This and That. Ends with Cuteness.

As tired as I am of the cold weather and winter (which is still here, regardless of it being a lot sunnier overall than last month at this time), I do love that I can still really enjoy a hot cup of tea for the moment, inside and out, as I use it to warm my hands up as well as my insides. I'm most definitely not a 'hot drink' drinker once the weather turns and ice tea isn't quite the same so time is running out for this little pleasure. :)

I took inventory of my loose/bag teas in January (written down on paper no less!) and, well, that was sobering. *ahem* I swore I was going to stop buying any for a long while............and OF COURSE  I didn't stick to that, but I really have been a more judicious in my purchases since then. Except I've recently fallen down a bit on that though as I've discovered the new-to-me Harney & Sons tea line. Oh my! Such nice teas! And they come in these brilliant little tins that I have no idea what to do with but, gosh, they are pretty. These are my three latest (all fairly 'fruity' ones) but my favorite so far is the Hot Cinnamon Spice which tastes like a robust black tea with a Hot Tamale candy melted in it. If you like that kind of biting cinnamon taste, it's dead on.

Finished stitching the last of the three stockings in this L*K pattern book and finished them off with a bit of flossing cording which, I have to say, I really have no love for stitching on. It takes so much time if you want to do it neatly and hide your stitches. So.....much.....time......

My favorite of the three is the 'Noel' one. I like the holly border/beads at the top. Second fave though is the sampler one.

My finishing, as always, is fraught with one mishap or other - as you can see I, uhhhhhh, sewed one inside out on the back. Whoops? I had some thoughts as to patiently ripping it out and redoing it..........and then those thoughts vanished into the wind because I plain ole don't care enough about it. lol

Until flowers and pretty things start popping up outside, I'm going to have to fill in the color gaps in my life with brightly colored yarn, I think. It's only fair, right? The one in the back (Poste Yarn from Simply Socks Co.) might be a tad too neon even for me. (There is no such thing, of course, but I'm trying to picture that as socks and it makes me laugh EVERY TIME.)

Well, there. I broke the streak of posting only once a month. *bows* I'll finish this off with a couple new pictures of the 'kittens' because they haven't been around the blog in a long while. 

 (You can't comb out the curlies. You can but they are right there again an hour later. It's like the worst magic trick ever.) 

(Livvy and her 'chinny chin' aka goat's beard.)

Kittens. Ha! At almost nine months, they aren't kittens but definitely not adults either. What they are is HUGE. And PUFFY. With fur. Oh_so_much_fur! Does that LOOK like a belly that is combed out every other day? ARGH. The bald spots are from where I've had to cut knots out. You just blink a few times a knot forms on these guys. I really hope their fur 'settles down' and gets less sticky as they get older otherwise they are going to be SHAVED BALD for the summer! lol

Hmm.

Well, I guess I'm not going to update here any more than I did last year (roughly twice a month....in a good month) if *THIS* month has been an indicator. Ha! 

Though it has to be said: Winter is not my favorite time of the year. It certainly is pretty with the snow and all but, man, is it gloomy, gloomy, gloomy at times. Last year I didn't feel it so much but this year is not as good. I have some potted hyacinth bulbs popping up now in my living room and I don't know if it makes it better or worse. It makes the contrast between deep winter and spring so much worse somehow. lol (I'll take it though. I have them in pink and purple and I do love the flash of bright color.)

One thing I would like to do this year is read more. I started off SO GOOD last year with that but it dropped off in the summer...because of life....CANDY CRUSH obsession (ugh ugh ugh)........definitely didn't finish on a high note in regards to reading. I have SO MANY books downloaded or on the shelf here. It's not all about the numbers, of course, but there's no doubt it's better time spent than ANOTHER HOUR of Candy Crush gaming (UGH!!!!!!!!!!). 

The first book I read this year was The Hobbit. A re-read after I realized I could NOT remember how it ended *and* couldn't tell how much was new and what was original in the 2nd movie that we saw over break. (Otherwise known as, I have officially read too many books (thousands) and am starting to forget even the ones I've read more than once. Getting older is not being kind to my memory. *sigh*)

Interesting fact: I still have the Tolkien gift set that was gifted to me when I was 12-ish. AND it's in pretty good shape. (That would be 30 years ago. *ahem*) The husband had his OWN set of Tolkien books when I met him at age 19 and I've always read HIS copies instead of mine. Because I'm evil like that. Ha! (His are really rough now.) I think we need to upgrade to digital copies though because the pages are seriously yellowed and dry. I'll still keep these forever though. They certainly aren't for everybody (I actually hated them when I first got them - not much in there for a pre-teen girl, you know?) but I know I will still enjoy reading them again every so often.

First finished knit of 2014............sort of. I did MOST of it in 2013. Actually, I think the only bit I did in 2014 was the bind off and blocking. Heh. 

