Trish Knits.com

A Comfy Pillow…

January 27, 2010 By Trish Leave a Comment

Tegan finds a comfy pillow

The sight of this photo is going to make cat lovers say, “awww!” But I know all you Yarnies out there are cringing.This is Tegan, my 16-year-old tabby, curled up on my desk. In a pile of Rowan Kidsilk Haze. My DH quipped that Tegan probably thought my mohair needed “mo’ hair” in it. But alas, this is a definite testament to the yarn’s softness, that she would choose it for a pillow. She’s still sleeping on it now, and I fear that her individually uniquely stripey hairs are now permanently entwined into it.

Perhaps, in a weird way, this isn’t an entirely bad thing. Tegan is my little shadow and when I am home, she is rarely away from my side. It has always been this way, much to the chagrin of our other cat, but she is my constant companion. Many mothers I know complain that they can’t get peace, even in the bathroom, for their kids following them in there. For me, it’s the cat. She’s always on my desk pawing at me for attention, and constantly walking across my keyboard if I don’t respond fast enough (“fast enough” being a half a second shorter than, “now!”). Of course walking across the keyboard over and over again can cause havoc, especially when I’m trying to code HTML or something, and often I find myself saying something cross in exasperation.

Tegan is getting older now, and she is thin and not in the greatest health. We do our best to provide for her needs as an elderly member of our family, but we know that the day is coming that I won’t have the constant meowing in my ear or the special coding generated by kitty paws taking yet another stroll across my keyboard. I know that I shall miss her terribly, but at least now I know that someday soon I will have a Kid Mohair wrap to snuggle up with and always remember her. And I am sure I’ll be forever finding tan and black individually striped hairs… and I shall smile when I do.

Filed Under: blog, Knitting, Pets, Yarn Tagged With: cat

The 12 Days of Blogging

December 2, 2009 By Trish 1 Comment

Hi There!

Sorry I’ve been away so long. Do I have an excuse? Not really. I’ve been knitting, as you’ll see in a moment, but for the last couple weeks I thought it was sort of boring to look at so I didn’t blog about it. Which doesn’t mean I didn’t at least think about blogging. I thought about it, a lot. The thing is, I’ve been having trouble turning the thinking into doing. I didn’t even do the knitting group meeting report from two weeks ago yet. Maybe I’ll try that tomorrow. Or sometime before the next meetup on Saturday! Wish me luck on that.

In fact, I’m setting a goal for this month. In honor of the Holiday Season, I am going to try to blog at least 12 times this month. 12 times. It won’t be easy, given that the dark days of winter suck the motivation right out of me, but I am going to try. Hang in there with me!

So anyway, on to the knitting:

Long Stocking Cap in progress

I’m finishing up the third stripe of my long stocking cap. I like it, I think. But, the design has a lot going on and some of it is getting lost. The original pattern was two colors (a main color and a contrast color for the ribbing and tassel). I decided to incorporate stripes. But there’s also these cables in the pattern, that creep up the hat and shift around in a spiral as you do each repeat. Well, the stripes are sort of eliminating the effect of the spiral. So I could have left the spiral out, I think, but oh well. It will be interesting to see how this hat comes out.

I’m hoping to have it done for Christmas (it’s not a gift), but right now it’s feeling doubtful.

Hey, guess what? My Christmas shopping is almost done! Next… the dreaded Christmas card. I ordered custom ones again this year with our photos on them. I like making the card but I hate the whole mailing part. It’ll take me from now til Christmas to get them all done.

Finally, I’m going to leave you with a video of the cutest little kitten I have ever seen (today, anyway). If you watch the Ellen Degeneres Show, you probably saw this today, but it’s worth sharing:

Until next time!

Filed Under: blog, Knitting, Project Progress Tagged With: cat, hat, video

Just Testing

July 1, 2009 By Trish 1 Comment

Cat photo

The amount of white space around my photos has been bugging me so excuse this dumb little post as its only purpose is to try out an edit I just did to my photo script that will hopefully tighten things up. This is Tegan, who is usually only too happy to oblige for an emergency photo pose, more so than even my human children. (Well, not entirely true. The little guy is still a camera ham, but the teenager? Fuhgetaboutit.) Besides, it’s the middle of the night so a cat photo would have to do.

