Still Life, With Cats

I spent most of today feeling vaguely queasy and doing my best to keep a headache at bay by throwing ibuprofin at it every few hours. I did go for a couple short walks, thinking maybe if I got up and moved around things might improve, but of course they didn’t. The weather was rather nice outside though – warm for this time of year, and sunny, and it wasn’t until this evening that it finally dawned on me that the issue was, as usual, my sinuses. Any time the barometer decides to do a big change, my sinuses respond by throwing a massive tantrum. So much fun Ah well.

Yesterday’s snowflake turned out much better than the day before’s, primarily because I did it at home, all by myself.

I rather like this one because of the non-pointy ‘points’. It feels as if, were I to remove the pins, it would just roll merrily away. The roll would be a bit wobbly, of course, because I am still working on keeping a consistent gauge, but it would be fun to watch. Well, until it was trampled by a cat, because that is the way of things in this house.

Today’s snowflake looks a lot like a couple of the previous snowflakes I’ve already made (except slightly neater, because I really *am* getting better at this. Slowly. Very, very slowly).

But I swear it is a different snowflake. It is #12 in the book. So I shall trust the designer to not have snuck in a duplicate when the editor wasn’t looking.

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.

I was browsing lazily through Facebook this morning, cat on lap, as one does, and stumbled across this, which is so awesome I had to share it with the rest of you.

I watched this and it occurred to me that they should set up a carousel where they play *this. Because even if anyone who rides it can manage to hold it together throughout the first half, there is no one who can resist the head-banging section in the middle, and by the end, every single person would be singing along at the top of their lungs.

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Today’s snowflake suggests that maybe, just maybe, I’m starting to get the hang of this.

We shall pretend that I did not have to rip out the first point twice before I finally got it working. Shh..

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.

So aside from doing this whole snowflake-a-day project, and also a test knit due by the end of the month, and oh let us not forget that whole ‘working full time’ thing and also rehearsals and so on, this month also is the start of my workplace’s ‘let’s encourage everyone to be more active’ annual challenge. And this year the deal is that in order to meet the challenge, we have to walk 350,000 steps in between February 2nd and March 28th. Technically that’s only 6250 steps per day except that you get extra brownie points if you hit 10,000 per day, or something. Huh, I could really go for some brownies right about now. Mmm. Brownies.

Yesterday I flew to Atlanta for work. There were lots of extra steps getting to the airport and getting to my gate, but by the time I landed in Atlanta I was still a couple thousand shy of the goal. So instead of taking the gate shuttle, I just walked the extra-long hallway, and while waiting for the MARTA train to arrive, I paced up and down the (rather long) platform, so that by the time I got to the hotel (also more walking, from the MARTA station) I was only a couple hundred shy, and that I was able to make up by pacing around in my room.

Today I had grand plans to get up early and go walking, except that as I sat on the bed, blinking blearily because the brain does not shift so easily from west coast to east coast time zones, the skies opened up and it began pouring. And I am sorry, no brownie points are worth getting drenched.

Anyway, all throughout the day my coworker (who has also signed up for the challenge) and I have been finding ways to sneak in a few extra steps here and there, and we even picked a location for dinner that was half a mile away, just for the extra steps. One should never underestimate the allure of mythical brownie points.

So at this point, two days into the challenge, I’ve hit the goal every single day. Go me! Also, my coworker and I are meeting tomorrow morning at 6am (which, those of you paying attention to what I said earlier may note, is actually 3am to my west coast brain) so we can try to knock out a big chunk of the 10K before the meeting gets started. Whether one or both of us then dozes off during the meeting later is anyone’s guess. I sense tomorrow is going to involve caffeine. A lot of lovely, lovely caffeine.

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Today’s snowflake technically was made yesterday, because I did not feel like dragging along all the parts to make them while traveling, but as this is my personal challenge I get to make up the rules as I go along, so there. I did not, of course, make tomorrow’s snowflake early, so I sense that I shall be blearily crocheting what I am sure will be a *lovely* snowflake at roughly 11:30 pm tomorrow night when I get back home, but oh well.

Clearly I need to spend a lot more than 30 seconds pinning these things out. You can see that there is still that weird little lump where the circle joined, but I figure anything that is less lopsided than yesterday’s has to be counted as a win.

*No, I am not sorry for the earworm. Not sorry at ALL.

It’s February! Which means that, at least based on last year, it’s time for me to take on some sort of ridiculous yarn-based daily challenge. Last year, faced with a bin full of cotton yarn, I knit up a dishcloth a day (in fact I ended up with more than 28 dishcloths because there were a few days I was on a roll). This year, I pondered what to make and vaguely recalled that somewhere, lurking in the back of my stash, were a couple little balls of crochet cotton, and somewhere on the bookshelf, a book all about making snowflakes. Piece of cake, I thought to myself, and didn’t bother to drag out either the book or the yarn until this morning. At which point I stared at the cover and thought ‘oh yeah. This is how to *crochet* snowflakes.”

I am a…modest crocheter, by which I mean I have a general grasp of the basic stitches and can crochet an edging onto a lace shawl with no stress. But I haven’t really delved much into that side of yarn crafting, beyond the single and double stitch. So what better way to do it than with crochet cotton (size 30, in case you are wondering and I am sure you are), a 1.9 mm needle, and a book of snowflake patterns?

