6720 to go

I am still slogging through Larkin. It's beautiful - but why do I knit blankets??? I'm a little more than half-way around the border, which is knitted on. Larkin is knit in the round (or, more precisely, in the square). I did 14 pattern repeats on each side, instead of the recommended 15. Each repeat is 10 stitches. So - we have 140 stitches per side, and 560 stitches around the whole blanket. 560 isn't so many. I've knit plenty of shawls with longer rows.

Each pair of rows of the edging is knit onto one of those edge stitches -- 15 stitches out and 15 back. 30 stitches x 560 = 16,800 edging stitches. This is obviously math I should never have done, because 16,800 is a LOT of stitches. I keep recalculating how many stitches I have left. Right now, I'm about 60% done with the edging, so I only have 6720 stitches left to go.

6720 - that's not so many. Of course, the baby this blanket is for was born last night, about 3 weeks early...

(And also, I cast on for a pair of Cotty socks. With what felt like very little knitting - even though it included a picot cuff -- I'm almost to the heel of the first sock. But now there will be no sock knitting until Larkin is done!)

Again

I hate for this to become "Janna's Sad News Blog," but that's what I have, again.

When I came home from work last night, I discovered that Dolly, my little tuxedo girl, had died during the day. I don't know why, although I do know that she had always been small and a little bit frail. When she was a kitten, or maybe a young cat, years before she came to live with me, she had been seriously ill with bladder problems. I don't know exactly what the problem was, but she had to eat expensive Prescription Diet C/D catfood as a result. In the last few months, she had actually gained a little weight and her coat had gotten thick and shiny. I thought she was doing really well.

Yesterday morning while I was getting ready for work, I heard her throw up. This isn't unusual -- she would throw up two or three times a week -- but yesterday morning, the amount thrown up seemed like a lot. I even asked her how such a little kitty could possibly throw up that much. But she seemed fine, nestled in her little pink kitty bed, which she loved, on the guest room bed. Sometimes she would even lay next to the cat bed, with her head propped on the edge of it.

When I got home, she was stretched out on the guest room bed, with her right front paw resting on the edge of the kitty bed. I have no idea what happened, but am glad that I decided to come home 20 minutes early. That meant that, after I calmed down a little, I still had time to call Pet Memories before they closed. The nice woman there waited until I could bring Dolly to them.

Poor Harley keeps looking for Dolly, who was her BFF (well, next to Simon, maybe). I came home early this afternoon to keep her company. We both need a little TLC, I think.

1. Dolly, 2. Dolly and Hemlock Ring, 3. yarn sniffing, 4. the frogging game, part 1, 5. D is for Dolly, 6. Dolly on the couch, 7. truce, part 2, 8. Dolly, 9. Dolly, 10. D is for Dolly

Created with fd's Flickr Toys

Yay, Snowden!

If you read the comments to my last post, you already know this from Steven's comments, but in case you missed it --

Snowden Becker, the designer of both Larkin and Myrtle, was featured in an article yesterday in the Daily Texan, the campus paper at UT Austin, where Snowden is a grad student. Except for the fact that it seems to say that Jimmy Beans Wool is in Austin and that they got the name/url for Ravelry wrong, it's a great story!