Still Life, With Cats

This content shows Simple View

Life

Five and done

Posted on 5 December, 2017 8:39 pm by Jennifer 2 Comments

Continuing the ‘Tour de Sock’ catch-up, fresh from the ‘joy’ (HA HA HA) of beaded socks, my team all eagerly awaited the final pattern. I was excited because it was to drop the weekend of Labor Day, which means I’d have three whole days to work on just these socks, and surely that would be plenty of time.

And then the pattern dropped and….wow. Um. yeah.

So I’m normally a fan of colorwork – I can do it pretty quickly and it can turn out some really lovely things. But this one…this one had places where you were to carry 3 strands, and sometimes even 4, at a time. This was going to be one really, really dense sock.

I started working on this, my enthusiasm significantly dampened, but still determined to make it work. Three hours later, the time it usually would have taken me to whip up half a plain vanilla sock, I had barely made it past the cuff. I checked in with the rest of my team, and one by one, they were all chiming in. Nope. Not happening. They tried it, they hated it, they were done.

And I looked at that stupid cuff and pondered spending the next several days swearing at a stupid pair of socks that I was never, ever going to wear anyway because of the thickness, and I remembered that I signed up for Tour de Sock because it was going to be fun and (yes, even with the stupid beads) so far it had been, but not if I kept going. There was no penalty for just saying enough is enough. I’d already knit five pairs of socks, and taken ninth place for two of them, which is really great (sleep is for the weak!), and nothing would happen if I just said ‘screw it’ and made something else instead.

So I did. I joined the rest of my team in declining to take part in the triple- and quadruple-stranded insanity (and considering that by the time the deadline had hit, only 36 people had finished, out of nearly a thousand participants who’d originally signed up, we clearly weren’t the only ones who took a look at that pattern and said ‘oh hell no’). And then I cast on for a completely different pair of socks by plucking a mosaic pattern out of one of my stitch books, and I made these socks for Richard. And thus the Summer of Socks was concluded for the year. Huzzah.

(I haven’t a clue what the yarn was that I used because *someone* whose name either rhymes with Herman or Schubert knocked the balls out of the bag where they were carefully placed to be safe from cats, and the balls fell on Nutmeg’s head, startling her so that she then proceeded to pee on them before skittering off, and I just gave up and threw the leftovers away, and also I’m too lazy to go try to figure out where I found the stitch pattern in the first place, but people, there’s a bazillion patterns on Ravelry so just go there and don’t ask me questions, okay?)



Catching up

Posted on 4 December, 2017 9:50 pm by Jennifer 2 Comments

So…I realized I never finished posting about Tour de Sock and my ‘Summer of Socks’ plan, primarily because things got busy (as they usually do) and I was knitting things that can’t actually be talked about (the only downside to test knitting). But then I remembered it’d be December soon and I would definitely need things to post about so…hooray for filler!

The fifth pattern for Tour de Sock had beads. I was not looking forward to this, as knitting with beads is super annoying and fiddly and the potential for certain cats (cough cough Rupert) to come along and tip over the container of beads, thus spilling them all over the floor, is always high. But I dutifully picked some yarn and went to the bead store that is located in convenient walking distance from my office, and got ready to play.

And then the pattern dropped. First of all, it has beads that go down far enough that if one is wearing shoes, they will rub. How is this even remotely a good idea? Beads under the toe of a shoe are going to rub, and cause your socks to develop holes! Secondly, the pattern charts were all in eye-bleeding colors, using non-standard stitch notation that made it both a) super annoying to have to print (hint to pattern designers – not everyone has access to a color printer), and b) even *when* printed (either in color or in black and white), the colors were sometimes so dark that it was almost impossible to see the stitch notation in the first place.

No surprise, I suppose, that there was a huge outburst of ‘are you *kidding* me?’ from a large majority of the other Tour de Sock participants – to the point where the organizer finally posted a ‘you don’t have to do the bottom half of the beads’ note, plus the next sock pattern was apparently then hastily modified to include no color at all on the charts (despite it being a colorwork pattern, where using color actually makes sense….but more on that later because I have to have *something* to write about for tomorrow!).

