Good Thing no.5

I nearly changed the title of this post because every time I look at it I get Mambo no. 5 stuck in my head (the Lou Bega version, anyone remember this?)  Anyways..moving on!  Yesterday I hinted at some luvverly new fibre I have acquired:

On the left is some super dooper brightly coloured merino top and on the right is some wonderful sparkly bits which I will be adding to everything I spin with gay abandon from now on.  Both from Shunklies Etsy shop.  This was my first foray into buying on Etsy and it was a pleasure - although I'm kinda wishing I'd never looked now because there is sooo much stuff I want on there.  I'm going to hold off on spinning the top for a little while until I can decide exactly how I want it, but I have spun some of the sparkle into this candyfloss pink.

You can't really see the sparkle in a photo, but it is there and it makes the magpie in me very happy indeed.

A good list

I'm having a funny old time at the moment, people close to me having OMG Dramaz and the like, so I've been a little preoccupied of late.  However, good stuff has been happening too and because I'm a cheery sort I'll skip right over the crap.

Good thing no.1.  Izzy is much much better now, she actually feels like a cat now rather than a bag of coathangers.  On the flip side she has now turned into a speshul snowflayke princessy nightmare.  Obviously she got a little too accustomed to being fattened up and now we can't even go near the fridge without her shouting at us for titbits.  Sigh.

Good thing no.2.  I won a year's supply of Tetley tea!  Twitter is a marvellous thing you know.  I've been retweeting every Friday for weeks and never thought I'd win, but win I did and when it arrives I shall finally have an answer to the question of how much tea is a year's supply of tea.

Good thing no.3.  I dyed some yarn and it is good.

I've attempted brown a few times by mixing up colours and got something unexpected each time.  This time I used some brown Sugarflair paste which seems to have worked really well.  I used 3 jam jars for this yarn, the brown in one, some pink Silver Spoon food colour in another and some lemon lime KoolAid in the third.  I dunked a corner of the skein in each and microwaved the lot.  In an ideal world I'd have left a little less yarn in between each jar because I think I have too much white but I like it anyway.

Good thing no.4.  Rowan have finally brought out a magazine I like (which is sort of bad because I really don't need to add projects to my queue!) after I stopped my subscription a couple of years ago.  There is even something in there that I might knit for my wedding - although I'll have to get cracking on that one if I want to get it done on time, so maybe not.

And Good thing no 5.... will have to wait until tomorrow when I can take some pics of the really great new fibre I got in the post the other day.  It's worth waiting for, at least it was for me!

Getting better

After a week of worry and puzzlement we finally got a reason for Izzy's illness.  I took her to the vet on Thursday and had to leave her there in the hope that someone could work out why she wasn't eating.  Around 8:30 that night one of the vets phoned up and said that they thought they could feel a small soft mass in her tummy.  We immediately put 2 and 2 together and asked them if it could be an earplug.  After opening her up it was found to indeed be an earplug which she had eaten and was stuffing up her insides.  Given that I had found a nice sicky pile of four earplugs and an elastic band a couple of days before she went to get spayed I should have realised sooner, but because she got ill after having an operation we all got fooled into thinking it was the anaesthetic that did it.  So she is recovering at home, trying hard to grow back all her shaved fur with no idea of how much vet bills are!

Because we have been having to watch her pretty much 24/7 and also because I seem to have some kind of mystery wrist pain I haven't really done much of anything the last few days.  I tried to knit some of Stu's cardigan, but that really hurt so I have been spinning in short bursts just to feel like I'm doing something.  Hopefully in a few days I should have a second length of green yarn to ply with the bottle green I finished a while ago, I haven't bothered to take a picture of this because it is quite boring, even if I do say so myself.  My black white and grey stripy stuff is growing slowly, I'm really enjoying the striping so I think I'll probably do a lot more yarns like this in the future.  Here's a little piccy, you can't see the white bits but you can see the other stripes.  Now I just need to think what to do with it when it's done.

Busy with Izzy

Once again it's all about the cats today.  Little Izzy continues to be poorly and now has not voluntarily eaten a thing since Friday.  We're off to the vet again tomorrow, but until then we are working hard to get enough food in her to keep her going.  This has involved a few scratches and lots of flying tuna.  Stinky.  This is really frustrating for us, but mostly for Billie, especially in the mornings when we go off to work and leave her effectively on her own with no one to play with.  She's been quite well behaved but I can see that her pent up energy is making it a struggle to be good.

