G. Knerd

Four years ago, the Yarn Harlot declared the start of the Knitting Olympics – and I didn’t do it.  I could use any excuse I want about how I was in college, it was a weird time for me, I didn’t have the yarn for a good project, yadda, yadda, yadda.  The real reason I didn’t go for it was…er…well, if we’re going to be quite honest here (and when are we not?), I was just too lazy to put the effort into picking a pattern, and finding the yarn, and waiting to start until the right time, and so forth.  When I have the urge to start a project, very little can get in my way – even the Knitting Olympics.

This year, though, I’m in.  I’m doing it.  I’m signing up for the Knitting Olympics (in fact, just did, right here).  I’ve got the pattern (Anjou from French Girl Knits), the yarn (Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine in the 1275 colorway), and the needles.  The yarn is wound up.  I’ve swatched (although I’m living dangerously, because I’ve decided to skip blocking the swatch and fudge the numbers a bit between my inability to get gauge and the lack of a size that really fits me well).  I’m ready to go.

Or, I was ready.  Then Monkey Kitty got involved.

Now I like untangling knots more than most people (I’ve actually begged some of my friends to let me untangle skeins they got into a mess), but this was not what I wanted to wake up to this morning.  Luckily, only one of the three balls was really unwound (but boy was it ever!), and Monkey Kitty didn’t break the yarn in too many places.  Still, I’ll be spending a bit of time tonight turning this:

Back into this:

Because tomorrow, I get to cast on and go to town.  This will be interesting – the pattern doesn’t look too challenging technically, but it does have lace which has to be blocked (actually, the whole thing needs to be blocked), and I’ll need to plan accordingly for that one.  Also, there’s miles of stockinette down the body – that’s the endurance section.  And then there’s the seaming, which based on the description seems fiddly at best.

Really, I can’t wait.  Except I have to.

Damn rules.

Remember how Monkey Kitty has an extreme fondness for all things yarn and wool related?  Well, I wasn’t telling the whole story in the last post when I told you about how I’d thwarted his attempts to destroy the knitting.

See, I apparently didn’t learn my lesson about leaving hats hanging out around the house, and that night while we were sleeping, Monkey Kitty stole into our room, jumped up on the dresser, and stole another hat!  Since he was stealthy enough not to wake us, no one stopped him from actually damaging the hat, so what I woke up to that morning was this:

Now, really, that doesn’t seem so bad, actually…until you get up close with the damage, at which point this:

And this:

Plus a couple other loose ends convinced me that the hat was too far gone to be saved.  Luckily, this wasn’t a hand made hat and didn’t carry much sentimental value, so after a few minutes of cursing myself for leaving it out and Monkey Kitty for taking advantage of the situation, I moved on to thinking, “Well, what can I do with this now?”

And then I thought, “You know, I could take it apart and salvage the yarn for another project…”  (We’ll forget, for a minute, that the yarn for the hat is pure polyester and thus relatively unlikely to ever be knit by me.)

After a couple stitches had been unraveled, I got a clue that maybe this would be a messier process than I had signed up for:

It turns out that chenille sheds.  Massively sheds.  Especially when you’re pulling the length of it through the stitches to get to a point where you can just start unraveling.

After about a dozen stitches, something else occurred to me.  Something I’d read about on the Yarn Harlot’s blog just a few months ago.  Something about, er…unraveling ribbing?

Yep, that’s right – ribbing can only be unraveled in one direction (took me about 3 days to accept it, so if you haven’t had the revelation – or the failed experience – give it a minute to sink in).  Which meant that while one side of the hole I was making was perfectly fine for unraveling:

The other side was having, er, difficulties:

Sighing, I decided to deal with that problem later, and soldiered on working the hole bigger until it reached all the way around the hat:

And after that, it was pure, unraveling goodness.  Am I the only one who gets a perverse pleasure out of frogging knitting?  Especially store-bought knitting – there’s something so powerful in the idea that you can take this thing and reduce it down to component parts which you can then use to make something else.

Or maybe that’s just me.  That’s cool, I’m used to being…special.

When everything was said and done (and after doing the same hole making/enlarging process on the other side of the non-ravelable half), I ended up with a huge pile of unusable “stuff” and a few balls of yarn:

Anyone want some polyester chenille yarn?  I think I’ve gotten all the pleasure I need out of it.

Here’s another episode in the Saga of Monkey Kitty and the Knitting.  It probably says something that I reached for the camera before saving the hat.  The same behavior (and the laughing) probably also taught him that his behavior was okay.  Whoops.

It started with him stealing one of my skiing hats out of the office while the Blanket Thief wasn’t looking and running downstairs with it.  Unfortunately for him (and luckily for the hat), I was sitting downstairs and saw him as soon as his feet hit the first level.

At first, he seemed to be a bit nervous about having an audience:

"Uh...Daddy? Could you go back upstairs, please?"