After all of that, of course, since I am a super fast knitter, I ended up doing all the damn beads anyway – primarily because by the time I *saw* the ‘you don’t have to do the bottom half of the beads’ comment, it was too late – I’d already done them on the first sock, and I wasn’t about to have non-matching socks so I grit my teeth and did them for the second one as well.

Here they are. If it weren’t for the beads, I would really love these socks, because I do love me some cables, and this pattern is *all* about the cables.

View of the back.

The designer has a plethora of other patterns available, so apparently there are enough people out there who don’t mind reading from eye-bleeding color charts and using beads on their socks to make it worth her while, but I suspect that if I ever do another of her patterns, I’ll take the time to re-chart them first. And (short of another Tour de Sock pattern in the future), I can’t see myself ever voluntarily adding beads to a sock again, because seriously, no. Just…no.

Happy Holidailies.



Moving along

Posted on 3 December, 2017 8:18 pm by Jennifer Comment

Today was the ‘yay it’s over’ party for the Sacramento region of Nanowrimo, so we hastily cleaned the house and I pulled a loaf of pumpkin bread out of the freezer, and then while the house was full of cheerful Nanowrimers, I camped out in the kitchen and made cookies. There’s a cookie exchange coming up and rehearsals for the concerts next weekend and long days at work and I just wasn’t sure when else I’d have time to do the baking, so I figured I’d just lurk quietly in the kitchen while the party went on in the other rooms.

Heh. I should have remembered that our kitchen always ends up a prime hang-out space any time we’ve got a crowd over. So I busily rolled dough and cut out shapes and cycled pans through the oven, all the while chatting with folks. I had two different types of dough because there was a recipe I wanted to try, but it turned out I wasn’t all that crazy about it (although apparently it made a hit with a lot of the other people), so I’m glad I had the second cookie dough all ready in the fridge. By the time I was done I had plenty of cookies to carefully stash in the freezer for the cookie exchange, and even had time to join some of the others in recording a song for the Finnish Nanowrimo group (long story that will make no sense if you’re not an active member of the Sac Nano pages, so just nod and smile).

Sherman, by the way, is acting perfectly fine, if a bit dopey from the meds, because that is the way of cats, of course. I scrounged up an extra heating pad and stuck it into one of the cat beds along with some afghans and he’s been happily purring in his little heated nest, and demanding plenty of attention every time one of us walks in the room.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.



It’s the most wonderful time of year

Posted on 1 December, 2017 9:31 pm by Jennifer 1 Comment

Happy Holidailies! Yes, indeedy, it’s that time of year again, where a bunch of us diehard bloggers do our best to blog on a daily basis throughout the month of December. My success on this has been…um…mediocre at best the last few years (which is sad considering that Richard and I *run* the thing) but hope springs ever eternal, so away we go!

To kick off the month of December (and let’s be honest, to provide fodder for a blog entry) we waited until today to pull out the tree. It’s always an ordeal, moving all the stuff in the storage closet out until the tree can be extracted, removing the cats, pulling out the tree box, removing the cats, remembering where we stashed the ornaments, removing the cats, attempting to stuff everything non-holiday related back into the storage closet, removing the cats, shutting the door, hearing a suspicious noise and reopening it to, you guessed it, remove the cats. Fun times.

Nutmeg’s excitement about the whole process was, as usual, palpable.

In years past this has been more exciting, because ever since we got Rupert and Ingrid in 2009, we’ve had cats climbing the tree. However, except for a brief dash by Sherman….

…..while we were assembling the pieces, none of the cats really seemed to care much at all. In fact the box the tree came in was far more interesting.

I suppose we ought to be happy about this, since it means we might finally be able to drag out all the nice, breakable ornaments that have been lurking in boxes in the attic for the past eight years, but in a way, it’s a little bit sad. It feels like the end of an era. We got so used to the amusement of having cats in the Christmas tree – in fact we actually looked *forward* to it each year – that it feels strange to think that we’re going to be back to having a plain, ordinary tree.

Well. Maybe not *completely* ordinary (yes, that is Cthulhu wearing a Santa hat at the top).

Ah well. To everything there is a season and all that. The tree is up and so now it’s starting to feel a little more festive around here. These days (especially with Rupert and Sherman) that’s just about the extent of the decorating we do.

Okay, except for one other thing. But for some reason these don’t stay put very long.

Happy Holidailies!



Is a year enough time to plan?

Posted on 1 November, 2017 6:15 pm by Jennifer 1 Comment

Last night, while lounging on the couch and waiting for trick-or-treaters to climb the stairs and ring the bell (I always feel bad for the littler ones because those front steps are kind of steep), Richard and I listened to a rebroadcast of the original radio program of War of the Worlds. Richard’s heard it before but for some reason, I never had (although I’ve read the book it’s based on, of course).

While the claims that the first airing of the radio drama in 1938 caused wide-spread panic are not true, the myth has continued to persist, and the radio drama itself has become part of west’s cultural heritage. And while we were listening, I noted to Richard that, in an era where social media wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye, and the radio was the most common source of news, it’s easy to see why some listeners might have been understandably concerned.

And that got us to chatting about whether or not something like the radio drama could even *work* today, in the era of instant communication, across a wide variety of media platforms. Richard and I, years ago, took part in Blog Like It’s the End of the World Day a couple times, which was a lot of fun, but we haven’t done that in a very long time (well, except for when we were overrun with Daleks and when the giant mutant spiders attacked, but that was just me doing it by myself, for fun).

So….now I’m wondering. Would anyone else be interested in trying to do an homage to the original radio drama of War of the Worlds, for Halloween, 2018? My thinking is that everyone who participated would have to agree to stick to the plot of the both the book or the radio play, and work within those parameters (not just radio, of course, but any video/images/text done in the original style and theme), but using current media to spread the story over the course of the day. I’m not entirely sure how we’d all pull it off yet – this requires some thought – but it just feels like something that would be fun to try.



Stroopwafel Saturday

Posted on 7 October, 2017 1:04 pm by Jennifer 2 Comments

My younger sister is a baker – not just a baking enthusiast like me, but a ‘went-through-training-and-knows-what-she’s-doing’ baker. So she’s who I contact when I have questions about why my bread is doing things it shouldn’t be doing, or what sort of cookie dough one should use when one is going to do cut-outs with patterns, and that sort of thing. She also, like me, loves to try new recipes, and on a recent trip up to Seattle to visit with her, we took advantage of the fact that we were both in the same place with access to a kitchen, and tried out a couple recipes – chocolate-filled hand pies, and homemade Tagalongs (the chocolate-covered peanut butter-filled cookies one can usually only get from Girl Scouts). It was messy and silly and tasty and a lot of fun and when I got home I got to thinking that if she and I lived closer, we’d likely be getting together on a regular basis to try out recipes and play with butter and sugar and flour.

So a week or so ago I sent my little sister this recipe and said, hey, even though we’re not in the same place, maybe we could try doing these together over Google Hangouts. She was game, so we checked our calendars, and today was the day.

The recipe itself is pretty straightforward – you mix up the dough and let it sit for a bit, and then you make the caramel (both of which smelled absolutely delightful while going together), and then you make the cookies themselves. And then the next step is to split an already-thin cookie into two even thinner pieces, while still hot (possibly there was a tiny bit of swearing and uttering of ‘ow, ow, ow!’ during that process), then dollop a generous amount of caramel in the middle and finally, smoosh the two pieces together, spreading the caramel syrup between them. Then you set those aside to cool and when they are done, you have stroopwafels!

If you happen to have a pizelle maker, which my sister does because she scored it for $10 at a garage sale years ago, then you can smash the dough in there and it will come out nice and thin with gorgeous patterning on both sides. However, if you do not have a pizelle maker (like me), you can jury-rig a dough-smashing system via the clever combination of an electric skillet and a saucepan. Put the dough on the skillet, grease the bottom of the saucepan, and then use that to smash it down into a flat thing. Pro tip – a regular waffle iron doesn’t work (I tried) – the divots are too deep and your dough won’t smash thin enough.

Here are my finished stroopwafels. I know they look a lot like lopsided pancakes (see above re. ‘don’t have a pizelle maker’), but trust me, they’re actual cookies, with delicious brown sugar maple caramel syrup in the middle, and they are quite, quite yummy.

