Today is rainy, gloomy, and horrible. I actually like rainy, gloomy, and horrible weather, but today it’s a hindrance, because my boyfriend and I were planning to go to the fair today, but “rain at times heavy with the risk of a thunderstorm” does not seem like ideal conditions for riding large metal contraptions outdoors. So it looks like we’re going to wait until tomorrow.

Last Saturday, however, was glorious, sunny, and warm, which was serendipitous, since it was World Wide Knit in Public Day, and in Fredericton, we were knitting in public. Outdoors. Specifically, in front of the yarn shop. With considerably less planning than last year. (The lovely event notice I wrote up included the line “Hosted by: We’re sort of developing plans organically on Ravelry.”)

The turnout was quite good, considering how last-minute it was and how many people had other commitments that weekend. I think the most people we had sitting in lawnchairs on the sidewalk and knitting at one time was seven, with others arriving and leaving as their schedules allowed.

I actually have quite a few photos of people KIPping, but since I don’t know how well people I’d never met before would react to me posting pictures of them on the Internet, I’ll stick with a photo of Kathy, Trish, and me.

More people were induced to join Ravelry, more people later found one another on Ravelry, we taught some passers-by about WWKiP Day and were pleasantly surprised to discover that a few passers-by already knew it was WWKiP Day (fellow knitters? people who saw the—ahem!—highly popular WWKiP Day knitting book display at the library?), my awesome boyfriend did my laundry while I spent six hours knitting, a tourist took pictures of us, some guy walking by called us Amish, and a good time was had by all.

There was also some knit graffiti, in the vein of the scarf on the panther statue last year. Sadly, I never got to see that in person.

One of the lampposts on Queen Street now has a lamppost cozy.

It looked great last Saturday, but now it’s all slumped down onto the conical section below the most cylindral part, as it is clearly too big to properly fit on that pole.

One of the dolphins frolicking in Freddy the Nude Dude’s fountain celebrated WWKiP Day by wearing a little scarf around his tail. That only lasted until some point on Monday, when presumably a city employee was ordered to remove it.

My friend Mare just sent me some photos of another Animal Statue With a Scarf, which I’ll include in another post. Mare is a better photographer than I am, although so is everybody.

I’ve been reading about Knitta’s stuff pretty much since they came into existence, but I only recently started reading the Masquerade blog, which I now love. I don’t know why I said “reading,” when it’s almost entirely photographs. And I’m familiar with The Ladies’ Fancywork Society (a crochet street-art crew!) and the awesomeness that is Knitted Landscape and some others, but I’ll have to visit every single link on the Yarn Bombing blogroll to see what nifty things I have been missing out on. How much am I looking forward to this book? Let me count the ways. Oh, and speaking of books, how annoyed am I that the release date for Stitch ‘n Bitch Extreme keeps getting pushed further and further back?

I was working on my first toe-up socks on WWKiP Day. This is how they looked then.

That is also how they look now. They used to have a little bit of foot, too, besides just a toe, but I ripped it out. Then I knit a little bit more foot. Then I ripped it out. Then I knit a little bit more foot. Then I ripped it out.

I don’t want to talk about it right now.

My mother recently adopted two kittens! There is a black one

and a white one,

and the word on the street is that they are both very rambunctious (I believe the word “evil” may have been used). Which is to be expected. We kittens are are a rambunctious lot. I have not yet met them, but plan to this summer. Oh, and the kittens are both dudes, so they are my little brothers.

Speaking of which, my mom finally got my (allegedly) human brother to send photos of the Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimonos, too. You know, the ones that we finished knitting in December? Although I posted a picture of mine months ago, I hadn’t seen what it looked like once my mom sewed the ribbon onto it. So as well as having guest photos in this post (all of them were taken either by my mom or my brother), I have some guest knitting, too. Hers is the greenish one in front, although it doesn’t look too greenish in this picture.

It’s made from acrylic. I forget what kind of acrylic, but it was nice stuff. I think she got it at Baadeck Yarns. Mine is Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran. Yeah, I gave a baby item that must be handwashed to the parents of twin babies and a preschooler, because I’m a jerk like that.

I finished knitting Branching Out, but I haven’t blocked it yet, and I won’t get around to doing that until sometime next week. This week I have a virus which has provided me with an extremely sore throat, a headache, and exhaustion, so now I am going to fall into bed with a good murder mystery.

Believe it or not, it’s not because I’m too lazy to write that I haven’t been posting. It’s because I’ve been too lazy to crop and de-uglify my photos in Photoshop. I consider writing photoless posts, but then I think how stupid that is when I have so many relevant yarny photos on my hard drive, so I just don’t do anything.

I finished my third pair of socks, which I named the Rockin’ in the Free World Socks because 1) I went to a Neil Young concert this month (to which I did not even take the socks, because we were down on the floor rather than up in the stands and I figured that DPNs would be hazardous), and 2) I got Kevin from Moist to hold one of the socks. So they, um, rock.

I have no idea how long the first sock of the pair took because I put it aside and forgot about it for something like five months, but I do know that the second sock took me nineteen days. That isn’t bad — for me. I’m trying to find a good stitch pattern for the next pair of socks, but I don’t have immediate plans to start actually knitting them.

Oh, and here is one of last year’s Tangled Up in Blue socks. I finished knitting these last August, and then I tossed them aside and ignored them until last week, when I wove the ends in. All four of the ends. If I were any lazier, I would probably be dead.

Last week I started Branching Out. (Psst, if you’d been following me on Twitter, you’d already know that. @ KnitKitten, of course.) I am using Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool in hot pink. This would be the same Silky Wool I blogged about on September 3, 2006. When I said, “I am in no hurry,” apparently I really was not kidding.

Branching Out is going well. I wonder what kind of hell I have doomed myself to by daring to say something like that. I have done eight pattern repeats out of a projected twenty-seven, and it looks more or less like it is supposed to. There might be some uneven tension or twisted stitches, but so far nothing really horrible is wrong with it.

Anyway, I’ve gotta go. I’ve got a scarf to knit and a whole lot of photographs to beat into submission.

A few weeks ago I went to a Great Big Sea concert in Moncton with a friend of mine, which was of course awesome. Spirit of the West opened for them, and this was also (of course) awesome. Seriously, how often does the opening band get a standing ovation?

What was not awesome: the annoying drunk chick who came up to us during intermission and started talking to my friend. I was knitting and trying to ignore Annoying Drunk Chick, but apparently she was trying to convince us to “lend” her our tickets for some nefarious reason. Then came this exchange, which I swear I am not making up:

Annoying Drunk Chick: Is she knitting or something?
My Friend: Yes, she is knitting.
Annoying Drunk Chick: (to me) Can I say something to you? And don’t take this the wrong way, it’s just because I’m really drunk right now and you probably shouldn’t listen to a word I’m saying. No offense, but—oh, I really shouldn’t say this at all. You should just ignore me.
Me: Now I really want to hear this. It sounds like it’s gonna be good.
Annoying Drunk Chick: Do you have someone special?
Me: What?
Annoying Drunk Chick: Do you have someone special?
Me: Are you going to tell me that I’ll never find a boyfriend if I keep knitting in public?
Annoying Drunk Chick: Something kind of like that, yeah.
Me: Well, if me knitting in public makes somebody not want to go out with me, then they’re not the kind of person I want to go out with, anyway. I’ll do what I want.
My Friend: (to Annoying Drunk Chick) She has a boyfriend. (This is, of course, true, but I saw no need to mention it to Annoying Drunk Chick since it seemed irrelevant to the point I was making.)
Annoying Drunk Chick: Oh, well, that’s good.

Wow. I can’t imagine ever being that rude to a complete stranger. Luckily, she went back to her own seat or wherever and we didn’t see her for the rest of the concert.

After the concert we went to The Old Triangle and after waiting approximately 400 years at the bar for someone to take our drink orders, which they never did, we decided to sit down at our table and wait—that hadn’t worked before, either, but at least we’d get to sit down. Except someone had taken my chair and dragged it over to the next table, and was sitting in my chair, in fact sitting on my coat, even though there were other coatless chairs at the table that they could have borrowed. This someone was none other than… Annoying Drunk Chick!

Yes, the very same. There are 64,128 people in Moncton and exactly one I wanted to avoid, so guess who’s been sitting in my chair. On my coat. Aargh. She seemed very happy to see us. She told the people she was with that she’d borrowed our tickets, although she had not. I guess that’s why she liked us; in her annoying drunken haze, she thought we’d helped her out. Which we hadn’t. Anyway, we weren’t at all happy to see her, so we left. Quickly.

Speaking of someone special, I finished knitting Dashing for my boyfriend (click the picture to make it grow!), and I have gone back to working on a pair of socks that I abandoned and forgot back in the fall.

This is the first armwarmer that I knit. Unfortunately, the cables were a little too tight in this one. I managed to make looser cables in the second armwarmer, but I haven’t taken any pictures of it. Oh, and by the way, my boyfriend really does have fingers, and they aren’t buried in the armwarmer, either. It’s not colossally huge or anything — his fingers are sticking out, but you can’t see them because of the way he’s bending them.

I also made a clock for my boyfriend last month.

It’s a Robert Goulet record, because we are both immensely fond of the SNL skits with Will Ferrell as Robert Goulet. Apparently anything can become a clock if you drill a hole in it and attach a clock mechanism. Obviously, I didn’t have to drill a hole in the record, it being a record, but I did have to embiggen the hole in the middle a little bit with a steak knife.

With this clock, you will always be forewarned of when 3:00 p.m. is coming, when your blood sugar and energy levels are low, and (the ghost of?) Robert Goulet will come and mess with your stuff…

My back finally stopped hurting so much, although I had to take a few weeks off from knitting while it healed. Then my boyfriend and I went on vacation to Québec for a few days during Carnaval. We ate a lot of good food, went on a tour of the ice hotel, and did much shopping (okay, I did much shopping). We took many pictures, and almost all of them look horrible, as I am a poor photographer and I am also not photogenic.

My boyfriend is finally allowing me to knit him a pair of fingerless mitts. Our past conversation on the subject went like this:

Me: You know, I could knit you a pair of fingerless gloves and then you wouldn’t have to wear those cut-up socks on your hands.
Him: (genuinely puzzled) But why would you do that when I have these cut-up socks?
Me: *bangs head against the wall*

I’m knitting Dashing and have completed one mitt so far. Sadly, he has stipulated that they must be made from black acrylic, because he sucks all the joy out of life. I am using Vanna’s Choice. It is adequate. You could be stuck working with much worse.

My back has been bothering me again this week because I was in an accident when a car crashed into the bus I was on, which I have talked about enough lately and therefore don’t want to talk about here. None of us on the bus were seriously injured, just bruised and stuff, and my back isn’t even as sore as it was when I first hurt it. If you want to send condolences to the family of Contable Jason Porter and his two children, Hannah and Jack, who were killed in the accident, there is an online card on the RCMP New Brunswick site.

I’m taking an evening course in blanket weaving at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. That’s the one thing I’ve been doing that’s hard on my back, since I’m trying to give it a bit of a rest. Weaving is currently taking precedence over knitting and blogging (my poor boyfriend and his one lonely mitt!), and Jackie is saving my life. Or attempting to. (When she says, “others are still behind,” she means me. Well, and one other person. And when she says, “We will see how it all turns out,” I’m not sure I want to know what she means.) I don’t know for sure if I’ll finish my blanket, but I do know that I wouldn’t if I didn’t have help from Jackie. And if I didn’t run over to the fibre arts studio every time I have a free moment…

Once in a blue moon, I really do finish things. Or at least thing. Remember that stuffed kitty I meant to knit about a year-and-a-half ago? Yeah, I barely remembered it either. I finally sewed it and stuffed it, though, and embroidered a little kitten face on it, so that I could give it to my grandmother for Christmas.