It's just a simple drop stitch scarf. (Truly. SERIOUSLY simple.) Why work so hard when the yarn is this pretty, right? I'm content to let the yarn do the heavy lifting here. (It's a Mini Mochi yarn. The tags are long gone but I THINK it's called 'Autumn Rainbow'?)  It's single ply and slubby so I'm slightly worried about the yarn breaking if any of the yarnovers 'catch' on something I'm wearing (like a zipper, etc.) but I'll think of something if/when disaster strikes.

Also finished another Flora McSample stocking. Just one left to stitch up on these guys! (In progress.) Fingers crossed I manage to turn these into actual stockings before next Christmas. I really like these and will be sad if they get stuffed into the drawer for too long. :(

The 'kittens' turned 7 months old earlier this month. 

Well, maybe not so much kitten-y any more. Almost full grown with their adult coats coming in like gangbusters, is more like it. I really need to get a picture of them jumping around in the snow. I still let them out on the deck for a few minutes when it's sunny out and they both LOVE snow. Eating it, digging in it, etc. They are like big, fluffy snow bunnies out there. :)

Not so much loved: the thorough combing they have to get when the snow melts and they dry off. They HATES that part. (Bitey little creatures, they are! A handful of treats afterwards soothes all though.)

Ok.

 Which one of you is responsible for letting me go a month without posting? HUH? Please come forward. Because, surely, it's not my fault. It's got to be someone else out there who fell down on poking and prodding me into doing it......right? :)

Also, how is Thanksgiving already upon us? I'm feeling a little shell shocked over that and how close Christmas is, too. *scared*

 Tis the season for lots and lots of bead orders so I've been mostly keeping my head down and just trying to keep up. (Trying being the operative word here.) Muttering under my breath about how slow it will be halfway through December so I don't totally lose my mind over it. I can do it. Right? Just keep on trucking and a day off from all things work related will magically appear at some point? FINGERS CROSSSED. :)

Well, I can't go back and recap a whole month so I'll stick to the good stuff. Firstly, this year's Stitches East show has come and gone (earlier this month). I have mad love for this crazy convention-center-filled-to-the-rafters-in-yarny-goodness but I wasn't feeling it.........much?...this year. I mean, it was great to see everything but nothing was really sticking out to me. Am I jaded? Am I over the 'yarn thing'? Do I need an anti-depressant? Or have I just realized HOW MUCH FRICKIN YARN I HAVE STASHED away and how much I do NOT NOT NOT NOT need a single yard more? I think it might be the latter. Digging through the stash lately to find yarn for the husband's weaving projects have really made it clear how much yarn I have. *gulp*

Anyhoo. This is all I purchased at this year's show. I got the yarn/pattern for a pair of gingerbread mittens I wanted last year at the show and the hot pink sock yarn was 'just because'. (You don't actually come across NEON pink sock yarn very often. It's usually softer tones of pink only. Because most knitters, I assume, are adults and don't want neon colors. I happen to love neon colors but I'm not out there trying to pass as normal either. lol)

The neon colors are a thing with me right now, I guess, because I finished using up this yarn from my last post. I thought it wanted to be gloves but I ripped that out after I finished the first glove. Wasn't using up enough yarn. (This yarn was NOT cheap so I wanted to use up every last bit of it.) So I poked and poked around for a new pattern and came up with a free cowl pattern by the name of Inspira. The pattern is more an 'idea' than a hard and fast pattern. You adapt it to the yarn you want to use and just wing it.

Hmm. Cowls are kinda hard to photograph unless you are into selfies. (Which I'm not.) It's so sad and...........flat.

There. Much better with a model. Livvy loves poking her head and sitting in bags so she was a natural. Just plunked her in front of it and watched her go WHEeeeEEEEEEE A BAG, A BAG! while I snap a picture. I'm still a little dubious of how much wear I will get out of it (I like scarves) but it was fun to knit and the colors worked out quite nicely with a minimum of fuss. (The yarn changes color on it's own. No cutting/weaving ends in here!)

 I also had a MaMaMonkee as a model but I think the Livvy pic is much better. :)

This was all I had leftover of the two skeins of yarn, too. WIN! :)

Babies are babies no more. They had their junk ripped out and are officially sexless now. :) Poor Livvy and her boo-boo belly. Stitches come out the day after Thanksgiving so she's almost better now though. Just a little longer to go. Small price to pay, I think, for not being forced to give birth to your brother's babies. *snort*

At last.

 An update! Well, this month has clearly gotten the best of me, as far as keeping up with stuff. Yeeesh. 