Then he went back to sniffing the hat:

"Mmmm...wool...yummy..."

And then he disguised some chewing as snuggling with the hat.  Don’t be fooled, though – he had some yarn between his teeth for this shot.

"Nom, nom, nom"

But then, the stress of having an audience seemed to get the better of him, and he collapsed under the weight of the camera.

"It's no fun if you're watching!"

Quickly thereafter, the hat was taken back to its rightful place in the hat box in the closet, out of reach of adventurous kitties.  Despite a couple slightly-more-frayed bits of yarn, there’s no real damage…at least, not to this hat…

I think I may have mentioned before that Monkey Kitty is a bit…er…obsessed with yarn and all things made with it.  He’s been known to steal balls of yarn, socks, and even an occasional full sweater (although he usually doesn’t get very far with those).  This week has been a pretty good one for catching him in the act – such as the following exchange, caught on camera.

"No one watching to the left..."

"No one watching to the right..."

"Oh...uh...HAI! Didn't see you there..."

"What? Oh, *this* knitting? No, I wasn't planning to steal it! What ever gave you that impression?"

Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to catch him in the act every time…more on that next time.

This weekend, the Blanket Thief and I were invited to a baby shower (well, technically, we were invited several weeks ago, but the actual event happened this weekend).  And last week, I saw some Magic Slippers that my friend Hot Pink Mama had created, and…well…I have plenty of leftover sock yarn by this point.  Most of it I’m keeping to eventually make a Blankie, but there’s a few skeins that are wool or bamboo or corn based which wouldn’t fit in well with the other wool-based yarns, so Magic Slippers seemed like a great idea.

I pulled out a leftover skein of something – I think it might be Maizy, if my memory isn’t failing me, but I have no idea whether that’s a company or a particular line of yarn or what.  The ball band is long gone, so the color is also past knowing.  Really, the only thing I really remember about this one is that it’s got corn in it.  And it makes really thick, squishy socks.

Given that we didn’t know what gender the baby-to-be will be, mottled purple seemed like a nice, neutral choice.  I read the instructions for the slippers at SockPixie’s blog, turned on some TV, and went to work.

The sole took about an hour – SockPixie says that she can normally whip up a pair in that time, but I think I lost time between using a smaller needle size, slightly sticky yarn, and reverse engineering the pattern (because, er, I didn’t want to go back and look at the actual instructions…).  I bet if I were using larger needles and/or wool-based yarn, I’d come much closer to the pair per hour rate that she’s churning them out…although even then, I doubt I’d really match her speed.  (Reminds self that it’s not a race, really.)

For a bit of perspective, here’s the sole against my fingers.  Keep in mind that I actually have really small hands and the needles are size 0 (2.0mm).

Again, at this point, I didn’t want to check the directions, so while I knew I had to pick up stitches I didn’t remember how many.  I’d slipped the first stitch of every row, giving it a neat selvage edge, so I figured I’d just pick up a stitch per every slipped stitch.  Ultimately, I think I ended up with about 65 or so stitches – and since I was supposed to end up with 62, that sounds pretty good to me.

I loved the way the circular needle wrapped around the sole after the stitches were picked up – it reminded me of a trilobite.

This is where my booties stop looking like the original, however.  SockPixie’s version is knit in garter stitch, I decided to go with stockinette so the cuff would roll over a bit at the top.  I also did different sets of decreases (although that might not actually be noticeable, now that I think about it).

At this point in writing the post, Monkey Kitty walked over the keyboard and managed to make my cursor completely disappear.  Oh, the joys of having cats…although, as you’ll see later, there’s an argument that I deserved it…

Anyway, the top of the booty was much quicker than the sole, and before I knew it, I had a booty!  (Does anyone else think the singular of “booties” is weird looking?  Or, at least, odd in the context of babies?  Although, I suppose, it’s all a cycle – booty calls lead to babies lead to booties…er…anyway…) Here, look at the booty!

Almost instantaneously, the second booty also appeared – it really was like magic!  There was a pair!  And they were sooo cute!  Looking at them, I thought that maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea to start making babies of my own – you know, so I could have my own sets of adorable little baby booties like this:

At that point, the Blanket Thief declared that we would have to get those booties out of my sight now, and that I wasn’t allowed to make any more of them.  He considers them the Baby Booties of Doom™, and worries about the effects of me knitting more.

I might still make a few sets in secret, though.  They’re just too cute.  Seriously.

As to why Monkey Kitty might be mad enough to make my cursor disappear…well…right now, he’s my substitute baby, so I forced him to try them on.

Turns out, kitties don’t like wearing booties.  They also don’t fit very well.  Who knew?

(Don’t worry, the booties were thoroughly washed before being given to the mommy-to-be.  And, although annoyed and embarrassed, no cats were harmed in the making and photographing of the booties.)