Shhh

This is all I can show you of what I just finished for now. Pre-blocked and stretched. It is currently sprawled out on my couch with 96 pins holding it in place until it drys. That left me with 4 extra pins...whew.

The reason it's on my couch and not on the floor where it usually would be is because of:
Canela is a teeny chi-weenie hanging out for the weekend. She is literally my shadow. I get up - she gets up. I sit down - she's in my lap. When I was pinning my project on the couch she crawled -under- it and hung out until I got up. As long as she doesn't freak out about the ferrets we'll be ok. So far she barked and ran out of the room when she saw the cage. But the cage is in the bedroom, so this could be interesting...

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Merry Christmas!

Little Ninja minus one eye (turns out it -was- a boy.. promise I'm not usually wrong on that one)

We tried to get one with a bow on his head, but that proved too distracting to get a focused picture. He absolutely -loved- all the wrapping and boxes!

Have an awesome and fun day!

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One more thing

Earlier this year we lost Buddy Rich. Above is one of the last photos I have of him with his favorite ball. He'd lost a lot of weight at this point. We only found out afterward, but he had a tumor on his intestines. One night he seemed to be doing very poorly and I took him to work with me the next day so I could keep an eye on him. By that afternoon he had passed. I'm thankful I had the foresight to bring him with me and also thankful he held on until Mike could come and say Good Bye.



Baby missed him a ton and seemed to fall into a pretty bad depression without him. I don't blame him, he was never away from Buddy since he was 8 weeks old. A couple of months after, a stray ferret came into the shelter who stole the hearts of everyone because she was so neat in her cage. After an exam by the vet we found out she was around 7 years old (that's really old in ferret years), had an enlarged spleen, and likely had some adrenal disease (which Baby also has).

I spent some time with her at work and she sat either in my sweater or on my shoulder, perfectly content for close to half an hour. I was won over and so was Mike. I brought her home that night and within a couple of days Baby and she were snuggled together and Baby was back to his old self! They are a super cute couple and Mike has named her Victoria. She is very loving and playful and fits right in!

With each loss comes the opportunity for a gain. I'm so happy for all of us, but especially Baby, that Victoria has come into our lives. I think she's just as happy to have us since she gives us kisses every time we hold her.

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Early Resolution?

I was shying away from blogging for a while, but I want to catch up!

To sum things up: I finished my cardigan and wore it a ton before it got too chilly, it's perfect. I'm working on Mike's Wash Sweater and the blur of lace which has turned out to be much easier now that I have the hang of it. Both I hope to finish before the end of the year.

Fosters:
I've had tons of kittens - here are a few:
Mercutio and Taffy. We almost kept Mercutio because he was so awesome. We had them for nearly a month while they recovered from URI and Conjunctivitis. These were the first (and only so far) that I had to bring back and put on the adoption floor myself. I'll admit it - I cried! I miss them tons.

Bumble Bee and Beatle Juice. They were my first kittens who didn't need to be bottle fed. They were super sweet and loved each other soo much. They were super shy at first but soon were sleeping in our bed with us. Ended up going home together which warmed my heart to no end!

My latest kitten was Ninjaa who was a girl. She was super sweet but had a really messed up eye so I don't have any good photos of her. She's out with another foster mom for a couple weeks then her eye will likely need to come out.

Lastly, I had a puppy foster for about a week! Her name is Snookie (but we called her Molly). Her front legs were deformed from being confined in too small of a crate for too many hours a day and we gave her physical therapy as often as she would let us. She's now completely back to normal and is waiting for her home at the shelter!

She's a little hellion, but she's awesome. I can't wait until she finds a permanent home. No puppy should have to grow up in a shelter. And she's so cute! I don't get it. She's like a little cow/pig cross.

Anyways, there are a few knitting projects I've made that I won't post about because this would end up too long. And I don't have decent pictures of them anyhow. I'll start posting them on here again from now on!

Promise.

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Second Chances

I was getting really far on both of my projects when disaster hit.

My Safire cropped cardigan was zooming along, I was almost done with the shaping and about ready to start the bottom ribbing when I realized... it seemed rather large. I had been trying it on to make sure it wasn't too small, but I didn't stop to think about if it was big. And it was. By many inches. I decided I needed to start all over. :(

But, I learned my lesson and -actually did a gauge swatch-! I went down 2 needle sizes and thought it'd be perfect. But oddly, it wasn't..I was still too big. Either I'm the loosest knitter ever or my yarn is thicker then the recommended yarn. So I'm now down 2 needle sizes and making the smaller size. It should end up just about perfect if my math was correct.

I finally restarted it today on the bus and it's already coming along nicely. After a very crazy day at work it was nice being able to turn on my podcast and just mindlessly knit on my way home.

