I haven’t posted much about my knitting lately, but that doesn’t mean the needles haven’t been out. In fact I’ve sort of developed an addiction that is often triggered simply by sitting in front of the television. I can’t watch TV any more without my knitting in my hands. I guess that’s a lot better than not being able to watch TV without a two pound bag of M&Ms in my hands, right?

I’m attempting to embed a PhotoBucket slideshow above, with pictures of many of the recent things I’ve knit. These span from the standard array of socks and mittens for everyone at Christmastime, to a couple of hats (another new favorite; hats knit up so quickly!) to an eyeglass “sleeve”.

That came about because I got new glasses and cannot locate the case for my old ones, and I didn’t want to just toss them in a drawer without protection. So, I planned to just knit a quick tube in the round and stick them in it. That led to “maybe I’ll try my hand at Fair Isle colorwork”, and the “quick tube” took well over a week to complete thanks to Old Fumblefingers here. However, I do plan to keep at the colorwork and eventually become one of those people capable of juggling more than one color of yarn without risking self-strangulation.

Eventually.

The “Cranberry Beret” was fun, especially when the dog saw me putting it on the cookie jar and then following me around the house till I took it off the “cat”. He then sat quite contentedly while I tried it on him and snapped a picture.

Last year, Kai had to have a cyst removed from his thigh muscle. I had knit him a legging, to keep him away from the stitches while he healed. He rather liked it, and would come right over and ask to have his “pants” put on after trips outside to potty. After he then asked to try on the hat, I promised him I’d knit something else for him.

Ergo, the current project on the needles is my first foray into knitting a dog sweater. I’ll post pictures when it’s done (unless, of course, I manage to royally foul it up somehow).

So, enjoy the pics in the slideshow.

Feel free to leave comments below and let me know what YOU have been knitting or otherwise creating lately!

PS: I wonder why I’m now craving M&Ms….

Related posts:

1. Daylilies, Knitting, and Stuff
2. Creative Overload: Knitting and NaNo!
3. Knit Wit: Sock Education

I’m sure most people, even those who purchase gifts for their pets during the holidays, probably don’t consider the animals as actually understanding Christmas.  Oh, sure, they recognize the changes, notice and even remember things like decorations and trees.  Some may even feel the animals remember that there is going to be a stocking in the lineup with dog or cat treats and toys in it.

How much, though, do the pets really understand? How much do they “get” about this strange annual tradition their family celebrates?

About three weeks ago, we began hauling holiday boxes out of the closet. The first one to come into the living room, in preparation for decking the halls, was the box with the stockings in it. Since 2010, and moving into our current home after my Dad passed away, we’ve actually have a fireplace to hang them on. We set the box on the floor, and immediately, in ran Kai. He was quite excited, and we had to keep nudging him away from the box. At one point, we humans were distracted, and I turned to find the black Saluki’s head buried in the box. He came out suddenly, tail flailing with glee, and went racing through the house….

…with his stocking. Not just “a” stocking, there were nine of them, in various sizes, in that box. It was his stocking. A merry chase ensued, after which I managed to take it away from him and hang it up.  Several times that evening, and the next day, he would wander over to the fireplace and nose that stocking, as if expecting presents to magically appear in it.

In more recent days, as a package or two arrived from a dear friend, we’ve put wrapped gifts under the tree. Kai gave them a sniff or two (and we did have to put the ones we suspect have edibles in them into a box to thwart his interest), but after the first day left them alone. For a pooch who enjoys getting into trouble, he’s been extremely well behaved when it comes to Christmas.

Until this morning.

It’s Christmas Eve. As usual, I was the first one up, and had tended the pets and done most of the morning chores. After eating his breakfast, Kai went to his usual spot on the den loveseat, where he normally relaxes and watches me as I putter about the house. At one point, I sat with him for a cuddle, and told him that Santa comes tonight. We talked about how Santa brings presents, of course, and wondered what goodies the jolly chief elf might leave for Kai.

A short time later, I was standing at the kitchen sink sorting cranberries(*). I thought Kai was still on the loveseat, but suddenly realized that I was hearing a racket under the Christmas tree. I peered around the corner.

There was Kai. He was sticking his nose between the presents under the tree, giving each a sniff, and then shoving it out of his way in order to inspect the next package. It appeared, and felt, and was certainly confirmed by the emotions sensed, that Kai was just making sure Santa hadn’t come early and left his present under that tree!

I had to move him out of there several times, and tell him to “Leave it” (a cue he normally obeys on the first issue without any arguments). Kai was determined to make sure his present wasn’t there!