Here is my first one. Quarter is included for scale. It is slightly damp because that’s the only way I could get all the little points to lie flat.

Now that I look at the picture, I notice one of the little points is folded over, but eh, I’ll fix that when I block them all with stiffener at the end of the month.

I am not the only one doing a daily challenge this year – as we’re now in charge of the Holidailies site, I had a neat idea of setting up an additional monthly thing called Thingadailies. So check out the page (it’s the same link) to see what other people are making daily during the month of February.

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Our house was at one point split into two flats – an upper and a lower – which I suppose is the reason for why there is a set of double doors in what is now the master bedroom. They’re annoying doors because they have glass inserts, although the previous owner covered those with wooden shutters….from which we ended up removing one slat to save our sanity due to a certain grey tabby (Rupert) pawing repeatedly at them when he was younger so that he could look outside (the fact that he could have nearly the SAME VIEW from the window not five feet away was irrelevant). Because the lower level is about 2 feet below ground, there’s a step down immediately after you come through those doors, which means there’s really nothing to hold the doors in place except a cleverly placed pin in the floor.

At some point – who the heck knows when – one of us must have opened the doors for some reason or another and pulled up the pin, and then never bothered to put it back. Not a big deal except that last night there were crazy winds…which is to say that when I came downstairs to go to bed, I heard a weird roaring sound and realized that what I was hearing was the wind through the OPEN DOORS.

My first thought was someone had broken in. My second thought was sheer panic that Sherman had taken this opportunity to escape. I screamed for Richard, and then shockingly saw Sherman *inside* the house (either he’d already been out and come back, or he’d not yet discovered the clear avenue to the Great Outdoors). I shut the doors, we hastily did a head count (all cats accounted for, phew), and that is when I discovered that the locking pin had never been deployed.

That has been fixed and large furniture has been moved in front of the doors because now we’re both on the paranoid side, and we’ll be working out a more visible method of ensuring this never happens again. Gah.

So yes, I know that technically the month of daily dishcloths was supposed to be over as of yesterday. But I woke up at about 5:30 this morning, worrying about Rosie and the weird hole in her mouth, and so I went upstairs to check on her (she demanded food, so all was as usual), and then sat down on the couch and stared at the remnants of my cotton stash. I started working on another boring garter stitch square (this time with stripes), but then realized I just couldn’t do it. Not more garter stitch. So I ripped it all out and started over and noodled around until I came up with something a little different. Each pattern repeat reminds me a little of zipper teeth, so I have dubbed it Zip It!

(I would like to point out, for the record, that what you see here includes the VERY LAST of the teal yarn. Let the cheering commence.)

Once that was done, I scribbled some notes and stared at the cluster of tiny little balls of yarn still remaining and I thought hmm, I bet this would work great with scraps. And so then I knit up Zip It! number two.

I’ve been working today on firming up the pattern for the thing I spent most of yesterday on (including an awesome photo shoot with some very accommodating friends), but that isn’t quite ready to share. So instead I wrote up the Zip It! pattern, and uploaded it to Ravelry, and have made it available for free. You can download it via Ravelry here.

And with that, I believe I am finally done with the dishcloths. Grand total for this little personal challenge: 32 dishcloths.

Boy oh boy, if I ever need to do some serious cleaning, I think I’m now ready.

So for the past few months I’ve been working on some Christmas presents. Well, okay, if we’re going to be correct, technically I’ve been working on a whole lot of other projects, primarily some rather large test knits, with some time spent on presents in the middle. But with the last test knit finished up at the end of November, I took a look at the calendar, and at how much I had left on the presents, and had myself a tiny little panic attack. And then pretty much every single moment where I wasn’t at work or rehearsing for the Vox Musica concerts, or sleeping (because despite my better efforts, I apparently still need some of that), I have been knitting.

I got them all done yesterday. Alas, they were not all completed by the time I handed them over to their recipients, but since we were all sitting around chatting at my parents’ place, I snatched back the two that still needed work (one had ends I’d forgotten to weave in, and the other still had about half the border to complete) and knit as fast as I could until they were finally completed.

(as usual, click to view larger version of any of the pictures)

This is a larger version of the Linus Blanket. I really liked the basketweave texture so I cast on 161 stitches in worsted weight yarn, knit for 20 pattern repeats, and then finished with the garter stitch border and bound off. I’d say it was a hit, if only because my (teenage) nephew pulled it out of the bag, spread it over his legs, and then promptly nodded off to sleep while the rest of the family chatted around him.

This is a larger version of the Gradient Blanket. I cast on 152 stitches, did a pattern repeat of 18, and kept on going until it was done.

This one is the Lacy Throw, which I made for my sister because while she’s not a girly girl, she’s the only female in a household of males and I thought she ought to have something with a teensy bit of femininity. And I am dead serious when I say that I never even noticed that there was a discrepancy in the dye lot of the yarn I used, the ENTIRE TIME I was knitting it (hence the slightly darker swath there at the top), and it wasn’t until my older sister pointed it out that I realized what happened. She thought I’d done it on purpose, so…uh…yeah. Oops. Headdesk.

And finally, this one is a Short Rows Pinwheel. I have made more than one of these because I love, love LOVE the effect you get when you swap the yarn every 2 rows (the entire thing is in garter stitch). We shall not speak, however, of the interminable black hole of knitting that was the knit-on border. This is the one that I was still actively knitting yesterday after giving it to the recipient.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.