The current interminable knitting project is the Return of the Shawl of Doom. It’s a simple garter stitch triangular shawl in Fleece Artist Goldielocks that I put aside (or possibly hurled violently aside) about two years ago because the yarn was driving me crazy crazier. I am now much more capable of working with this yarn and it is no longer causing me to gnash my teeth every time I pick it up. So this is not yet a story with a happy ending, but at least it is a story with a Happy Bit Somewhere After the Beginning but Not Quite at the Middle Yet.

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.

Great, now this is bugging me, because I swear I saw a site once with pictures of what looked like knitted roadkill, and it wasn’t Patricia Waller’s fabulously disturbing crochet. Or maybe not roadkill, but flat dead animals, anyway. I thought maybe I had it bookmarked, but I don’t seem to (although maybe this could be because it doesn’t actually exist). So right now I’ve got another browser tab open and I’m here Googling stuff like knit dead snake and knit dead tiger and trying to pretend I am not insane.

Oh, and regarding the kitty’s tail, the pattern says:

Cast on 16 sts. K 1st row. In the 2nd row, K 10 sts and turn (leaving 6 sts “unknitted”). 3rd row K (this row is shorter now). Repeat these 3 rows 3 times.

Now, I would interpret this as twelve rows, because if you are going to repeat these three rows three times, then wouldn’t you have to knit the three rows one other time first? Otherwise, it’s not really repeating them. I think it’s actually supposed to be nine rows, though, because the tail in the picture on the pattern page looks shorter than twelve rows, and other people on Craftster said they did nine rows, too. I’m not sure why I’m even bothering to mention this, because I’ve got a nine-row tail, and if it turns out that it looks funny, then I’ll just knit a new one. Duh.

Speaking of semantics, I am going to be even more pedantic than I just was and correct something I said in my last post. I said that the kitty would be a calico cat, but that’s because I thought it had some white on it. The light patches aren’t actually white, they’re cream. Technically, that makes the inanimate, currently flat cat-to-be a tortoiseshell, because according to Wikipedia, calicos have white on them and tortoiseshells don’t.

I finally got around to updating my version of WordPress. Go, me.

Now that I’ve finished Eeyore, I’m going to do a Winnie-the-Pooh. I’ve also got a little Tigger kit, and it would be nice to have a manic Tigger to go with my depressed Eeyore, but the Tigger kit I have is this one that pictures him from the waist up, and I’d really need a full-body Tigger to be the proper yang to Eeyore’s yin. Plus, the Pooh Bear kit is easier.

All sorts of cross stitch kits were on sale at Wal-Mart, so Pooh and Tigger were $2.60 each instead of their regular price of $3.47. I’ve also been looking all over my apartment for a little butterfly kit I got about two years ago and opened but never started. After much searching, I managed to find the original packaging, the pattern, the little plastic frame for it, and even the freakin’ needle that came with the kit, but do you think I could find the floss or the fabric? Noooo. I know they’re around here somewhere, but I don’t know where. The frame was at the bottom of a laundry basket that contained many items that were not laundry, and the rest of the stuff was in a milk crate which was mostly full of magazines.

Nope, no scarf pictures today. Last weekend as I had hoped, this weekend coming up — what’s the difference, really, as long as they appear eventually?

I have several small, quick knitting projects planned for the very near future, but mentioning any plan I have for anything before I start it makes me less likely to get around to it, so I won’t go into further detail about any of them until I cast on. I have also been procrastinating for eons with respect to updating this blog to a more recent version of WordPress, and fixing up/creating some other things around the site. But I won’t express a plan to actually do so, because that always bodes ill.

Now that the wrist has improved, there is only one obstacle to the knitting: a small, furry, sharp-toothed creature.

All kidding aside, she’s really eased up quite a bit on her Kill All Yarn mission, now that she is an oh-so-mature ten months old. Sleeping on the knitting is much better than attacking it with her teeth. Although she still does that on occasion.

I finally got around to putting these JavaScript progress bars on the sidebar. I should really make some time to work on this site’s design. I used to like doing stuff like that, and theoretically I still do, but it’s been so long since I’ve done any web design stuff. Unsurprisingly, grad school leaves one with little free time. It would be fun to do more than just tweak the default CSS a little, which is pretty much all I’ve done here.