Part of that is that October is inherently busy for me. Fall is my favorite season and I like to take advantage of every nice fall day I can, hitting up the various festivals going on or just making time to sit on the deck when the weather is nice enough. (Anything in the 60's is fine. No lower than that though for Deck Time for me. At least not for sitting.) The other part is that I just stayed away for a bit because I was so sad to hear about Cathey. Reading through everyone's posts remembering her was like a kick in the guts. I don't know that I have anything eloquent to say about that (it's all been said so much better than I can fumble my way through it) but she will be missed and remembered.

I happily signed up for the newest L*K mystery sampler AND even managed to bang the first part out rather quickly this month. It's anyone's guess when I will get back to the rest but I'm quite proud to have finished the first part at least. lol

As charted, so far, except I left off some single 'snow flakes' near the pine trees in case I want to do them in beads (thinking a YES to that) and I think I have to change the parchment colored snowflakes on the bottom too. It doesn't stand out on the green at ALL. Boo. :(

I'll have to wait until more of that parchment floss comes up in the other two patterns though to see what would be a good sub for it. I don't want to have to change it twice, right? 

Seeing all the fall stuff going on though had me a little itchy for bright halloween colors so I did up a couple of quick small pieces from the latest JCS halloween issue.

(More pumpkins for Cathey? :))

Just short and sweet little ornament sized stitchies. I changed the linen on the block one from an ivory to this nice purple. It's not every day you can work a purple linen into a finish, you know? I started a bigger piece from that same issue too but I wasn't ambitious enough to drag it out and snap a pic of it. Heh. I'm about 2/3rds of the way done with it though so it might makes it debut some time soon. Maybe. (I put it away last week to concentrate on some knitting and have yet to get back to it. *sigh*)

My 'babies' are getting soooooOooooooOOo big! Almost five months old and Fitz is weighing in at over 5lbs now. Livvy is a full pound smaller - she can't compete with those boy genes! I let them out on my 'fenced in' deck and he likes to jump to the rail, dig a hole in one of the window boxes and take a nap. Dirty, dirty, kitty! lol

They still do everything together as a pair. Or almost everything. I haven't noticed any 'hormone' type activity going on with them......yet. Thankfully. My vet won't do the ole SNIP SNIP before they are solidly 5 months old so they have to wait a couple more weeks still before we are in the clear and I don't have to worry about THAT any more. Heh. :)

(And yes, poor Livvy got no pictures this time around but she's ALWAYS IN MOTION. ALWAYS. So I have the worst time ever taking pictures of her. Fitz is a fancy pretty boy lazy bum who sits and sits and is more camera ready.)

Little bit of everything.

I've had a couple people ask if I'm still making beads, because I haven't posted any really on the blog in a while. The answer: DEFINITELY YES. I've been working on a ton of them behind the scenes. (Pictured above is the pile of beads made over the weekend that I had to string and ship out yesterday. Have another pile to make over the next few days too.) Having said that though, I'm not super happy about making them anymore so I don't really feel like blogging about it. My left hand hurts when I make beads, my left shoulder is starting to hurt now........things are breaking down and I'm taking more and more Advil as time goes on to get through a torching session. A repetitive hand motion hour after hour, day after day, for over a decade? It's inevitable, I guess, that your body won't put up with that at some point. (And NOTHING hurts the tendons/joints in my hand like the bead work does.) I'm in limbo at the moment over it What to do, right? I could cut the work back but with the amount of taxes I pay as a self-employed person - income, sales tax, business property taxes, also, accountant to handle taxes, etc. - at some point cutting back is just flat out stupid and a waste of time. I still LIKE the beads so there is that. Heh.

Anyhoo. Moving on. 

I finished my big piece for Halloween! :)

How great is this pumpkin? I should have posted a pic of him in my Cathey post too! I love the way the colors work together, it has great depth. 

And how about this crazy, toothy grin? The reason he is so crazy looking is..........

TOO MANY TREATS. 

I mean - look at all those candy corns in there! He's not crazy - he's high on sugar!

So happy to have this done. It's a Bird of a Feather design that I purchased in 2003, along with the linen that it called for (which isn't made anymore, but there are good substitutes). Any design I have put away WITH the linen it needs always make me sad when it sits and sits and sits, waiting to be finished. (I actually wrote shits and shits at first by accident..........WHAT COULD THAT MEAN? Whoops.) It's a crazy design and probably (definitely) not for everyone but I like the kookiness of it. I did the belly part first to get the worst part of the design over with and the rest of it was pretty simple from then on. 

How would you tackle that belly? I'm always interested in how people approach certain things. I did all the periwinkle FIRST, leaving 'holes' for the other things. So I had to count very very very carefully to make sure the 'holes' were all situated correctly, but it made for easy-peasy candy corn stitching after the fact because then I could just hop from one candy to another, anchoring the thread(s) to the already done periwinkle as I went.

I have to say though, the pattern was pure MISERY to work off of. It was teeny TINY. I had to scan and enlarge it, color a lot of it in with colored pencils and it was still hard to see. (THIS is the piece that had me scrambling for new eyeglasses!) Did not relish that part of it.

