I hope everyone had a nice holiday weekend, even if you may secretly be glad to be back at work and back to a somewhat normal life.
Under the theory that “you should gift someone what they really want, not what you think they should have,” I gave the cats a big pile of crumpled tissue paper on the floor for Christmas.
It was a big hit. They loved it. The noise drove me crazy all day. I forgot to pick it up before bedtime, and periodically throughout Christmas night I was awakened by the Crash! of a cat diving head-first through a pile of tissue paper.
Not to mention the sounds of fighting over who got to play with “the good piece.” Or whatever. Who knows. Frankly, these littermates squabble a lot more often than I, a single child, would have thought.
I’m loving Kimble’s Power Ninja Attack Foot, on the bottom right.
Had Christmas dinner with family in Seattle. A soggy night, but I’ve never been one to wish for a white Christmas!
Thank you for those pictures. Now I want to know about the knit-looking blanket on the sofa. Did you make it and did I miss reading about it or has my sleep-deprived brain wiped it out of my memory, or isn’t it handknit at all?
Crumpled tissue paper! Awesome! They get the coolest things.
Ah, the joy of crumpled tissue! Rivaled only by the joy of an empty cardboard box… Cats are so satisfying to give gifts to.
(And a White Christmas is over-rated. Trust me.)
Adorable! One of my cats went crazy for tissue paper when I was wrapping gifts. I had to sacrifice a piece to him so I could buy myself time to use the rest. He’s the first cat I’ve had who is into it.
I was wondering if you or any of your readers can suggest an online tutorial for the tubular cast-on. I made a beret (www.knittherapy.ca/v/patterns/baronessberet.pdf) over the weekend and it called for a tubular cast-on. I found one method where you knit with waste yarn and working yarn and pick up working yarn stitches out of a sea of waste yarn, but I couldn’t figure out if this would work for knitting in the round (on DPNs) so eventually I just made it with a regular cast-on. Thanks for any help you can provide!
I think the canonical tubular cast-on tutorial is probably the one at TechKnitting.
The method I use (when I go tubular, which is rarely, even though it looks really nice) is to cast on, knit the 3 rows, then just go back and pick up the stitches from the cast on edge. I forget where I learned this method… it’s probably somewhere in that TechKnitting article, or linked from it.
It’s not as clever as using waste yarn and all. But it’s a heck of a lot easier!
You are correct in your figuring; you can’t really do a tubular cast-on with knitting in the round. But I have done it where you do the cast-on back and forth, pick up the stitches, and then start knitting around. That works pretty well.
Happy kittehs! Your rug makes me think of felted square, but I have felted on the brain right now.
Thanks for the tubular tips! TechKnitting looks like such a nice site. I think one of my goals for 2011 will be to use a new cast-on method.