My handwriting and signature are somewhat notorious for their inscrutability. But you can judge for yourself via this nifty handwriting meme… I first spotted this at Mim’s, although Julia’s post reminded me to actually do it.
Write a pangram on a piece of paper, sign your first name, take a photo of it, and load it onto your blog or upload into the flickr pool.
A while ago, I mentioned that I’m going to the Midwest Master’s in Neenah, Wisconsin. I just realized that I’ll be hitting the road for that a week from tomorrow! Woo-hoo!! It’s been way too long since I took a road trip or took any knitting classes.
I’m taking three classes – two from Anna Zilboorg and one from Merike Saarniit. I’ve taken a weekend seminar from Anna before and met Merike at that. I picked classes that sound interesting and that should also challenge me:
Exotic Stitches for More Than One Color – Anna Zilboorg (3 hours)
“Multi-colored knitting need not be stranded; many fascinating patterns are developed with one color at a time and a few simple techniques.”
Twisted Travelling Stitches – Anna Zilboorg (6 Hours)
“Austrian twisted travelling stitches create patterns in high relief that resemble woodcarvings. They are easy to do with a few special techniques and a little practice.”
Rainbow Dyeing in the Microwave – Merike Saarniit (3 hours)
“Experiment with making your own hand-painted yarns or rovings in an efficient, no-mess, no felting or fulling, low water use method!”
If anyone’s going to be at Neenah or is along the route between Minneapolis and Neenah and is interested in getting together to knit, let me know!
Wednesday randomness again, since I have no particular ideas for today’s blog entry.
Knitting excitement of the week was teaching myself Norwegian purling. I’ve been knitting continental and either purling by throwing in my own special very slow throwing method or by “scoop” (aka “combined”) purling. Combined purling produces a twisted purl stitch, so it’s great for, say, seed stitch in the round where you can knit into the back of the stitch next time to untwist it, but pretty much sucks for ribbing. Norwegian purling rocks. I can’t believe it took me so long to try it!
A few weeks ago, I wandered into Tuesday Morning to get some notecards and see what oddities struck my fancy. Imagine my delight at finding this candle:
Here’s a shot without the lid – those are little wax chocolate chips that are loose on top of the candle:
Tragically, the candle turns out to be too strongly scented for me, so it’s gone to live with my brother. Maybe the angelfood cake or lemon meringue pie wouldn’t be quite as strong…
Last week, I picked up some Vesper sock yarn in the Strange Little Mama colorway. Fun! I think that covers all the yarns I’ve been craving…
Not to worry about Chaos not being in that picture. It’s a sunny morning here, so he’s busy lying on the floor in a sun stupor. He had a rough night. I pulled out the stove yesterday evening and rescued six or seven sparkly mice. Chaos hopped behind the stove as soon as I pulled it out, snactched SRM, hopped back out, and got busy playing. Some of that busyness included dropping SRM on my face in the middle of the night, trying to get me to play fetch instead of sleeping… exactly as relayed to Chaos from Cricket in the comments yesterday. Thanks a lot, Maeve!
I’ve been 5’9″ since I was in fifth grade. Haven’t grown even a fraction of an inch. This is good, because when I was two and they were estimating my future height based on normal growth curves and my height then, it looked like I was on track to be 6’5″ by the time I was 16! I’m easy to pick out in my class pictures from grade school – I’m the one looming in the middle of the back row. And I played a lot of basketball during grade school and junior high, even though I was terrible at it.
Interestingly, I don’t really think of myself as tall most of the time. I do when I’m shopping for clothes, since womens pants are nearly always too short for me; I mostly wear mens jeans. I also thought of myself as tall when I was doing the internet dating thing – it turns out that most guys might say they’re ok with dating women taller than they are, but in reality… they’d get weird about it.
That second piece of tape in the first picture? I was trying to figure out what Chaos’ Height is. Let’s just say that it’s not easy to measure a cat and this is the best guesstimate:
“Hey, it’s kind of fun to pull this off the wall.”
Kat is having a contest – list five places other than your home or a knitting store where you’ve knitted. Here’s my list:
And the place I always mean to go knit but never quite manage to make it to… The Smitten Kitten (a feminist s*x toy shop about 10 blocks away), which has a weekly knitting group on Sunday mornings.