The end result of the whole thing is that we both had a lot of fun, laughing and chatting over the video call, showing each other our dough and our cookies and our caramel, and we have decided we are going to try to do this on regular basis. Because after all, we live in the future now, with webcams and laptops that can be propped up in the kitchen, and living two states away from each other should not be the deterrent to doing something we both love to do, together.



Prototyping

Posted on 20 August, 2017 10:51 pm by Jennifer 2 Comments

I suppose I could have just pulled out one of the self-patterning yarns in my stash and done a stockinette sock, or else dragged out one of the other sock works-in-progress, but instead, flush on the heels of zipping through Mosaic Marbles, I decided I wanted to do a little more colorwork. Also I decided I’d be nice and make a pair for Richard, since the last one didn’t turn out so well.

So over the weekend (when I wasn’t processing a gazillion tomatoes into sauce, because it’s that time of year here in the Central Valley) I started and ripped out the first of a pair of socks, too many times to count. And then eventually I gave up because the yarn I was using was on the thin side and even 80 stitches around was too small and it looked like in order for them to fit, I might even have to go up to 100 stitches. I’m sorry, but life is too short to be knitting socks with that many stitches on the needles, so instead of turning the yarn into socks for Richard I decided that they were destined to be something else, and I cast on for these. The more I knit them the more I loved them and wanted to just keep on knitting them, and before I knew it, they were done.

I have loved this motif since I stumbled across it, many years ago, probably in a stitch pattern book somewhere. I like how it looks if you do it just in one color with knits and purls, but I love it the most when there are two colors in the mix, and suddenly there is this 3-D effect. It’s stranded, which is the perfect way to use thin yarn without ending up with a sock that’s much too thick to be practical (I do live in California, after all, where one doesn’t actually really need warm socks most of the year, unless one happens to work in an office where they routinely set the AC to ‘arctic’). I just did my usual ribbed cuff and heel flap and single-stitch stripes on the bottom of the foot, and I decreased the toe while still keeping the pattern going until almost the very end. I am quite pleased with the result.

However, I don’t think this is the end of it. As much as I like *these* socks, they’re missing something. I feel like there needs to be a better way to have the pattern flow organically, from cuff to heel to toe, without those solid blocks of color. So I’ll definitely be doing more work with this motif in the future.

Summer of Socks Count: 9



Clear

Posted on 14 August, 2017 7:47 am by Jennifer Comment

Because I finished the last pair of socks so quickly (and after I let my hands recover from that) I realized I had lots of time to do at least one more pair before the next pattern was posted. I thought, briefly, about casting on something new but then I remembered that there were two pairs lurking in bags that needed to be completed, so I sighed and dragged one out and slipped it back onto the needles.

I don’t remember when I first cast on for this pair, and I’d already finished the first one and gotten about halfway through the second leg before setting them aside. But I have been avoiding finishing these socks for a very, very long time. Even now, knowing that if I just sat down and focused it would only take me another couple hours, I still procrastinated, willing to knit just about anything else but these socks. On the plus side, this means I managed to whip out several lace pieces for the upcoming Lacy Knitters Guild newsletter, but on the minus side, it wasn’t until this morning that I sat down and finally finished off the toe, and that was only because the next pattern drops this evening and I need the needles free and I just couldn’t bear the thought of putting these things back onto a holder to lurk in a bag again. Better to just finish them off and get them out of my hair completely.

I am pretty sure the yarn is Knitpicks Felici, but I can’t swear to it because I lost the ball bands a long time ago. The pattern is something a friend was doing for her own pair of socks, and I liked it much more than whatever it was I’d started to do with this yarn, so I copied it (mostly – I reduced the number of stitches per pattern repeat in order to fit my gauge).

The feeling upon completing these socks is mostly relief. Am not sure if it was the pattern, or the colors, or a combination of both, but I’m just glad they’re done and I never have to knit another stitch on them again.

