeeves off and set everything aside, because I wanted to confirm with Larry what he might need to see if I had to take Jeeves back to Twin Falls. ...

Bob:  In a surprise move yesterday, Ms. Sutton abandoned the expected cornucopia-finishing and instead surprised us with a flurry of scarves. Ron:  How right you are, Bob!  We were predicting all 11 cornucopias to be necessary for Ms. Sutton to hit 100 projects for 2010, but seemingly out of nowhere came project 98: a pair of scarves that no one predicted.  Bob:  This certainly is getting interesting.  These scarves were a complete experiment for Ms. Sutton.  She was attempting to use a combination of threads on a rolled edge  and I think it would be fair to call the results only moderately successful as the edge doesn't have that nice finish that Woolly Nylon would have given it, but as Woolly Nylon has become almost impossible to find in Boise, I think she was a bit too desperate to finish the scarves to wait until she could mail-order the missing thread.  Ron:  We are certainly seeing a slight relaxing of project standards ...