It’s Furious Balancing

Since I can’t work on my Ravenclaw mittens without getting CTS symptoms in my hands, and since I’m in the middle of two long and tedious knitting projects¹, I thought I would take a little mental time-out and and whip up quick project from my new knitting book, Kitty Knits: Projects for Cats and Their People.

It’s a sweet little book; I do confess that I want to make several of the patterns in it, especially “The Cat” afghan — a cozy lace-centered blanket with different foreign words for cat duplicate-stitched on the seed stitch borders. ²

I had about 1/3 of a skein of Malabrigo left over from the Tempting sweater, and I thought fuchsia would be a most excellent color for a catnip mouse. I knitted up the little guy while watching the first VHS tape of Serial Experiments: Lain.³ I decided to do the felting in the bathroom sink, since throwing one lonely little fuchsia mouse in the washing machine seemed like overkill.

I will say that Malabrigo felts up beautifully. It only took two hot water soaks, minimal agitation, and two cold water rinses to “shock” the wool and get Mr. Malabrigo Mouse to the right size and consistency. I stuffed him with extra-strength catnip wrapped in some clean rags, and The Husband stitched up his mousy back end on the Singer — er, the mouse’s mousy back end, that is.

Aaron was kind enough to pose for me. He’s such a good, cooperative kitten…

1. The Kitty Pi That Ate Cheboygan and my Yet Another Top-Down Raglan Sweater, respectively [↩]
2. I’ll pick out the yarn for that project before I go into the No Yarn-Buying and No Book-Buying Days of Lent. I need to research the yarn before I buy it since I definitely want to be able to throw the afghan in the washer when needed. My blankets tend to collect cat hair. Go figure. [↩]
3. I.e., in about two hours time. It took me a little longer than most people because (a) it was the first time I tried my hand at bobble making, and (b) Serial Experiments: Lain is in Japanese with English subtitles. [↩]

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Knitting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.