Yarn Recycling Day

Ah, lovely lazy weekends.

Since I have been bit heavily by the destash bug, I have also been going through my yarn.  I feel the need to ball up, tidy up and categorize everything.  And with that, I have been frogging some very old projects I will never finish or wear in order to reclaim the yarn.  

Mmmm, strawberry flavored wool.  This was at one point going to be a crocheted sweater; but I figured out that I didn't quite have enough yarn for the pattern I wanted to make.  So it sat in a box all through grad school and then sat for two more years until I finally found it and thought "gee, this is nice wool"

Besides, I figure that knitting takes less yarn than crocheting does, so I still have enough yarn for a ~knit~ sweater!

And so it was frogged.  And balled.  And turned into a lovely hank of crinkley yarn.



I even had help through this whole process!  See?  This is Heidi.  She thinks I cannot see her...


Oh... but the temptation was too great.  I see you, Heidi...  >.>  <.<


I had five hanks to be dipped in hot water, relaxed and then hung to dry.  Several move un-crocheted skeins that could simply be balled and stored.



After all that work, my assistant was pooped.  

I'm sort of jealous that this old cat still has the flexibility to turn herself completely into a catball.  May I be as supple when I am her age.




Until then, I'll content myself with the fact that I now have a sweater's worth of wool all fresh and waiting for me!

Cats in the Slammer

(with all due respect to "Cops"...  eh, who am I kidding.  I'm making fun of it.)  

Bad cats, bad cats, what'cha gonna do?  What'cha gonna do when the come for you...


To be fair these are not bad cats.  They are simply feral rescues.  For years and years my parents had barn cats in the, well, barn.  But as the number of cows dwindled the number of cats grew.  So we started taking in kittens (which might account for the unusually high number of housecats our family has) and finally my mother decided that enough was enough.  She was going to livetrap all the feral cats.  


We finally live trapped the last of the feral mothers from the barn; tranquilized them, got them taken to the vet for shots and fixings; and now they are enjoying a lovely day in the sun.  We set up a place for them to live indoors, with an outdoor cage.  Now they pass thier time away as healthy, lazy cats.  This is a Saint Bernard pen that is rigged up through a basement cat door, for some fun in the sun.  Or shade as the case may be in the pictures.  I just like how Suzy (the little black cat) is looking up so woefully, as if to say 'nobody knows the trouble I've seen...'

Woe be to the chipmunk who runs through the bars.

Round and Round

(and round and round and round and round....)

I find it a theme of my projects lately that I start them "because the yarn was there"



No, really.  It's the yarn's fault.  It lays in the boxes and tells me to make things.  I erase all responsibility.  

So let's start with the yarn.  Red Heart Symphony.  It's 100% faux mohair.  As faux as mo goes.  Acrylic, all of it.  I found it within my stash - the old stash (yes, I have stash stored away in separate places, like vintages.  And when I dig it out I find some surprising things.  This was one of them.)  I took it out and looked at the skein and thought 'what the hell is this?'

     What the hell indeed?  It was... well, it was furry.  Not Fun Fur furry.  Just furry.  

What the hell do you do with furry?  You type "Red Heart Symphony" into Ravelry and click on 'pattern ideas.'  That's what you do.  God Bless Ravelry.

Anyways, one of the patterns that showed up was the "Portland Pullover" from Interweave Knits.  I have always thought it was an attractive pattern; and the fact that it's modeled on that cute redhead model IK used for so many years didn't hurt.  The ravelers said it was a fast, easy and nice to wear.  I said 'sold!'

I cast it on a few days before my mother fell off the garage roof, and I ended up spending hours knitting the sweater body in the ER waiting room.  There are some times where completely mindless circular knitting (19 inches of it...) is most welcome.

I did not knit the sleeves flat.  I mean a circular body with a circular yoke and flat sleeves?  Please.  I knit them on a 16" circ.  Yaaay!

I'm not fond of funnel necks, and I will almost certainly wear a button down or turtleneck underneath it; so I bound it off earlier, and shored it up with a single crochet border and kitchenered the armpit seams.

Since Wisconsin is cold lately, I got to get some lovely outdoor pictures.  Mmm, fuzzy sweater.  Fauxmo it may be, but it's delightfully soft and light.
 

Hermitage

Like animals when they don't feel good and they crawl off to thier dens, I have crawled off to my internetless den for, oh, about two months.  I'm very bad at that >.<

News: my mother just got okayed to walk again (yay!) and now she can really start driving me nuts.

Man, I'm glad she doesn't read my blog.  >.>  <.<

Life is good.

This post had pictures.  The internet ate the pictures.  *shakes fist at the internet*  I will post the pictures later.

Life is still good.