Summer of Socks count: 7



Two little wins

Posted on 6 August, 2017 4:34 pm by Jennifer Comment

Two recent ways in which I am winning at this whole ‘adulting thing’:

1) Yesterday I *really* wanted some sort of baked good, except I didn’t want to actually have to *bake* it (because sometimes I am just not in the mood, yes, I know, I too am shocked by this, and also sometimes all I want is just one little piece of a thing, and not an entire giant batch of thing – see above regarding the ‘adult’ part of this equation). I suppose one of us could have gone out to purchase a thing, but we were both tired and needed showers in order to go out in public, so that was my excuse to lounge, slug-like, on the couch and simply whine about the lack of baked goods without actually doing anything constructive about it.

Today I was feeling the same need for baked goods, and then it came to me – mug cakes! Single serving size, doesn’t require heating up the oven (it’s been roughly 5-bazillion degrees outside for the past several weeks, after all), and once it’s done, there aren’t any other servings lurking in the kitchen to tempt me.

So I made myself a nutmeg spiced mug cake…uh…I mean…’mug breakfast muffin’, thereby satisfying the craving for baked goods while not actually having to go anywhere *or* dirty more than a couple mixing utensils and a bowl, and thus it was a win.

2) This one may only be relevant to some of you – the sort who either currently live with, or have lived with, small creatures prone to making messes. In this scenario, the mess-making creature is, of course, a cat.

I was sitting on the couch, knitting, and I heard the tell-tale sounds of a cat about to hurl. I looked up, to see Sherman perched atop the tiny little end table by the window, head angled so as to achieve maximum mess-making potential once he let loose.

I only had seconds to respond. Leaping to my feet, I grabbed a small box that had been left on the coffee table, and charged over toward the cat. At the last possible moment, I reached out, box in hand, and CAUGHT EVERY SINGLE BIT OF IT. Said box was then closed up and stuffed into the trash, mess free. Definitely a win!

The fact that a different cat managed to hork in exactly the same place several hours later without me being able to make a similar save, thus requiring the exact amount of clean-up I was trying to avoid in the first place, is not relevant here. Shh. Leave me my joy.



The only thing not fun was the weaving in of ends

Posted on 3 August, 2017 6:49 pm by Jennifer Comment

Unlike the first pattern for Tour de Sock, I loved every single thing about the second one – Kanteletar. Colorwork! A new-to-me heel idea that takes the whole ‘your ankle is bigger than you think’ concept into account! Latvian braids!

(Please note bonus Rupert paw in top left of picture. After all, I couldn’t possibly ever manage to get anything photographed in this house without at least *one* cat involved.)

These were an absolute delight to knit. Turned cuffs and Latvian braids are annoyingly time-consuming (which I’m sure was part of the reason why they were included in this pattern, since this *is* supposed to be a race, after all), but they do look lovely when done right, so I don’t mind slogging through them because I know the results will be worth it. And doing the stranded colorwork on these reminded me that I have been wanting to do more stranded colorwork in general, and socks are the perfect vehicle for this (small, portable, naturally done in the round so you don’t have to worry about steeking or any other annoyances, and far less overall commitment than an entire sweater, so if you give up and chuck them in the time-out bin, it’s not a huge loss).

The heel on these is done as sort of a little cup, with increases that flare out at the back of the sock, and then the turning happens at the base, with some short rows as well as decreases. At first I thought maybe this heel wasn’t so effective – when I tried on the first sock, it felt very baggy. But when a friend with larger feet than mine tried it on, she loved it and said it was really comfortable…which thus led me to the conclusion that maybe it just felt baggy on me because I accidentally knit the feet too long, so wasn’t able to accurately judge how they fit.

So since this *is* the Summer of Socks, and there is still plenty of time before pattern #3 is releases, I decided to do up another pair, using that new-to-me heel. I also used the slip-stitch motif from Kanteletar because 1) I really like how the heel centers around it, 2) sometimes you want something slightly less boring than just plain stockinette, and also 3) it makes it a lot easier to get two socks to be identical in length when you can count pattern repeats and not just hold them up side by side and take some wild guesses.

Verdict: I was right – the cup heel was only baggy before because the foot was too big. I’m quite pleased with how these turned out, so much so that I might even be tempted to use this heel again.

As for the too-big pair of socks I completed for the challenge, well, no worries there – I’m in no danger of running out of socks (I’ve made dozens and dozens over the years – my sock drawer is overloaded) so those have been sent off to someone else who will hopefully love them as much as I do.

Summer of Socks count: 5




top