The above photo was taken just a short while before writing this post. After finally convincing the blackdog of the family that the packages under the tree were not to be tossed and sorted by a long pointy Saluki nose, this is the spot Kai chose to settle in. Yes, there’s a patch of sunshine there…but there are numerous other, larger, and more easily accessed patches in the house as well.

That old Santy Claus sure isn’t going to sneak by KaiGuy!

(*Every Christmas Eve, I make special cranberry breads.  I use whole fresh cranberries, which have to be cleaned and sorted.  I was actually rather disappointed with this season’s cranberry crop.  I wound up having to throw away almost a third of the berries in the bags purchased from our local supermarket’s produce department. I’ve never seen so many overripe, and even rotten, berries in a batch before.  Don’t worry, though, there were plenty of good berries to make two lovely loaves for Christmas morning breakfast.)

No related posts.

Last night, however, it was pretty darned frightful.

Now, I don’t totally dislike the snow.  Don’t misunderstand me.  A new snow is so beautiful, peaceful, pristine.  The fact that this one fell on October 27th, and I had to drive to Cobleskill to get my son to his evening college class in it, though, wasn’t the most peaceful or beautiful moment.  The roads were horrendous, covered in four inches of snow and freezing slush, with white-out blizzard conditions to drive through. Thanks to my dad’s big truck (every winter I understand why he wanted the biggest, heaviest four wheel drive pick up he could get), we made it, though.  It was really nice to get home safely and be able to relax afterward.

I’m not ready for winter.  I love all the seasons, though fall is my favorite.  When it snows in October I always feel like I’ve been a bit cheated.  This year, especially, because we didn’t have a great fall to start with.  The floods caused by Irene and Lee took their toll on the trees, and many that normally give us nice color just went brown and dropped their leaves.  There are still some leaves on the hardier trees, though they didn’t have the color they usually do.  And now they’ve been snowed upon.

But…it really is pretty.  This morning, with the sun out, and knowing it’s already melting, I stepped out onto the deck early and snapped some pictures.  I hope you enjoy them.

And the doe–that’s our “Birdy”.  I am fairly sure I’ve shared photos of her here before; I know I have pictures of her in my main Facebook profile albums.  Last winter was a tough one.  We had a lot of snow and most of the winter the ground was well covered, making it very hard on our local deer.  There was very little to eat.  Part way through the season, this half-grown doe showed up at our bird feeders.  She would return each day and pretty much empty out everything she could reach.  I believe it saved her life.  We began to call her “Birdy”.

Birdy’s visits to the feeders didn’t stop when the snow melted and the world turned green, though.  She’s been back pretty much daily all spring, summer and fall.  In fact, once the herds started reassembling, Birdy even brought company.  She began to show up with another doe her own age, an older doe and two twin fawns.  I’m guessing it was her own twin sister, her mother, and her younger siblings.  They all appear to like bird seed.

Yesterday late afternoon, as Devon and I were leaving to fight the storm to Cobleskill, I stepped out on the deck, and there was Birdy.  Right on cue, the snow fell, and she visited the feeders and pretty much cleaned them out before we got home.  I leaned over the railing and took a few pictures with my cellphone (the best of them is above).  She finished her snack in a leisurely manner, looked up at me, and calmly walked across the lane and into the woods.

Better stock up on bird seed.  Winter appears to have called early.

No related posts.

No, seriously.  When I learn to do something new, I start scouting around for easier, faster methods and will finally settle on the one that gets the job done fastest and with the least amount of work or brain-power.  Take the Lifestyle Socks method by Charisa Charn, for instance.  I’d done a few dozen pairs of socks before finding this simple method of doing toe up socks that can be adapted to every sock pattern and I haven’t looked back.  I use it every time I knit a pair of socks now, and I even went a step further.  I figured out how to do two at a time.

How pathetic is that?  But hey, it works.

When you look at a little pair of socks, compared to things like sweaters and afghans, you wouldn’t really think that they’re a ton of work.  So why be so lazy?  Well, let’s look at a sock in detail.  In order to have a durable pair of hand knit socks, you have to select fingering yarn, which is really thin, and tiny little size 0 or 1 needles, which are kind of like knitting with toothpicks.  Lots of little bitty stitches because you want the gauge to be tight.  After all, people tend to, well, walk on their socks.  They need to hold up.

