What I made, by Sharon

 On Friday we said goodbye to Tarragon. He was the last of our OG cats - Princess Daisy, Ms Juniper and Lord Tarragon.  We then spent some serious time trying to get the house to smell less like pee. The last few months have been hard on the floors and the couch.  Other than than the weekend has had all the usual (running, friends, dinner with the folks) but it's all just a little bit sadder than usual. My house smells better, but feels rather empty. 

Good morning. The excitement this week is that we adopted a new cat. I'm pleased to introduce Lady Willow of Dakota.  She's allegedly two years old, and she just had a litter of kittens. The foster carer dropped her off on Monday night and she's already settling in well. And she is so, so pretty. I'm reading St Kilda Blues , which is the third and final book in Charlie Berlin series. It's a detective novel full of gruesome murders, so, while I'm happy to catch up with Charlie, and thrilled to read a book set in St Kilda in the 1960s, it might not be well matched to my cheerful, about to be on leave mood. I'm knitting this and that. I knit a hat to go with the charity jumper  , and now I've almost finished a matching cowl. I'll probably cast on a pair of mittens tonight, to finish the set. And that's my week in reading and knitting. To read my all my book reviews, and to see everything I knit, you can find me on Ravelry as  Sharondoublekni t and o...

On Tuesday we dropped Juniper at the vet hospital - she was in good spirits, but seemed to not be eating at all and had lost a lot of weight.  We weren't too worried though - we figured they would scan her, work out what was wrong and then we would know, and  put in a course of action. Long story short, she crashed on Wednesday night.  We went to say goodbye to her, and now we are a two cat household. She was just the epitome of Cat. She loved cardboard boxes and purring and napping in the sun. She was always there when I was stretching or mobing - "helping out" by sitting on me. I don't know if Tarragon is missing her - it's so hard to know what cats  are thinking and feeling - but I know we are. 

Ok, so complaining because a large pair of socks took me 7 days is ridiculous. But the first one took two days (a weekend) and the second took 5, so it felt really slow.  Particularly since I didn't get any time to knit yesterday (Thursday). We're hosting Friday night dinner tonight, and it's going to be 43 degrees Celsius, so we cooked and prepared all the food yesterday, and we are serving cold soup, followed by cold roast chicken, followed by chocolate mousse.   The socks were originally going to be all in the top colour, which was destashed by Kris, but there were breaks in the yarn, and I lost 30 grams of it to tangles while skeining in up. So i faded in the second colour. I used by new Signature 2.25mm double points for the first time and I love them. The fabric they are creating is lovely, and the needles themselves are sharp and sort of grippy but still fast. As for the socks, they are the Vanilla is the New Black pattern, which is a top down heel f...

I've been sitting here trying to write a post about the socks I'm knitting, but I don't have anything to much to say about socks right now. This morning I dropped Princess Daisy at the vet hospital in Werribee - we recently discovered she has an overactive thyroid, and the simplest treatment is to irradiate it. It's medically not a big deal, and we caught it really early. They are going to feed my cat radiation tomorrow and then keep her for a week, because she will be radioactive. When she comes home she's not meant to sleep next to me or sit on my lap for long for the first two weeks. I can't really see that happening, we'll work something out, probably we'll all end up a little irradiated. And now, I'm sitting on the couch, knitting the above mentioned sock, but without Princess Daisy on my lap, or snuggled next to me on the couch, it just isn't the same. Here's a picture of the sock - Gladys , by General Hogbuffer, to go with all...

  Today it was forty degrees. Today I finished Leon's knitted-all-in-one-piece jumper. Today Leon decided it was too hot to try it on, so I can only hope it fits. Obviously, I still have to sew in the ends, and kitchener the underarms. As a bonus, here's a photo of Tarragon having a snooze with a ball of yarn I dropped.