I guess I’d better go check and see how this sucker looks. Let me know what you think, too, ok?

Only one more day of work this week, then we get a four day weekend around here. I’m already looking forward to it, believe me. Guess I’d better get to bed for now…

Edited to add… ok so it’s the style sheet dictating the white space around the photo. I thought it was my photos, which have some white space around them to accommodate the drop shadow. Oh well… maybe I’ll get up the gumption to mess with the style sheet sometime soon…

Edited again… Ok I played with the style sheet. If you look at the cat photo versus the tomato photo below, it is now obvious that the tomato has more white space around it. I think the tomatoes have too much white space, so I think I’m happy with the new spacing. Am I weird, or is it ok?

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Filed Under: blog, family, Pets Tagged With: cat, photography

Father’s Day Hearts

June 20, 2009 By Trish 1 Comment

I had to give up on the knit necktie greeting card for now… it just wasn’t working out. I’m sad! But I came up with this instead:

Father's day card with knit heart

I have a long way to go in the “it doesn’t look like first grade art” department, huh? But, I hope he likes it. It has a knit heart, sparkly Mod Podge (because the plain mod podge wouldn’t do!) and carefully printed upon and then recklessly torn up paper. I still have to learn the art of effective yet not overkilled and messy gluing. (Is that a word? Gluing? It looks weird.) Any advice for an inexperienced card maker? I’d love to get better at this.

Of course, Tegan had to get into the middle of my photo shoot:

Tegan gets in on the photo shoot

And then my daughter spent 10 minutes digging the cat hair out of the card. Ick.

Today was a busy day. We had a party at my mom’s house, where I made homemade guacamole and lime fizzies. Both seemed to be well liked. I’m on a lime kick these days. I had never made lime fizzies before so I sort of “winged” it. Basically I squeezed about 5 limes into a measuring bowl, and then added enough sugar to make it syrup-y. Don’t ask me how much, but it was a lot. Then mint leaves and stirred it all around. Then poured about an inch or so of the lime/mint syrup into the glasses, over ice, and then filled the glasses with club soda and stirred. (The glasses were actually small plastic party cups, so for a tall glass, perhaps more lime syrup would be called for.) Yum! Someday I’ll post my guacamole recipe but I don’t know proportions for that, either. I’m a very seat-of-my-pants sort of cook.

Tomorrow is Father’s Day but we don’t really have any big plans. Some years are like that. We have lots of housework to do and grocery shopping. Maybe I’ll surprise John with a meatloaf. He’s pretty easy to please.

I miss my dad.

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Filed Under: blog, Knitting, note cards Tagged With: cat, note cards

I Don’t Feel Like Blogging

April 28, 2009 By Trish 2 Comments

I’ve been in a blogging funk all week, so I thought maybe I’d better show up before the few readers I do have start disappearing on me. The truth is there hasn’t been much happening here and I’m kinda stuck, knitting wise, so not much to blog about. I wound some pink yarn last week with the intention of casting on a small, carry-along project in time to have something to take to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, but I’ve been so unmotivated, I haven’t even done that. The truth is I hate casting on, and I’ve been avoiding it altogether. So I’ve been knitting on the sweater:

closeup of tabby cat with knitting

Apparently, Tegan wasn’t too thrilled about posing with the knitting; apparently she is completely blissfully unaware of the important connection between knitting and cats. Perhaps Lucy can fill her in.

I’m just about to the point of the huge knot in my yarn for the sweater. I’m trying to decide whether I should cut it and work on it and start a new ball, or if I should just stick it out? Something tells me the whole ball is just a mess inside, despite being wound on my ball winder. Some yarns are just like that. I swear some of them delight in getting themselves all knotted up into a giant cobweb that would try even the most patient soul. Patience is not one of my virtues, so we shall see whether I painstakingly pick apart the knots in this ball, or I just fling it at the wall instead.

Anybody wanna take bets?

Meanwhile, I gotta figure out what to take with me, knitting-wise, on Saturday. As per usual I won’t be wearing any completed knits (as if I have any) so at least I need to look like a knitter and bring something in progress. Hopefully I’ll get motivated to start something new before then. Taking the sweater in progress to the festival? Out of the question. I don’t want to get any festival ick on my silk.

Ciao for now!

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Filed Under: blog, Knitting, Photography, Project Progress Tagged With: cat