Next up is the Lizzie Kate Mystery Christmas sampler (and maybe some ornies!). I really like doing the Halloween one last year so I signed up for this one too. I like the colors as is but some of them seem a little too light as I'm doing the actual pattern. I think I"m going to have to go back and switch out the Parchment, at the very least. My snowflakes with it are totally disappearing into nothingness. :( 

I kinda miss that there are no beads or charms with it too. I've got a TON of Mill Hill beads though so that will be easy enough to add if I want at the end.

Annnnnndddd......I guess that's it for now. Except for a Fitz pic. 

The 'babies' turned 4 months on Sunday. Getting soooooooooooo big!!!

Hey look!

I actually made some progress on a couple projects. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! That hasn't happened in a while. (Seriously - where did the summer go? I feel like I did nothing, went no where, etc. It was a pretty depressing summer though, for the most part. It's probably better that it's over actually, now that I think about it. Good riddance summer? lol)

These are my 'Jury Duty Jaywalker' socks finally finished. I had jury duty in July and I prepared for that by making sure I had a pair of wooden circular needles (because you can't have metal needles here) and got some nice striping yarn (because I lovessssssssssssssssss striping yarn) and even started the cast on in a much-loved-by-me pattern (Jaywalkers) to get them ready for some major courtroom knitting and......................my jury duty was canceled. Of course. (I'm 0 for 4 now in being called up for jury duty. I'll get there one day, oh yes I will! lol) Oh well. I finished them eventually.
 

I'm not going to try and figure out many times I've knit this pattern now but it's a lot. (Ten maybe?) There really is nothing better out there to showcase a self-striping sock yarn, IMHO. And it's free to boot! (I think? It used to be free. It's PROBABLY still free? I should check that. lol)

Okay so this isn't finished, not by a long shot, but I'm very proud I made it this far on this. It's a creepy, waaaaaaay out there Halloween design that has been in my stash a long, long, long time. (Long enough that this particular fabric is no longer sold so I'm glad I got it at the same time as the pattern. It really needs a linen with character, I think, to offset the crazy design.) It's not easy trying to cross stitch when you have a silver bullet who likes to LAUNCH herself at your Q-Snapped piece like it was a trampoline. Seriously. What is the appeal?? She just comes out of nowhere and BOUNCES off it like a gymnast! It's funny but it makes stitching, uh, a little slow. Heh.

Not that these guys are ever naughty like that. Oh no. Perfect angels, all the time. *snerk*

(They just turned 12 weeks this Sunday and I'm fairly certain that = Terrible Twos. I'm starting to turn into Bad Mommy with the No! Don't Chew That!s and No! Biting!s and the always popular Get Down from There! And then 10 minutes later they are snuggly cuddle muffins who melt your heart. *sigh*)

My beloved Fair was this weekend and, in fitting with the whole summer, it was kinda depressing so I'm not going to bother to post pics. *sniff* It was dark, dreary, rainy and humid (oh god, HUMID!) the entire time it was going on so we didn't spend much time there. Also, I didn't enter in anything this year so there was excitedly hunting for ribbon status, etc. Maybe we'll go to the Big Eastern Exposition in Massachusetts in a couple weeks to try for another 'fair fix'. :)

So many kittens....

So little time for hobbies lately! 

 

Wow, these guys keep you busy. Think I've got a bit of 'twin' syndrome going on. Get one happy and satisfied and then the other one starts crying for attention, so  you get that one happy and satisfied, and then the other starts in again....................repeat repeat repeat.

There have been a few tummy and litter box troubles this week, especially with this one:

He may be a boy but he's a big baby who seems to be a lot more delicate than his tough-as-nails sister. (Big, whiny baby too because woooowweeeeeee does he like to whine!) We stuck with our original names of Fitzgerald/Fitz and Olivia/Livvy for them...........but are mostly called Pooh Bear and Peepers because, well, that's what they do. :)

Lots of blogiversaries around this month but I got y'all beat with my regular blog (Livejournal) anniversary a few days ago:

Permanent Account, previously an Early Adopter,

  Created on 17 August 2000 (#11375),  Last updated on 20 August 2013

• 3,542 journal entries
• 27,235 comments posted

THIRTEEN YEARS. Yep. Over a decade. That's kinda crazy, right? 

I'm journal 11,375 out of almost 40 million. Been using it mostly as a food blog lately, writing up my adventures with the Fresh 20 weekly meal plans. (Love the plans but have to tweak them a fair amount to suit my tastes/boost the veggie portions a little.) There's no sense in giving it up either because my early adopter/permanent account automatically gives me all the upgrades (and zero ads) for free forever - or until it's shut down. I'm not going to pass up FREE  now, am I?  

Will be interesting to see if I can make it another thirteen years. :)