A Friendship in Black and White

Visiting a friend's home for the first time today, I heard a funny story.  The couple had two black-and-white cats and recently they took in a lovely tortoiseshell-and-white pregnant stray (all the kittens found homes).  A skunk lives in the backyard in a woodchuck burrow.  The black-and-white cats and the skunk are friends.  They hang out together and the skunk flushes out rodents for the cats to hunt.  He even comes over to check out my friend's husband when he's outside.  The husband thinks the cats want the skunk to come inside with them.  Every time they come in for the night, they form a line with the skunk in the middle.

I wonder why the attraction.  Is it because they are the same color?  Could the skunk have been raised by a cat?  That's not unheard of.

We are all wise to nature here and know about Eau de Skunk and keeping our pets' shots up to date, but we can't always figure out inter-species friendships.

Swedish Bird Mystery

Recently at my knitting group someone was giving away a collection of knitting booklets.  I took one because of these socks.  I like the little birds.  The booklet is 0115 Idehefte, Sandnes Julehefte.  It was distributed by Swedish Yarn Imports and the copyright belongs to SandnesGarn of Sandes Uldvarefabrik SS.  The booklet is in English and the socks are designed for my shoe size. 

I assume being in a Swedish knitting booklet the bird is Swedish and I don't know what species it is.  Offhand I couldn't find anything on the web to tell me.  However, my knitting group also has a member from Sweden.  I'll have to take this with me to ask her what bird this is.

It's getting closer to that December holiday, you know.

Update:

I've done a little investigation.  I think it's possible the bird is supposed to be a European bullfinch.  See the photo below:

It looks pretty close to me.

Beautiful Kitten Litter

Here is the litter the sleepy kitten comes from.  There ARE eight kittens and it looks like only ONE is not a calico.  I tend to like calicos and tortoiseshells.  Did you know that three colors in cats is sex-linked?  Most are female; 1 in 3,000 are male, and usually sterile.  Tricolor males have the feline equivalent of Kleinfelter's Syndrome and have an extra X chromosome.  Female calicos or tortoiseshells can be thought of as half-orange because they have one orange color gene.  An orange female can must have two orange color genes.  A orange male cat needs only one orange color gene.  Each calico or tortoiseshell is unique because the coloring and pattern are determined by conditions in the womb.

Sweet, Uber-Relaxed Kitten

I can't get over the trust the little kitten has.  I hope nothing ever happens to destroy it.  The litter of kittens is so big!  Eight cow and calico kittens I think.  I wish I could be there with them right now!  What fun.
There is another video of the EIGHT kittens when they were younger, but Blogger refuses to find the right one.  [I do not like this new way of embedding videos, no, I do not.]

New Sweater Finally Underway

I think it was 2008 or earlier when I bought the pattern for Artful Yarns Broadway Trimmed Top:

It was approximately the same time that I bought some Park Avenue Printed yarn, the blue-green no. 136 color, from the Lily Chin Signature Collection at a deep discount from Webs.

The contrast band was tricky because my skin is more sensitive now and the pattern called for a fuzzy yarn, and most natural fiber fuzzy yarns have mohair that is too itchy for me.  What I ultimately set my heart on was Great Adirondack Caribou Yarn in the Birdsong colorway that it was just discontinuing.  Thanks to ebay, I found it in fingering (?) yarn. I kept finding it listed as different weights.  All I know is that if I knit 2 strands together I get exactly the gauge I need, and that's all that counts.  The Birdsong colorway is a hand-dye of green, blue, violet and plum.  The green in the colorway is almost the exact shade of green in the Parke Avenue Printed yarn. 

Within the past year and a half I started to knit the back of the sweater.  It begins with a ribbed lace stitch.  I recently took it to my spinning and knitting group because it was the easiest thing to find.  Tonight I just had to knit for a while and I ended up being able to knit the contrast band in the back.  It looks so pretty knitted.  Too bad it couldn't be fuzzy, too, but the two yarns look so nice together.  Now I wonder how long it will take me to knit the rest of the sweater.

Affected by Color Affection

If you are a member of Ravelry and like shawls, you might be aware that one particular shawl garnered an unusual number of likes, the Color Affection shawl designed by Veera Valimaki.  My friend were discussing it in the spinning and knitting group one spring afternoon.  Thanks to her electronic gizmo, my friend Laurie could even show it to me right then and there. 

I love playing with colors and textures. Try as I might, thoughts of that shawl kept creeping into my mind.  It wasn't long before I scrolled through the project photos on the site. I saw some lovely combinations, but only one or two in my favorite colors.