My grandmother knit a few things for me when I was a kid, so I wanted to knit something for her. She doesn’t need scarves and hats in her nursing home, and she likes stuffed animals, so I decided on the knitted kitty. I also thought it would be nice to get a picture of the kitty with a sweater that Grandma made for me when I was little.

It’s not a very good photo, but for once that isn’t my fault. I was trying to keep That Darn Cat off the sweater. She became fascinated with the horse sweater as soon as I tried snapping a photo. Evil thing.

The dog demands that there be equal-opportunity cuteness.

That is Honker, her Christmas goose. He honks. Or at least he will honk until she manages to kill his honking mechanism. That’s one of her favourite hobbies. The dog leads a rich and rewarding life.

I also finished knitting the Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimono, although I did not add the ribbon to it, and actually, I never will. My mom’s going to do that, but she has promised to send me a photo of it once it is beribboned. How much do you want to bet that the babies will have outgrown the baby kimonos already? (My cousin’s wife had twins, so my mom and I each knit a baby kimono.) Eh, it’s the thought that counts.

I am also very close to finishing the Mystery Intarsia Project, and since almost everyone I know in real life has already seen it by now, including its intended recipients, I figure there’s no point in taking a photo until it’s actually finished.

Stop laughing, it’ll happen.

No, I’m not kidding; I really did buy underwear tonight instead of doing laundry. In my defense, I am not completely out of clean underwear. I just don’t have many clean pairs of comfortable underwear, and purchasing more seemed like the most time-efficient way to remedy this situation, since tomorrow is Christmas Eve and I have a plane to catch and plenty of things to do before catching said plane.

Admittedly, I did buy underwear at the grocery store, which is pretty sad.

I hurt my back last week when I slipped on some ice and fell. So last week was pretty unpleasant, but this week the pain doesn’t hit me until about 4 p.m. every day. Apparently that’s as long as I can remain upright without it hurting, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it did last week. It has made knitting challenging, though.

I haven’t actually needed to do a lot of knitting, per se, but I do have lots of sewing up of knitted items to do. That, of course, happens to be my least favourite part. Which is why I’ve left all of it for so long.

Pretty pictures of stash should distract you from lack of any further content, right? Look, Handmaiden yarn in the First Flight colourway from Baadeck Yarns.

And the Celtic Colours colourway…

And now for something completely different:

It took me quite a while to figure out that was supposed to stand for “assorted cupcakes.” Because, I mean, it says ass cupcake.

Yeah, National Novel Writing Month will do it to ya.

I did knit quite a lot in early November, but that meant I had quite a lot of writing to catch up on later in November. Hence, no time for blogging.

Some people are good at getting Canadian rock stars to hold a sock (or Henry) for photo ops. I always thought that would be fun. So on Tuesday night, I asked Kevin Young, who plays keyboards for David Usher and played keyboards for Moist, to hold the sock I’m working on. (Of course I brought my sock to the David Usher concert. Duh.) If you’re not a fan of Moist and/or of David Usher, then you have no idea who Kevin is. If you are a fan, then you understand that this is awesome.

Kevin was really nice and patient about complying with my bizarre request, especially when you consider that my camera was not being nice or patient. We had to move into better light and I had to take a whole bunch of shots in order to get one that turned out okay. Not that the final sock photo is a very good picture of him. Look, here he is during the concert, looking normal.

Kevin was also very nice about giving hugs to us weirdo girls who were waiting outside the tour bus after the concert. Aww, we ♥ you, Kevin!

It’s been a while since anyone has asked me why I wanted them to hold a sock, and I totally failed at explaining it to Kevin. I eventually gave up and said, “Look, it’s just something knitters do. You’re just going to have to accept it.” Sorry about giving the impression that all knitters are unhinged.

David didn’t come out to talk to the fans afterward, although he sometimes does. ‘Twas a good concert, though. I also liked the opening band, Crash Parallel. I’d prefer a concert at a venue where you can stand up the whole time, rather than at the Playhouse, but it was a better venue for a David Usher show than the casino in Halifax, which is where I saw him last time.

I wrote down the set list… mostly… I won’t post it unless I think I’ve actually gotten all the songs down correctly.

There actually has been quite a lot of knitting going on. I still need to finish up the baby sweater, but I’ve also started a Mystery Project involving intarsia, which is coming along quite well.

The back of it looks considerably more complicated and horrifying now, but overall, I’m very pleased with my progress on it.

Oh yeah, this is a rock star post, isn’t it?

Tilli Tomas Rock Star, in Jade. The colour really has to be seen in person to be properly appreciated. And appreciate it I do.

Leia was my princess, my angel, my baby. I know exactly how sappy that sounds, but if you weren’t expecting some sappiness, what are you doing reading a blog called KnitKitten, anyway?

I had always wanted a cat, but my parents weren’t cat people (especially not my father), so they wouldn’t let me get one. The summer after my first year of university, though, I really wanted a kitten, and one day I cut out a newspaper picture of an adorable kitten at the SPCA who was waiting to be adopted, and I left it on my dad’s pillow. Since I was severely depressed at the time, my parents decided I could get a kitten, because they hoped it would cheer me up. They told me I had to take her with me when I moved into an apartment, though, because they didn’t want to take care of her forever. This seemed like a no-brainer to me — I was the one who wanted the cat.

My mother and I went to the SPCA and asked for the kitten that was in the newspaper, but they said that they didn’t do it like that; we’d have to go pick a kitten out ourselves. So we went to the cages and I picked my favourite kitten. I didn’t realize until later, when I compared her to the picture, that she actually was the one from the newspaper.

My mom has often asked me, “But how did you know she was the best kitten out of all of the ones there? How did you know she would be as loving as she is?”

The only thing I can tell her is that it was always completely obvious.

I brought my kitten home the day before Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace was released, and I named her Leia.

She was a lot better than the movie.

Leia was a cat, but she thought she was a dog. It’s pretty obvious that she was part Maine Coon. She was longhaired, with a huge, fluffy tail, a ruff around her neck, and tufts of fur in her ears and between her toes. She followed us around like a dog, she didn’t mind water, and she always wanted somebody to watch her eat. (She would whap me in the face with her paw at six in the morning — “Mom, watch me eat. Watch me eat, Mom.” — until I would get up and stand over her at her food dish while she had breakfast.) Leia never meowed. Instead, she chirped like a bird. She also seemed to have a mild case of hip dysplasia, so mild that it never caused her any discomfort, just gave her a hip-swinging sort of walk. We called it her “sexy walk.”

She was best friends with the family dog, but she hated cats, so she barely tolerated Wednesday, the cat my brother and I got a few years ago. See, here she’s looking up at Wednesday and saying, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Leia didn’t go outside. Ever. She was terrified of the Great Outdoors. She never felt grass under her paws in her life. (My mom brought some snow inside on a baking sheet once, though, and got Leia to stand on it. She hated it. Unlike the dog, who loves nothing better than to run outside and purposely stick her entire head in a snowbank.) Since she never wanted to go out, we didn’t have to worry about the fact that she refused to wear a collar. If you put a collar on her, she would just manage to take it off. Smart girl.

Despite not being cat people, when I did move into an apartment, my parents did not want Leia to go with me. They loved my wonderful catlet, of course. Although I wished I could take her, I knew she’d be happier if she stayed, since moving would be traumatic for a cat who hated leaving the house and besides, she and the dog would miss each other. I missed her, but at least I got to see her when I visited.

I couldn’t visit much lately, because I didn’t have enough time to take the bus, but I didn’t have enough money to take a plane, either. I would have visited more anyway, though, if I had known Leia was going to get cancer. There’s nothing that would have been more worthwhile to spend my money or my time on than Leia. She’s the only pet I ever had that was all my own (except those two guppies, and I still feel guilty about what happened to them — sorry, Edmund and Lucy.) She was my daughter.

Last week, I got to be with Leia for her last few days. She ran to the door to greet me, and she slept in my arms at night. On Friday, I had to have her put to sleep.

She was only nine years old.

I miss my baby so much.