An addition to our household

From the humane society, he came with the name Dipstick.

I called him Archie for a while, but THOMY kept calling him Harry.

So Harold Archibald Dipstick the First, it is. He's three months old and loves to be cuddled. He's probably the first kitten I've had who isn't too busy to stop and be held.

He's doing something

A friend of mine is collecting baby hats to send to a ten-year-old boy who received a grant from DoSomething.org. His name is Andrew, and he is organizing a project to provide hats to newborns and preemies at Charlotte Medical Center in North Carolina. Heaven knows I have plenty of yarn to fill my friend's request for a hat. And during a road trip Friday, I produced two such items.



The left is a Tubey hat. I reworked the design to fit a tiny, preemie head. At least I hope it'll fit. I don't know much about babies' heads, but a knitter I know who makes lots of preemie hats told me once that if it fits an orange, it'll fit a preemie. I think the Tubey will fit a grapefruit. Or a two-cup Rubbermaid bowl, which is what's holding it up in the picture.

The other hat is a two-by-two rib. Both hats were knit to about seven inches in length and closed by the three-needle bind off method. The spiral tassels on the Tubey were added later.

If you're on Ravelry and want in on the project, go here.

Oh, and the road trip Friday? I went to The Yarn Barn in Lawrence, KS, something of a yarn store mecca, apparently. One of my companions went to test their spinning wheels and came home with one. I can tell you right now that I can't afford to be a hard-core spinner. I bought a drop spindle last fall, and that alone made THOMY's eyebrows struggle to stay even. [Love you, dear!] To be fair, the price of the spindle wasn't objectionable, just, "What? Another hobby and all it's paraphernalia?!"

What I did come home with however...



Lace weight cashmere. 2100 yards per cone, .003 cents per yard. I bought two cones. To heck for a moment with my solitary New Year's Resolution. It's cashmere. It did my cheapskate heart good.

Charity and penny-pinching extravagance in one blog post. That there's what you call ironic.

My Lizard Ridge

Twenty-one months after I began, I've finished my Lizard Ridge throw.



It consumed twenty-four balls of Noro Kureyon and Plymouth Boku. After I knit all the blocks, I had almost 200 yards of leftover yarn which I spit-spliced together into a great big ball and used to seam together the blocks.



This is a reverse, single crochet stitch, a.k.a. crab stitch. Originally, I had though I'd use some sort of three-needle bind off process to seam the blocks. Don't ask me how I was going to do it, exactly, but it would've involved picking up stitches. Lots and lots of stitches. The crab stitch gave me a visible seam with a lot less hassle.

And because I used a Rail Fence layout (the design on each block is perpendicular to its neighbor) for my rectangular blocks, I stretched the shorter of the two blocks being seamed. This forced the seam to lie to one side and caused a woven look throughout the blocks. Unexpected design feature!



Eleven grams--all that's left over:



This is your brain on yarn.

Some New Things

We are trying our hand at gardening here at Casa Scrapdash, and we have successfully jumped the first hurdle: sown seeds have sprouted.



Lemon Basil




Bell Peppers, a miniature variety.

We've assembled a planter table in which to grow our small garden. It's the ultimate in raised beds because I will not have to stoop or kneel to tend to the plants. We have seeds for shorter, bushier tomato plants, too, which I've stuck in the super special organic potting soil just today. I know, I know. I'm way late on planting them. Give this newbie a break; I've gotta act like a gardener until the plants believe me.

So far, so good.


Also, I'm trying to knit honest-to-God lace. In a rectangular stole, though, for crying out loud, not a triangular shawl or something 3D like a sweater. I'm not a complete adrenaline junkie*. So far, I've made a swatch of the stitches I'm going to use and the picot cast on edge for the beginning of the stole. I've taken two stitch patterns from A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns by Barbara Walker--an entirely awesome book--and put them together because, baby, they were made for each other. Maybe, just maybe, if all goes well and I don't hang myself by my lifeline, I'll jot down the pattern to share with generations hereafter.

Another so far, so good...




*I just remembered that I did make lace in 3D last year, in the form of the Lightning Lace Jacket. But that was when I was younger and stupider. It had nothing to do with adrenaline. More like cortisol pumping into the veins.