I finished the cage liner and will send it off to Chris tomorrow! Although there might be a bit of resistance about that…
What I particularly like about this picture is that, if you click on it and make it larger, you can see the tabby striping on the side of Chaos’ face. Chaos is not exactly a black cat – he’s a stealth tabby. He has ultra black tabby markings on a near black background. You can only see the stripes when he’s in bright sunlight, illuminated by a flash, or if you spend some time around a cat who’s really, really black, like Chaos’ mom Riley.
I’ll give you some time to cope with the shock. Do you think I need to bow out of the Black Cat Web Ring?
A few oddiments… I’ve made some progress on my Sunny Sock.
Most of it while I was hanging out with some coworkers after work on Thursday. It was 82F. In April. In Minnesota. We drank and were merry.
I’m also making quite a bit of progress on the cage liner that I’ll send to Chris on Monday for her local Humane Society. Sadly, I’m almost out of orange Canadiana, so I’ll be switching to all black or to green and black.
Here are a few more songs for the playlist – some from the comments yesterday and some from cds I picked up at the library:
It’s sunny and warm here, so I’m going to clean up my bike and hit the trails. Have a great weekend!
Here’s the list of all the songs I received. I think the songs with the most suggestions were Love Cats (the Cure), Stray Cat Strut (the Stray Cats), Black Cat (Janet Jackson), and Cat Scratch Fever (Ted Nugent).
Inspired by the lists you sent, I put together a Chaotic Cat mix. I was surprised at how few of the suggestions I had in my music library, but I did my best.
Thanks again to everyone who submitted a playlist! You definitely got me thinking, laughing, and inspired.
Very sleepy today. Set my alarm wrong and only Chaos being naughty and knocking something over woke me at anywhere close to my regular time. So be warned – I’m even less coherent than usual!
Another thrift store find – perfect Project Spectrum April colors, eh?
I’ve also started knitting (brace yourselves for the surprise) another sock, in a very Project Spectrum Opal that Christine sent me for losing a contest.
To reassure Marina, who’s concerned that I seem to be knitting nothing but socks these days, here’s a picture of the cage liner I started knitting last night. Chris is collecting 6″x6″ acrylic squares to be sewn into cage liners for her local Humane Society, although I decided I could certainly manage a 24″x24″ cage liner for some poor kitty looking for a home.
For those wondering if Chaos really is that curious (leading to many pictures with him in them), yes. He’s a very curious, busy guy and he keeps a close eye on me. Of course, that said, you’ll have noticed that he isn’t in any of the pictures above. That’s because he’s been very busy keeping an eye on birds through the window:
Today we shall celebrate black cats. (What? You think I do that every day? Um, well, maybe so…)
Last week Trish posted a picture of some very cool cat stitchmarkers she’d purchased. I went and checked out the lovely stitch markers Karen makes and ordered a set of black cats for very small needles and another set for medium needles.
Aren’t they great? These are the ones for small needles.
And here are the markers for medium needles – Karen included a bonus marker for me – recognize Chaos’ brother Diablo there on the right?!! Now I need to start a shawl or something that will use lots and lots of markers…
Last week I took care of my neighbor Anna’s cat Sweets while Anna was in Hawaii. One of the best things about living in my building is that we exchange catsitting duties – so I went down the hall and visited Sweets a few times a day and one of my neighbors will do the same for Chaos while I’m out of town. Anyway, Anna brought back some very fun black cat swag for me!
From the left, swizzle sticks, a very cool black cat nodder, and one of my wine glasses decorated with a little black cat that hangs from the rim by its tail.
Congratulations to Sydney (aka “Doctor Dirt“), who was lucky number 15 and the winner of the Chaotic Playlist Contest – a package will be heading her way very shortly. Sometime this week, I will post a list of all the songs that were submitted – they were great! Thanks to everyone who participated.
Anyone want to hazard a guess how I missed this bit o’ yellow in my life?! *smacks forehead*
Over the weekend, I finished another pair of socks…
Some recent sock yarn procurement… From left, Dicentra Designs in Kingsfoil and Pelennor, Sunshine Yarns in Denim and Gryffindor (I am so happy about that skein), Brooklyn Handspun in Ramblings, and the previously mentioned Treadsoft in Sunburst and Burples.
Another fun booklet from the thrift shop, for knitting accessories flat and then seaming (for hats, socks, mittens)…
Annotated with these words to live by:
