Invisible tea

I wrote a post all about how my car knocked a cup of tea all over the sock I'm knitting.  When I went to take a photo the sock had dried and no trace of the team was visible.  Good news for the sock, not so great for the post!  Anyways, here's a nice photo of the cat responsible.  Good job she's adorable.

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.

Spin, spin, spin

All advice I've read about learning to spin mentions spinning a bit every single day, so I have been.  I must say that this seems to be doing the trick and I really feel like I'm starting to get there.  The photo above probably doesn't look all that impressive, but I'm really rather proud of myself.  I was expecting my first yarn to come out really thick and thin, but this is mostly thin and a bit thinner.  It is by no means consistent yet but it is not as wildly varied as I thought it would be.  The plan for this is to spin until the bottle green runs out and then spin another strand out of a lighter green and then ply the two together and see what I end up with.

I've ordered a load more top in various different colours, as well as some to dye myself and hopefully if will arrive soon so that I can take some pictures.  Now obviously if I have all this tempting fibre on the way I'm going to need more spindles.  Much as I wish that I could be the type of person who is 'project monogamous' I'm just not, so I've been busy crafting my own spindles.

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They don't have hooks in yet so I have no idea how they spin, but they are only made from chopsticks and fimo so it won't break my heart if they turn out to be sucky.  I've also got a length of dowel to use so I can make some that are a bit meatier than these dainty little things.

Believe it or not I have actually also found some time for knitting.  The back of Stu's cardigan is done and I'm about 1/4 of the way up the right front..  I'd love to take a picture but every time I try there is magically a cat in the way.  Maybe I'll try again when they are eating or chasing the laser pointer or something.  So in lieu of a cardi pic here's a pic of the chief photo bomber herself.

Izzy cat

The cat sat on the.....

As I still haven't got my photos sorted of my Christmas projects I'm sticking with looking forward today.  Although a lot of my time (and daydreaming) is being taken up by spinning, I have finally managed to cast on for Stu's cardigan (the cardigan from Knits Men Want which I mentioned a couple of months back).  I never normally knit for men because... well because I am lazy and I don't like to knit for anyone bigger than myself - unless it's a hat or something small.  However, the silly man is going to marry me so I guess I can break the rules for him!  I started knitting about a week ago and I've got a couple more inches to do on the back so it's knitting up pretty quickly in acres and acres of grey Cygnet Wool Rich Aran I got from Modern Knitting.  Unfortunately I don't really have a good picture of it so you'll have to take my word for it.  I did take pictures, but this happened:

I suggested that to Izzy that she might like to go and sit elsewhere.  She responded thusly:

That's right kitten, make yourself comfy!

And this was when I knew it was game over for that little photo shoot.

However I do have a reasonable picture of my latest dye job, mainly because the cats haven't worked out how to photobomb a picture of things hanging from doors.

It's not a great picture, but it'll do.  This was achieved with yellow and red Wilton's, poured in opposite sides of a dish so that the stuff in the middle sort of mingled into orange and then microwaved..  The red isn't quite as red as I'd like but the overall effect is what I was after.  Hopefully it will be dry tonight and then I can twist it into a skein, because it always looks prettier like that.

Strike a pose!

Taking photos of my projects is sometimes a challenge.  If I'm on my own I have to make do with a timer or a mirror or just take a picture of the FO artfully draped around the house.  No more!  The solution?......

Get a cat.

Pattern: Burberry Inspired Cowl Neck Scarf by Julianne Smith a really quick and easy knit which I can highly recommend.  This is going in the Christmas box and I'll decide who it is for a bit closer to the day.  Oh and the cat was loving it, she is a total camera ho and would probably have sat like that all day if I'd kept snapping her!