My second disaster ended up being a very good thing. I was working on my shawl when....the last stitch slipped off the needle when I was moving the project to a different location. It was completely and totally unfixable. There had been bind offs and adding stitches, not to mention the sheer size of yarn and complicated stitches!

After making sure everyone in the house knew what a terrible thing had just happened to me, I ripped it out and started it all over again (it was only 18 rows. But each row is taxing!) But this time around I knew what I was doing! So I cast on much looser and did the first row correctly and man, you can tell. It looks a lot better and I am really glad I ended up restarting.

Oh, and I already want to start another project. I found a pattern for the sweater Wash wears in Firefly and Mike wants one!

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The instructions for my latest project. o.O The blur of letters is no trick of the eye. It's a bit daunting, but I'm confident in my abilities. The hardest part for me has been getting used to the size of the thread. I mean yarn.
Eventually I'm hoping it'll look like this:

It's a beautiful pattern by Anne Hanson. I've probably wish-listed half her pieces already. The yarn I'm using is an alpaca blend from Knit Picks (my fav company ever) in a really beautiful purple.

To give me some sanity breaks I'm restarting my Safire cardigan. My gauge was waaay off. I figure I should finally learn the gauge lesson. Luckily it's a super easy knit and I will bang right through it again!

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Baby Bundles

I can finally post photos of my latest creation! I've been working on it for a while and the wonderful Kendra now has it in her hands. It was really fun to make and the yarn is beautiful.

Hopefully I'll get a picture of a real baby wrapped up inside!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

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I had my first kitten foster the last couple of days! They were so young that they needed to eat round the clock, so someone had to take on such a hard task ;) Started off with a little 3.5 week old boy and then added in a 4 week old girl (who was actually smaller then the boy). The girl was very helpful in teaching the boy how to eat on his own! The 2 days of fun culminated with us all falling asleep on the floor together. The girl on top of my arm (I was sideways) and the boy curled up between my chin and shoulder. It was heaven.
Mike agrees:

They are now out in permanent foster for a few weeks.

While waiting to order more yarn I was going through my stash trying to figure out what I was going to do with some of the different yarns I had. I came across this on Ravelry and it was perfect! I usually shy away from such plain patterns, but I've been in the mood for something simple I can knit on the bus without referring to a pattern every other row. I'm making it in a really beautiful heather green that I got for Christmas.

I just placed an order for yarn to make 4 different projects! I'm so excited. 2 are very complicated patterns that will be a lot of fun to work on. One is a very simple pattern similar to the Safire I'm making now. The last one is an easily memorized lace pattern to make a tank top. It's going to be a great summer. Hopefully they last me all summer. I have some fall projects planned too once I bang out these 4 summer ones.

In closing, this is how hot it was today:

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Burnout

I've been working on two projects for weeks and weeks now. One more than the other and I'm feeling a bit of burn out. The one I haven't been paying much attention too I'm kinda not feeling right now. I won't need them until fall anyways.

I think I need to take a day or two to make a quick project so that I can get back to work on my main project.

Let me see if I can be more vague.

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New Petfinder.com App

I have taken over running Petfinder.com for the shelter. I think there is a lot of information that we can put out there for people. And a lot of browsers of the site could become new adopters!

I got an email from Petfinder yesterday morning announcing the new IPhone App. Sounds really awesome! So I download it right away and went searching for our dogs.

I couldn't find a single one! I searched in just our zip code and just for pit bulls to see if that would help, nope. On the real site we are on the second page in our zip code. I searched through 10ish pages on the app and couldn't find us. I find it extremely frustrating that a large organization like the MSPCA isn't easily found.

My only other gripe is that while searching the only thing you can see is a small picture of the animal. If you make your search criteria, then all those dogs should be a good mach, but then it's just on looks alone. But I understand that a lot about an animal that attracts people is their looks, I'm the same way. I'm really a sucker for anything gray, dunno why.

Aside from that the app seems pretty well put together. I think it's very clean looking and not too bulky. I read a review that said it crashed a lot, but so far it hasn't for me. I'll have to fiddle around and see how I'm going to get our dogs up onto some of these search pages!

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Valentine's Nerds

This is a photo of the best boyfriend ever. For Valentines he took me on a Stay-cation to the Westin where the annual Boskone was going on! Boskone is a sci-fi convention run by the New England Science Fiction Association. The guest of honor this year was none other then Alastair Reynolds, my favorite author ever. I got to meet him, get his autograph, hear a reading from his newest book, and hear him speak on a number of panels on everything from the concept of The Singularity, to how science fiction relates to what's going on in the real world, and beyond.

It was amazing. We got to meet other authors including Vernor Vinge, Charlie Stross, and Karl Schroeder. I did get quite a bit of beef from the girls at work. Everyone thought it was probably one of the nerdiest valentine's gift ever, but that it was the sweetest too. I agree.

