Cute and warm

I am sitting here waiting for some medication to take effect.  I am sick again.  This hardly seems fair, and I am endeavoring to not be a grumpy Gus about it.  So I find myself with a half an hour until sleep, just enough time to post pictures of my dog. As promised, I have completed Audrey’s dog sweater.  See?

The sweater was originally a different project, a sweater for a cousin, begun way before this blog started.  It began to be a dog sweater when I messed up the stitch and ended up with a fairly wide bit of fabric I couldn’t use and wasn’t sure what else to do with it.  I discovered that the length of fabric fit around Audrey well.  She was then 11 pounds, which is a tad bit on the hefty side for a Yorkshire Terrier.  Now she’s about 9.2 pounds through cat-inspired exercise and illness, which means the sweater had to become a wrap sweater in order to fit.  I still need to shorten the wrap ties, but those ties make this one of the easiest-fitting sweaters I’ve ever wrestled onto a dog.

Honestly, dog clothing is on the silly side, and Audrey doesn’t like wearing it.  I mean, she’s a lapdog, but she’s still very much a dog‘s dog, if you know what I mean.  Nevertheless, I made this because Yorkies have fur issues – they don’t actually have fur, it’s hair, and they don’t have an undercoat. That’s good ’cause they don’t shed, but bad when it’s freezing out, because she takes a step out the door and starts shivering so much her paws skitter on the pavement.  So you can see that her getting deathly ill in January sorta made me think – hey, where’s that sweater!?

This one was designed to be loose in the right places, cover her tummy but leave her legs bare.  Audrey has this funny (really hysterical, actually) problem with her legs and feet – if they’re covered, she stops dead and refuses to move.  If you really want her to stay in place, put shoes on her.  She’ll stand there for hours on three legs.

As a last step, I am going to sew a harness right into the inside of this sweater, because separate harness + sweater = 15 minutes wrestling with dog.  That way I’ll just put this on and clip on her lead, and there will be less fuss for everyone, and a dog that doesn’t end up shivering pathetically!

Now I’m going to go collapse in bed.

P.S. So the Lion Wool (the royal blue in this sweater) … after about 5 minutes I had to get a hand covering.  It started to feel like I was rubbing my fingers with steel wool or an emergy board.  That can’t be good.  I guess this isn’t what it feels like to people who aren’t allergic?  What does it feel like?  I really don’t know.  Surely Lion Brand wouldn’t sell any if it felt like that to everyone.