I learned about the shawl before the  Massachusetts Sheep and Woolcraft Fair  on the Cummington Fairgrounds.  A friend and I went there together.  It was one of the first hot days of the year.  I wore my favorite batik clothes by Global Village,  a scoop-neck top and a paneled gathered skirts in complementary fabrics in two leafy prints in purple and green (sorry, no photo). I couldn't think of anything I wanted to buy, but since I loved my purple and green batik clothing so much I thought a shawl to wear with them on chilly summer evenings would be nice. 

I walked into my friends' booth Sliver Moon. Here is the same booth at a different fair. 

I happened to find a fingering yarn in just about the exact shade of purple I wanted.  The price for the yardage was great. Because of the way Laurie hand-painted it, it shades to a pink that brings out other colors in the fabric.  Kay had the last of some green yarn she'd dyed.  I don't think I could match the green of the fabric much more closely if I tried.  There was some shading in the green yarn, too, that would echo the batik effect of my clothing.  Both women were amazed at how well the yarn looked with my clothes when they hadn't known what I was wearing that day or what the other was bringing.

I have to admit I immediately thought "Color Affection shawl."  I didn't knit it immediately though.  I lacked a third yarn to go with the yarn.  On the rich purple background of the batik print there is a tie-dye double leaf design in white, shades of green and blue. In the stall that day we all decided that blue would be the color, and a shade they didn't have that day.  I've put off buying the blue yarn because of finances.  I have the fabric that I cut off when I shortened the skirt. This past week Laurie told me to bring in a swatch so that she could dye a blue to go with it and I can knit my shawl. 

On a completely different note, the animal barn were right in the midst of the vendors.  We couldn't hear the music from the other part of the fairgrounds.  The soundtrack for the day were the various vocalizatons of the sheep and goats.  Some sounded very forlorn, some upset, others angry or insistent. At the end of the day after the public had gone, in the barn in the middle of everything it sounded like the animals were talking over the day.  One little black lamb was standing in the center of his pen and for all the world sounded like he was saying he was tired, he was hungry, he wanted his mama, he wanted his own pen and he wanted to go home!

Cameraless

The old HP digital camera is dead, as well as the much newer one. This time it wasn't the camera's fault.  I blame it on the design flaw of a monument.

I wanted to take a photo of the plaque at one side of the Daniel Nimham Memorial at the Putnam County Veterans' Park.

I had the plaque in the viewfinder of the camera and I was stepping back very carefully to site it, since the zoom doesn't work in the camera.  The next thing I know I'm tumbling backward into the small circular structure in the middle. I was first aware of hitting the bottom of my head and my lower back.  I landed on a sharp rock, that I could literally feel in my back the next morning when I woke up.  My thighs came to rest against the interior of the stone wall.  The camera went flying and landed on the gravel. The door of the battery compartment sprang open and the batteries fell out.  I held onto the stone wall, keeping my aching head up and yelling, "Ow!  Ow!"  I was in enough pain that I couldn't think of yelling anything else.  A couple leaving the park stopped and pulled me out. I don't think I would've been able to get out by myself. I remembered I had a blue ice pack in the cooler and put that on my head for a while.  It was not fun driving two hours home.

The next week was pretty much a washout.  The fall aggravated the bursitis in my hips. My neck was so sore.  I was very glad that I already had a cervical collar at home.  I put that on and it helped so much.  Any one position hurt after a while so I alternated between sleeping and sitting. 

To add insult to injury, I had just finished sewing a ribbon dress.  I wore it for the first time to a pow wow at the park that day.  It did not survive unscathed.  The fall must have torn at the fibers.  Washing the dress weakened them further. One stroke with the iron and they gave way in the pattern of a tear from a sharp point.  The dress is made out of one piece of fabric, so there is no way to make it look like new again.  I'll darn the tear to keep it from raveling and then I'll probably patch it.

For the immediate future I'm cameraless. I know of a way I can buy a good used digital camera reasonably priced.  I'm going to check reviews first and stay away from the brand I had before.  I don't know how long it will take since finances are very tight. 

It's been a month since my fall.  I wish I could say I'm all better.  I've just entered the worst part of my outdoor allergy season.  For some reason September is worse and I don't know why.  It's a shame because there's usually some beautiful weather during the month. This coming weekend I'm going to the Cherry Valley Kite Festival, something I haven't done in a few years.  I'm in serious need of some good, old-fashioned, pointless fun and I think it's worth some stuffiness later.