Still Life, With Cats

Hooray, the last day of Thingadailies 2017, which means the last snowflake (for the year).

Naturally it is chock full of picots and long skinny points and all the things I like the least.

There are, by the way, 99 total snowflakes in this book, so it is entirely possible I might be doing this one more year. WHO KNOWS!

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.

This evening, while we were sitting at our computers, we heard skittering and thundering of little paws, and the distinctive cry of a cat who has caught some prey and is very, very proud of it.

I figured it was just Sherman doing his usual ‘time to burn off the crazy’ dash around the house, but when Richard went into the kitchen later, he started laughing.

Turns out the ‘prey’ Sherman had caught was a ball of yarn – a light fluffy mohair blend that apparently was extremely appealing to cats – and he was having SO much fun with it, throwing it into the air, batting it into a paper bag and then pouncing on it, smacking it across the floor.

I took the yarn away, and tucked it into my knitting bag while Sherman was otherwise distracted in a different room. Alas, that wasn’t enough to hide it because roughly ten minutes later, oh hey, is that skittering and sliding of paper and ‘I caught something I’m not supposed to have!’ vocalizations we hear again?

This time I hid the yarn better, so he couldn’t get to it. I was so tempted to let him keep it, because he was so happy playing with it, but I really have no desire to repeat the ‘extra tail’ experience of 2014, so he’ll just have to make do with the packing paper that’s still lying on the floor, and the collection of empty boxes, and the bazillion other, safer cat toys scattered all around the house.

*****

I could swear I have made a snowflake very similar to this one, but who knows. At this point they’re all starting to swim together.

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.

The downside to getting up at o-dark-thirty in the morning and driving down to spend all day in a brain-intensive class, followed by socializing with fellow knitters, combined with the fact that I always have a really hard time sleeping in unfamiliar places, is that today only happened through large amounts of caffeine and sheer will power.

Today’s class was only half the day, and was all about how to take better pictures (which I realize might not seem applicable to a fiber festival, but a lot of designers and yarn dyers and spinners have to do all their own photography, plus some of us just want our Ravelry pictures to maybe not suck quite so bad). The class was taught by the Shibaguyz, who were extremely energetic and witty for it being the morning of the last day of a four-day event (a fact that we all appreciated very, very much).

The awesome thing about this class is that it was specifically geared to everyone – from people with their fancy cameras with all those weird dials and gadgets, to people (like me) with their ‘point and shoot dummy’ cameras and mobile phones. It’s helpful that mobile phone cameras are way smarter we give them credit for, and have all kinds of useful settings that let people like me take better pictures than we have any right to, but now I know some extra tips that make me feel like I might actually have half a clue what I’m doing. Huzzah. Plus I came out of the class determined to build myself a light box (which means sorry cats, I may have to abscond with one of your boxes), and also make use of the Ott light that I keep forgetting I bought years ago specifically for lace knitting (the thinner the yarn, the higher the eyestrain).

Will my photography magically improve? Possibly not when it comes to the cats, but when it comes to things that don’t move on their own and can be posed and moved to get the right light, I’m feeling pretty confident.

*****

Speaking of better photography, you probably would expect today’s snowflake picture to be better, but here is where I confess that I did a bit of front-loading last week and finished out all the snowflakes for the rest of the month (because I knew I’d have very little time). So sorry – you’re stuck with crappy pictures for the next couple days.

And speaking of crappy pictures, here is what is quite likely the most boring snowflake in the book. Whee.

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.

I realized I haven’t actually talked about this at all, either here, or anywhere else I’m online, so…hey. I do a new thing now (that is yarn-related, because of *course* it is).

Last year, the Lacy Knitters Guild was looking for a new editor for the quarterly newsletter, which is half articles and half patterns. I started to ponder it but while the pattern section sounded like it’d be a whole lot of fun, the thought of having to come up with enough text for the front section was extremely intimidating. So I checked in with my friend, who was feeling the same way, except that it was the articles she thought would be fun, and the pattern section she thought wouldn’t. Long story short, we decided what the heck, we’ll give it a go, so basically ever since then, in between work and rehearsals and test knits and all the other stuff I’ve got going on, three of us (my friend, me, and our webmaster) have been making plans and having the occasional planning conference call and firing stuff back and forth to each other for editing and discussion. And I’ve been doing a *lot* of work on the lace itself – either charting out patterns (which has been interesting because terminology has changed a LOT since some of these were written, plus some need to be translated to English), or knitting them, or figuring out how to photograph them quickly, before the cats move in and turn it all into another lounging area and cat hair collection spot (last part is sometimes more difficult than you might imagine).

We’ve now put out three newsletters (with only a couple minor hiccups, but it’s all part of the learning curve!) and so far I’ve been having just as much fun with it as I expected. I’ve gotten pretty good at Stichmastery, and it helps that I’m a pretty fast knitter to begin with, because the turn-around time for some of this has been a bit quick, but the pile of lace work based on vintage patterns is growing, and it’s possible that I may or may not have used this as an excuse to invest in a large quantity of laceweight cotton yarn, but hey, it was on sale and you get free shipping if you hit a certain amount in your shopping cart and yarn purchased for ‘work’ doesn’t technically violate the unofficial yarn diet I’ve been on for a while, cough, cough.

*****

Anyway. Enough about knitting. Look, it’s another snowflake!

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.

I like today’s snowflake. I like that it’s not exactly the same all the way around (there’s bigger points and lesser points). I like it even though it’s chock full of picots.

I do not like so much that as I was doing the inner section, I didn’t discover that I’d skipped some stitches until I was nearly done with the outer section and then had to rip it out completely and start over again.

Fun times.

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.

Today’s snowflake pattern (#51, for those of you who care) is the second one in the book (so far) that called for beads (I made the first one last year). As with the previous one, I just ignored the part about the beads, but this time I also adjusted the pattern accordingly by adding in picots (yes, really, on purpose, sigh) as I crocheted it.

If nothing else, making all these snowflakes has definitely improved my confidence with crochet (although not so much my gauge or speed, but shhh, let me have this moment).

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.

Normally, it being a Monday, I would have rehearsal tonight, except that this past weekend was our latest concert set, and that means now I’ve got two Mondays off. Yay!

I celebrated by eating homemade pizza for dinner and working on some test knits. Do I know how to party or what.

*****

Here is today’s snowflake. After the last couple weeks of increasingly more complicated looking snowflakes, this one was a bit…well…boring.

No worries, though, I see oodles and OODLES of picots in my future (sigh).

Making a snowflake a day for Thingadailies.