When Knitting Was a Manly Art

Grace is one of two surviving siblings from our first hand raised litter. Their momma disappeared late in June about 6 years ago leaving us with 5 three week old kittens. A crash course on feeding 5 very hungry little mouths. We learned a lot with this litter.

Grace was a shy kitty and wouldn’t come into the barn to eat with the rest of the litter and later that summer completely disappeared. We were sure that she had become a coyotes dinner, but about two months later while out feeding one evening, I heard a strange meow and saw a *very* thin Grace coming across the field. She had always been more shy with me, so I called Eileen and she was able to catch her and she instantly become part of the indoor tribe. We suspect she had been living completely feral, eating what she could catch and was painfully thin.

She’s still a shy kittty, but for the most part gets along with the rest of the indoor cats. She’s put on a bit of weight - we call her the land whale - and she’s finally come to trust me to the point that she’s one of my morning greeters. These are the cats that notice that I’m awake and jump on the bed to purr in my ear and lick my nose and tell me that their food bowls are empty.

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Back at work on the Aran sleeve this morning. Finsihed 6th set of decreases and it’s looking more and more like a sleeve. This shot is from the top of the sweater, with neck at bottom of picture.

Our first hard frost last night - 26F on the back porch - and I’ve got 30 bales of alfalfa hay to move over the next two days, so off to work.

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Continuing with the indoor kitties

Sage Emily is an example of ‘Should Have Known Better’.

We picked up Sage and her brother from the side of a local rural road about 10 years ago. They were tiny, undernourished and abused - Sage still carries two large scars from that abuse. We had already gone through a bout of Feline Leukemia with the resulting loss of cats and decided we wouldn’t bring the kittens inside until they’d been tested to protect the rest of our cats. So we set up a little nest in the back of Eileen’s canopyed pickup truck. Temps that night didn’t drop below 40F, but apparently in their state, it was cold enough. We found both in deep hypothermia the next morning. We weren’t able to save the male, but heat lamps, heating pads and warm bottles of milk revived Sage.

But, some damage had been done. She completely lost her left ear and about 1/3 of her right ear. Our vet says it’s common for the system to shut down extremity blood vessels when hypothermic and with the blood supply shut off, the ear tissue died.

Doesn’t seem to slow her down any… She’s the current Queen of the house and a sweet girl.

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Decided to put a full morning on Sock #2 instead of working on the Aran.

Finished leg, heel flap and turning of heel. The ‘Eye of Partridge’ pattern shows up much nicer on this one. The first sock heel was kind of overwhelmed with the green and white patterning.

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Eileen and I like cats. We both have dogs, but cats always seem to rank higher and I guess that shows in the number we have.

I thought I’d provide a bit more details on our kids

Grandpa Jake is the old man of the family. He turned 15 in May and is still in good health. He and his brother, Ben, were the last cats we payed money for. All since them have been free. Unfortunately, we lost Ben in April to kidney failure.

Jake’s a talker and he purrs with his mouth open which produces some interesting sounds and he’s a sweet old man.

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It’s been a busy past 4 days and not a lot of anything but nursery/farm work. The weather has been terrific and we couldn’t pass it up. I have made progress on the aran sleeve. Kind of boring, as most ot the sleeve is Moss stitch with the three cables down the top of the sleeve, but when I get the time I make good progress. Unfortunately, sock #2 hasn’t been touched for nearly a week, but I hope to finish the leg tomorrow and start heel flap.

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Another of my on and off hobbies is amateur astronomy. I’ve got a 6″ Dobsonian reflector telescope that I drag out into the backyard from time to time.

Though the sun is on the downside of sunspot actitivty, a *very* big group has appeared and there’s been concern and anticipation. Concern that it will cause disruptions in electronic communications and anticipation for a massive aurora show. Neither one has appeared though.

I drug out the scope and a sun filter and took some shots of the sun. This is the best and a full size shot is linked to the thumbnail

UPDATE: To give you an idea of the size of these sunspots, I’ve added a little blue dot at the upper left of the picture. This represents the size difference between the Earth and the Sun.

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First Aran sleeve is started. Picking up stitches was better this time, but still took over an hour to get those 79 stitches plus the saddle stitches. 1 1/2 inches of flat knitting for underarm ease and then finally onto circular needle. Finished 6 rounds of the actual sleeve and it looks like this is going to be a speedy process.

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Finished last 6 rows on upper front this morning. Everything looks good, final patterns match and now I get to pick-up stitches for the first arm tomorrow. Oh, how I love picking up stitches — Not –

And nearly down to the heel on sock #2

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Socks
Only a couple rows on the Aran this morning. I needed something different, so spent some quality time with sock #2 and made pretty good progress. About 3/4 the way to the heel. I’ve really fallen in love with these Bryspun needles. Decreases are a *bit* harder, due to the points, but I just breeze along with anything else - knit or purl.

I’ve got two more 100 gm skeins of Opal. One will go towards my first pair of toe-up socks and the other to the Strong Heel socks from the Knitter’s fall issue.

And guess what? The folks from KnitNet have asked permission to put one of my socks-in-progress pictures in their latest issue. If you have a subscription to their online magazine, you’ll find the picture heading a short piece about knitting blogs.

Flowers
It’s the 20th of October. Fall is a full month along, and we still have flowers blooming.

The Toad Lilys are still producing their unusual flowers

And the Monkshood (Aconite napellus) is slowly dwindling but is still producing their own unusual spkes of flowers

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