This and that and a few threads
There are six columns in my flower afghan and eight rows. 48 granny squares. 4 borders each. When I am done with this thing, I’m going to count approximately how many stitches there are in the entire thing. Squares, borders, the whole thing. And I’m going to figure out about how long this blanket has taken me. I am fairly certain I am going to be appalled by the number of hours, but not surprised, exactly.
All six columns are now assembled, and two have been stitched together. If you’re wondering, yes, this feels exactly like making a quilt, except FAR MORE labor intensive. I never thought anything could be as labor-intensive as a quilt, but I was wrong. After the columns are stitched together, then there are two borders of different color. I could have just done one, however, I had to buy an entire new skein of red yarn to finish the last two red squares, so it’s getting a red border.
Meanwhile, I tried out a few stitches on my birches quilt. Take a look, because that’s the last you’ll see of them. They’re supposed to be waves, but I definitely did not like and I ripped them out. I think I know what I’m doing now (haha, sure). Tell you what, all I’ll commit to is that I’ll try the next one I thought of, and I’ll show it to you regardless of whether or not I like it. I can’t promise to keep it.
I wish my camera showed the color variation in the blue fabric well … the warp and weft are different colors, and it gives it an interesting depth. The weft is the blue that you see, but the warp threads that were used are silvers and golds. It’s so pretty. Unfortunately, that means that most of the blue and gold embroidery threads I’d chosen do not show up at all. Bummer.
To take a break from big projects, I keep cooking, hopefully nothing too hard. I find I’ve been liking pureed soups for their simplicity and how tasty the simmered ingredients can be when blended. Last week I invented some zucchini soup with basil, which I enjoyed very much. I just looked for a similar recipe online with no luck - this one’s not chilled or curried or made with dairy or mushrooms or whatever else, so I’ll have to write it down sometime.
This week I tried my hand at African Peanut Soup, but made it a whole lot spicier than the recipe indicated (honestly, 1/8 tsp of cayenne in a tomato/peanut butter soup is nothing! That’s not even respectable!). I even made my own peanut butter for it, because I have a food processor, and I can. I fell in love with the peanut soup at a local restaurant and had to try making it, and this is pretty darn close. It was also pretty simple, even though I made the peanut butter. Plus, I then got to mix the leftover peanut butter with honey, which I will apply to graham crackers later. Winner!
I will leave you with The Two Troublemakers. Oh, and they certainly are. Audrey got a good report on her health the other day - she will probably never be totally well again, but we are told her recovery so far is unusual and really very good. She’s out of the woods. Callie, on the other hand, is completely well and leaping tall buildings and all that, and getting fatter and fluffier by the day. She’s a year and a half old now, and thank pete she’s not a kitten anymore. That was just a nightmare. I’m kind of dreading spring as our temperatures climb above 85F - what will she be like when she sheds?! O the horror!
In the immortal words of Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Christmas vacation: “Later dudes.”
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.
A Holiday Gone Awry
Ah, my poor neglected blog. I miss you. My crafts, I miss you also. But as usual, December is a busy month and life is definitely NOT going how I might like, or how I planned. Life is doing whatever it wants without my input, as usual. So, a brief update first, for those who have missed my ramblings in other forms, starting with:
Traveling. We flew to Washington state to see my brother graduate from college in environmental sciences. Woo! Family merriment ensued. There was snow, which will probably be my only glimpse of the stuff this year. It was a great, silly, noisy, people-filled time. I cooked a lot. It was a nice break because mostly during December I’m busy …- Raising money. Fundraising season is upon me, which means work has eaten my lunch on occasion. It’s always busy this time of year. It’s a hard year for it, what with the economy and all. Ironically, the economic state means both there’s more demand for the services we provide and yet less funding to provide it. Rock, meet hard place. So in the evening I was relaxing by …
- Crocheting. I had most of a sleeve done on my cardigan. Then I found out I’d messed up the pattern, and had to rip out all but two rows (I was on row 42) and start again. RIIIIIP! D’oh! I’d almost be done with both sleeves (and hence the sweater) now except for that! But I had a darn good reason I made such a big mistake, I was thinking about …
Audrey. My pup is a very sick little dog, and has been for about a week now. Although there are four bullet points here, she is pretty much all I’ve thought/worried about for a week. She has been having serious kidney problems, and has been in the hospital getting IV fluids to flush her little body of whatever it was that it doesn’t like. What that “something” is - a bacterial infection? a toxin? we just don’t know. Hopefully we’ll get some answers soon, and she will get well and get to come home. Her condition has been up and down so far. If anyone has spare positive and happy thoughts to send her way, she could really use all the good vibes she can get.
I am planning a few changes to my blog in the next couple of weeks, and a return to my various projects. My blog has been active for a year and a half now, and over that time my life and my interests and my ideas about blogging and crafting and art have undergone a series of mutations. I am nothing if not ever-changeable. I am looking forward to getting back into it and seeing what else I can do.
TTFN, Miriam