In the midst of all this we have managed to book our wedding.  It's happening in June, so once Izzy is better it will be all hands to the pumps to try and get that properly organised.  We are going for a fairly laid back affair so hopefully it shouldn't cause us too much stress, but those sound like famous last words to me!  So with everything else going on I've not really had much time for craft.  I did finish spinning up two very small bits of fibre that came free with one of my new spindles.  I thought I'd spin them on their own and then ply them together just so that I could give plying a go really.

Not great, but not terrible either.  there is a small amount of the fibre left as one of my plies was a lot thinner than the other and I'm probably going to spin that up so that I can try out chain plying.  Chain plying preserves the colour order of singles and my latest projects is striping from black to greys to white so I'd really like to chain ply that instead of relying on 2 singles with matching stripes.

Oodles of spindles

I'll start with a quick kitty update, because they really have been my main focus since yesterday and any crafty activities have been slotted around them.  They need sympathy at the moment so if one of them climbs into my lap then my project gets put down right away.  Izzy is not a happy cat at all, she did a monumental upchuck just after she got home and again in the night and she just looks a bit sad.  We are hoping she'll perk up soon but we're keeping an eye on her.  Billie is like a new cat though, she's been my little shadow and is behaving herself beautifully, long may it continue!

Anyway, cats aside I've managed to get a little spinning done, mainly to try out my two new spindles.  Here's my little collection in a rather lovely painted jam jar that my friend Marion made me about 13 years ago.

The front two are the new ones, the one on the left was sold on eBay by someone who'd got it as part of a kit but hadn't taken to spinning and the second one was from this seller who makes them.  I tried to take a nice close up of this but it hasn't worked too well.  You can just make out the notch at the bottom which allows you to turn the whole thing over and use it as a bottom whorl instead.  I like it a lot, it has nice little details and it came with a small amount of fibre which meant I could check out how it spins without starting on any of my fibre.

 And, just quickly, because I mentioned it once and never took a picture, here is my plain boring sock I started at Christmas using yarn I dyed with Kool-Aid waaay back.  I've kind of ground to a halt because of other projects but here it is.

You what!

Last night's wedding venue appointment has been postponed until Saturday, but the lady was very apologetic and let us know all the dates that were free.  So instead of going there or spending the evening knitting or spinning we high tailed it round to my parents and had a big old wedding pow wow  Between us we have decided that our favourite date was June 3rd, so providing the venue looks good I shall be getting married in just over 4 months - eek!

However, for today I cannot be thinking about all that at all.  We finally shipped the kittens off to the vet to be neutered today, we'd left it longer than we intended and being a boy and a girl we didn't want to risk any incidents.  A few days ago we spotted Billy clambering on Izzy's back and making a very inept job of humping her so the phone call to the vet was made with haste.  Stu took them in this morning and a short while later I get a text saying that Billy is a girl!  I am still in shock, Billie (as she henceforth shall be known) can't be a girl!  The vet said they understood how it happened, she is very big and is a total bruiser and you know...the humping.  So I've been out today and bought them some slightly less gender specific collars, all the while cursing the stooopid woman we got them from.

So for tonight I will hopefully be getting some actual knitting and spinning done while I help my kitty get in touch with her feminine side.

Bridezilla awakes

I had a post planned for today, all about the spinning I've been doing and the new knitting book I got as a replacement for a duplicate Christmas present.However, I'm feeling far too distracted for this so I'm just going to write a quick post about what's on my mind. 

Wedding. 

I could stop there, because that is basically what's going on in my brain.  When we got engaged in June we both knew that we wanted to get married as soon as possible but we are just now really starting to organise it.  Tonight we are off to see a lady about the reception and we may even have a date by the end of the day and all of a sudden I'm writing lists of things to organise, things to think about, trying to think of things I've not yet thought of but may need to think about thinking about...and so on.  I'm aware that I'm being a weeny bit crazy and hope this is not a sign of things to come.  With any luck I'll be feeling a bit more lucid and grounded tomorrow if things are a little more concrete.  Til then!