So, being the odd duck I am, whose brain, when it gets moving along such lines tends to get lost in deep layers of trivia, let’s look at a pair of knee-high toe up socks done two at a time on two size 0 circular needles using one of my favorite self-striping fingering yarns.  This particular pair adds up as follows (and yes, I counted.  I am not obsessive.  It was just research.  Ahem):

One pair of socks, Thirty-Six Thousand stitches and (at the relatively boring speed with which I knit) 20 hours work.  Okay, real hard core sock knitters are laughing at my slow progress, I’m sure, right now, but still.  When broken down into numbers, I think I understand why, come mid-October, I’m not sure I’m going to get all my Christmas knitting done in time!

I still love knitting socks, though.  Socks are the one thing that, at least in my little easily entertained mind, no one can have too many of, after all.  I mean, one can only have so many scarves or fit so many sweaters into the closet, but socks?  You wear socks till you wear them out and then, if you’re like me and stuff them into a darning basket you never get around to tackling, you need more socks to replace them, right?  And don’t you think everyone would like a few pairs of nice cozy hand-knit merino blend socks to add to their packaged every-day fare?

Still, though, I do branch out.  I’m trying to balance the socks with other things this year.  Things like mittens, gloves and hats.  Charisa Charn has a great Lifestyle Hats formula that makes them as easy and trouble-free as her socks, by the way.  Yeah, I found that pretty quick once I started venturing into hats.

And these days, there is also a high-speed way to learn just about everything you need to know about knitting, including the fast and simple methods.  It’s called YouTube and is a newbie knitter’s paradise.  Yeah, no great secret revealed there, eh?  Sorry, but hey, if it works….  When learning the Lifestyle methods, it was easy to head there and watch the various components being illustrated in video.  I ventured into mittens by taking Kelley’s Mitten Class on YouTube.  Just about everything I’ve tried my hand at so far, I’ve managed to find someone on that site to show me the method in easy step-by-step ways.

Years ago girls learned to knit by sitting at their mother’s knee, painstakingly following her methods and instructions.  Now we have a world wide network of “mothers” out there who can teach us everything from a continental style purl stitch to how to do fancy cable work to spinning the fleece from your own llamas to building your own spinning wheel out of a bicycle wheel.

Now, “spinning” is something I can’t quite get the hang of.  One actually needs some semblance of coordination and timing to do that right. But when I’m ready to try again, I know I have YouTube to help me out.

A friend once said, when I first told her that I was taking up knitting, that she prefers crochet because knitting is so slow.  I guess it’s true that when you have to hand knit 36,000 stitches to create a pair of socks, that’s a lot of work.  But with the invention of circular needles, two-at-a-time toe up methods, and YouTube, it’s a lot easier for a lazy knitter to join the fun these days than it used to be.

On to the next pair….

Some Links of Interest

• Charisa’s Lifestyle Socks
• Charisa’s Lifestyle Hats
• Kelley’s Mitten Class
• Hand-made Spinning Wheel from Bicycle Parts (the creator’s a bit spacey, but I thought the concept was fascinating)
• Ravelry (a world of fun for knitters)
• KnitPicks.com (my favorite place to buy yarn and supplies; I so love my Options circular needles!)

Related posts:

1. KnitWit: Sockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
2. Knit Wit: Sock Education
3. Knit Wit: My First Scarf

To illustrate, feel free to visit this Parts of a Daylily diagram on the American Hemerocallis Society website.

That’s what the books say, anyway.  And then, every so often, you meet a daylily who hasn’t read the books.

When a daylily produces a number of petals and sepals more than the standard three, it is referred to as a polytepal or polymerous bloom.  The term polytepal used to be used pretty much globally for daylilies, but the AHS has apparently switched to the more botanically appropriate polymerous in recent years.  You can see more of an explanation, and some other photos of these “poly” daylilies, on this page of their website.

http://www.daylilies.org/ahs_dictionary/polymerous.html

Certain cultivars of daylilies tend to be more prone than others to producing “polys”.  This morning, as the season winds down, one of the final buds on my daylily, Chamonix, opened as a polymerous bloom. Chamonix is one that loves surprising me with extra petals.  I thought I’d hunt down some of my daylily photos through the past several years that display these anomalies, and share them here on the blog. As I find more such photos, I’ll return here and add to the gallery of images.

I hope you enjoy this parade of mutants!

Related posts:

1. Daylily Season Ending
2. Daylily Photos of the Day
3. Sunny Daylily Day

Up here, most of the daylilies are nearly, or completely, done. Though Primal Scream and Outrageous, Siloam Double Classic and Wisest of Wizards, had quite a few scapes on them, they’ve all pretty much finished their run. Primal Scream opened its last flower today, as did Outrageous (and a damaged one at that).

South Seas looks like it’s pretty well finished, too, having opened its many flowers all within a little over a week.