 I’m not sure how much I’ve written about this on the blog, but Tarragon is a Bengal, and Bengals can be quite "special". He has terrible separation anxiety, and cats do not have a great many options for expressing how they are feeling. Tarragon expresses his feelings by what vets call “inappropriate urination” and what I call ‘why does Tarragon keep peeing on the bathmat”? We’ve done everything we can think of. We have multiple litter boxes, we got him a friend (yep, that’s why we got Juniper) and we are giving him prozac. A while a go he peed on my handspun bath mat, and I put it in a hot wash. I knew it would felt, but some things just have to washed hot. It did felt. It came out a little smaller, but wonderfully  thick and ruglike. I was looking at all the unspun wool I have, and got inspired. I’m going to spin this up thick and self stripping and knit it into a bathmat: probably a 10 stitch blanket for the bathroom and another half mitred square for ...

  On Wednesday I wasn't very well, so I spent the day on the couch. During the day all the cats visited me, Princess Daisy sat on my lap for hours as I knitted and watched TV, Tarragon wandered across and stood there, looking put out because my hands were bust doing something other than holding him.  At one point Juniper jumped onto my lap. I discovered that she's a little bit fascinated by the knitting. Mostly she sat there, looking cute and staring at my hands as they moved. For me the cutest moment of the day was when I put my knitting down, and left the room. When I got back, there she was sitting on it as if to say , "well, I'm royalty. Why wouldn't I sit on the softest, cosiest thing in the room?".  

I don't have a lot to say about knitting in this post. I've been plugging away pleasantly at the body of Straboy. It looks almost exactly like it did last post, except a bit longer. See? Aside from that I made the Matcha Biscuits from the August Cookie A shipment. They are subtle and it's hard to see in this photo, but they are green. Which makes sense, since they are green tea biscuits. 10 minutes after I started making them I got a call from my parents saying they were coming around, and they certainly seemed to enjoy them. Even if I haven't got around to knitting with the rather more vivid green yarn, at least I am playing along by baking the biscuits. Also, and in more exciting news, we got a new kitten. She's a half Bengal, called Miss  Juniper (as an aside, we got her from the  Keysborough Animal Shelter who are wonderful and do a fantastic job of trying to match people with the right animals.)    She's six months old ...

I finished my third pair of socks from the Cookie A Sock Club 2012, the lovely Nanaimo socks . I used the club yarn, since it's a perfect man colour for a perfect man pattern. This is the first time I've knit with Socktopus Sokkusu Original and it's lovely. Bouncy and beautiful. The pattern itself is quite straightforward, which was perfect as I knit them during the Comedy Festival, and was out and about much of the time. The other thing that's coming in three around here is cats. This is Fern:  She's staying over for the next six weeks while my parents are overseas. It's lovely to have her here, she fits in so well with the household. I wanted to get a picture of all three of them, but this is the best I could do. That's Tarragon sneaking off the front of the photo, Fern looking confused in the middle and Princess Daisy right at the back.

As I promised myself, a quick and bright project. I decided not to bother making these gloves matchy, matchy, as I didn't want to waste too much of the yarn and Mini Mochi is not a yarn that like to make things match. I knit the first glove. There were HUGE gaps between the fingers, which I had to darn shut. Perhaps learning to do fingers while drunk was not a good plan. I knit the second glove: For some reason the Mini Mochi did not change colours at all. The wool really annoyed me, it's a terribly underspun singles yarn. I've used it before for socks, and it holds up fine, but it is quite splitty to work with. And I didn't expect it to look this unmatched: I have now cut the chewed bits off the bottom of my Train Tracks scarf, and will be finishing it up again over the next couple of days. And for everyone who mocked Princess Daisy for looking a bit chubby in a previous post, here is a picture of her in all her beauty, and not next the feline equivalent of a supermod...

Leon and I have a cat (actually we have two, but this post is only about one of them). This is Tarragon: He looks cute, right? He's a lovely cat. He follows us around the house, sleeps on the bed and is obsessed with yarn. Nearly as obsessed as I am. When I brought home my train tracks scarf I knew that Tarragon was crushing on it. I would find it in odd places, like draped over the cat scratcher in the bedroom, and on the kitchen floor. Because of this I hung it on the very top of the hat stand. The third day after I got back I went to put it on and discovered this: Now, luckily its near the end and I still have 100 grams of the yarn left, so repairing it will not be a major drama. But still! And here's a photo of both cats. See why I forgive them anything?