I've pretty much stopped writing completely right now. It inspired me to start up again, now the only problem is finding the time to sit down and do it. After we get moved into our new (glorious) apartment I'm going make the time. In the new place there is a nice little nook just big enough for a small desk. I want to turn it into my corner. Enough space for my sewing machine or a laptop. We're going to purge a lot of possessions with this move, things we just don't need to hang onto. Some of the furniture will go up on craigslist and the rest is going to goodwill. The one thing that isn't getting purged is our book collection. Luckily the new place has a built in shelf that -may- hold most of them. For now. I'm looking forward to starting a new chapter without so much extra junk.

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Button on Blanket

Tadaa!

Pros:
* Super warm
* Really soft
* Layers awesomely under my coats!

Cons:
* When putting on the buttons, I did do it quite evenly, so the left side comes up further then the right. Weird, I know.
* I need better stitch markers so I don't create ladders like you see coming up from under the armpit.

No real complaints with the pattern, (B.O.B)it was really well written. It does seem to be made for someone with narrow shoulders. Or, I have a very long neck. The sweater is supposed to have a turtle neck, but it barely comes up my neck at all. This was such a quick knit that I think I'll make it again with some added shaping in the waist and a higher collar. Maybe put in some more cables as well.

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Honest Scrap

Ok Kendra doing the Honest Scrap list for you!

10 things about me people may or may not know about me

1: I love animals. I love it when Mike says "Wow you get paid to do that?" when I tell him stories from work (MSPCA Adoption Center - Boston) *plug plug plug* I just really love being around animals constantly. I would probably live in a zoo if Mike wasn't here to hold me back.

2: I would absolutely love to work at a sanctuary some day. I think one for orphaned Chimps or Apes would be the most fun. I've seriously considered trying to get an internship/volunteer at Chip Eden in South Africa. If I could do that, it would be amazing.

3: I don't really know what I want to do with my life. I do know that I want to have a family, and I want to work with animals. Unfortunately supporting a family on an animal related salary will not be as glamorous as say, a doctor.

4: At the age of 19 I was diagnosed with Hyperthyroid. Meaning my thyroid produced too much hormones, so they literally nuked it. 2 years later my thyroid was no longer producing enough any longer. Now if I miss my medication or my levels are off I'm a very forgetful, tired, psycho. "You will ENJOY Christmas!" type of thing.

5: While I'm a very good homemaker, I'm very picky about when I want to be one. I love to cook and have a nice house, but I don't like cooking in my craptastic kitchen that's completely cut off from the rest of the house. So we usually end up eating out.

6: Which means I'm trying very hard to cook more to save money! It's my new goal for life; save as much money as I can. Frugal without feeling like I'm going without.

7: I only read books that are an escape from reality. I've tried reading some really great books, but I can never stay focused on them. My philosophy is that if it's similar to something I could live through, why read about it? I love space adventures, sci fi, fantasy (not the magic dragons and cheesy ones). On that same note, I have a hard time keeping up on the news. If it's not huge to the point everyone is talking about it, I probably have no idea about it. This is bad, I should probably work on it.

8: I used to write a lot of short stories. This is something I need to get back into. Problem is, I write higher quality when I put pen to paper, but then it's so dang slow!

9: I knit and crochet (incase you haven't seen any other posts, heh). There is something extremely enjoyable in making something with your own hands. My parents gave me a sewing machine for Christmas and I'm really excited to expand into that area too! Who needs clothing stores?

10: I'm in love with the most amazing man ever. Life is truly going to be an adventure with this one! When I'm content with sitting at home he pulls me up and we go out and have a ton of fun exploring new places. He's the reason I'm in Boston right now, and I really love it here (except for winter). I can't wait to see where life takes us and see our family grow. Ok, I can wait a bit for that last part.

So there we have it! Summary of me!

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Long Time Coming

Finally, some pictures of finished projects! I have a sweater that I was working on last week and was literally only the collar away from finishing when I ran out of yarn. I just got my shipment of more though, so tomorrow I'll be able to finish it! It's going to be warm and squishy and delish.





First off, my Hexagon Blanket that's been finished for quite some time now. I really love this thing, it's huge, it's snuggly, it's pretty! Mike says "Who makes a round blanket?" But I love it. It never lives on the bed, it's always in the living room, either nicely covering our couch or wrapped around me, like now.










Next, my Autumn Blanket. I actually only finished this last night. A little late for the season, yes. It's not as big as the Hexagons but it's beautiful, and will look wonderful over the couch next fall.












Lastly, my Glittens! Technically they aren't finished yet because I haven't put on the buttons to keep the mitten tops down, but shush.

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