The only problem with daylilies, of course, is that the blooms only last for a single day each.

Um…that’s why they call them daylilies.

I’ll miss them, I always do. However, I see quite a few seed pods on Fooled Me. Maybe I’ll find a place in the house to plant them this winter, and have some new seedlings to put outside in the spring.

Today’s photos will probably be the last for the year. Enjoy.

I know I have.

Related posts:

1. Daylily Macro Photography
2. Garden Season Begins
3. Daylily Photos of the Day

Daylily season is in full swing here in upstate New York.  One of my two “later bloomers” (at least those I was able to get moved up the hill while my health held out in the spring) opened its first flower of the season today.  South Seas is a lovely salmon pink bloom, and this year it has more scapes than it ever has before.  As is frequent with first flowers of a season, today’s bloom isn’t a perfect one, but I’m including it below, anyway.  My last hold-out, Chamonix, is another favorite, and has a ton of buds that are going to be ready to start opening soon.

Last hold-out, that is, if you don’t count the ones over by the bird feeder that the darn deer ate.  ::sigh::  I do love the deer, but….  When it comes to tender, sweet young daylily buds, my polite requests to the deer to leave them alone simply gets me a response that might best be translated, “In your dreams, silly human.”

And the last big bit of news is that we’ve said goodbye to the baby Grackles and Starlings of 2011.  I haven’t taken in any more birds long-term due to the way my leg has been acting up, and on Sunday morning we opened the “escape hatch” of the aviary.  By noon, all five babies had flown.  I’ve seen the grackles, both together and separately, numerous times since, and we’re leaving dishes of fresh water and food all over the yard for them, in an effort to help them out as they learn to forage on their own.  The Starlings, though, were here one minute, gone the next, and we’ve seen neither foot nor feather of them since.  Just like last year’s Starlings.

Well, if you don’t count Whistle, who refused to leave.  (She’s still here and even named one of this year’s babies.  One of the Starlings just released took with her the name of “Boo-Boo”, which is what Whistle would repeat over and over every time she saw her.)

So, think good thoughts toward my Star-babies and Gackers.  May they thrive and their tribes increase.  I hope they’ll bring their babies back to visit next year.  I’m pretty sure that’s why we saw more Starlings than ever in our front yard late this spring.

Related posts:

1. Daylilies on a Cool July Morning
2. Daylilies, Knitting, and Stuff
3. A Gallery of Daylilies

“The Leg” seriously dislikes the heat, so when the temperatures soar close to and above 90°, I head for the bedroom, the only room with air conditioning.  Since the computer is an old desktop sitting in the hottest corner of the house, that means that my time at work is limited, and of course the priority is time given to speaking with the many wonderful animals (and their humans) who come to me for help.

This means, naturally, that emails fall by the wayside, my writing time suffers, website jobs get put on the ever-growing to-do list in the “undone” category, and frustration abounds.

Then, within the past few days, serendipity crossed my path in the form of a laptop computer.  It’s not here yet, but will make life much more pleasant and productive on those hot days.  It still has to be paid for, of course, but the deal was a very good one, and the cause was just.  (That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)  Being able to get more work done, more books finished and “out there”, and other beneficial endeavors will certainly see the new addition paying for itself in the long run, after all.  And my leg won’t cook in the process.

Sounds like a win-win situation to me.

The book I’m almost finished with at the moment is another novel, one unrelated to the Junior Handler Mysteries.  It was actually first written in the 1990s, and may still be a bit on the “dated” side in some ways, but I have done my best to minimize that.  I’m just waiting for a certain talented young artist who is very dear to my heart to finish the cover art, and I’ll be putting it through the publishing process.  “Watch this space”.

I have several others in the works, as well as rudimentary ideas for another non-fiction animal communication/animal wisdom book on a more focused topic.  I’m currently noodling over the best approach, but it’s looking more and more as if it will come to pass.  I’m liable to need some audience participation on this one.

The daylilies I moved up the hill in the spring, though they’re only a portion of the whole, are doing well.  They seem to like the new location.  A couple that were pretty but not overly enthusiastic down the hill are going strong up here.  I haven’t seen so many blooms, for example, on Wisest of Wizards before, and South Seas, which previously only put up a couple of blooms each season, has five thick, healthy scapes.  That is a later variety, and flowers haven’t opened yet, but the mid-season cultivars are now in full swing.

So, without further ado, some more photos for my fellow flower fans.  And yes, I realize the Hollyhock is not a daylily, and the sunset’s not even a flower, but I hope you enjoy the pictures anyway.

Related posts:

1. Daylily Pictures, July 14th and 15th