Birthdays and Horror Stories and Fugs, oh my

Twelve years ago today, at 7:30 a.m., I first held a wee little girl, just minutes old, who looked at me with big blue eyes.

Last night, that girl performed in the school's spring concert.  She sang,

She played recorder (with a large group, and then with a smaller ensemble),

And she acted in a cute short playlet (in which no one fudged a line at all).  Sometimes I forget just how multi-talented she is!  All this, plus piano, soccer, poetry, great academic grades, generosity, cuddliness and mad knitting skillz!.  How'd I get so lucky?  Who knew she'd be so well rounded at only 12!  Did I mention that she's also appropriately moody, and giddy, and a bit clumsy from time to time?

This morning, I watched that lovely girl with long brown hair, and big blue eyes walk out the door, gleefully touching her morning presents (a new moon phase watch, and a pewter pendant bearing her Celtic astrological symbol (a Chalice)). There will be more later, but she's about as much a morning person as I am... and it is a school day.

This evening, three more twelve year old girls will be sitting down to dinner with us, lounging about, eating us out of house and home as the evening progresses, likely dancing and laughing and playing and generally causing a ruckus, and then spreading sleeping bags around the floor so that they can pretend they're going to actually sleep in them.  They won't be going home until tomorrow.

Somewhere, between that bright Chicago morning full of new life and promise, and today... I must have lost my mind.

Since the impending horror of the four pre-teen girls giggling right underneath my bedroom all night is too frightening to contemplate for long, I'll revert to lesser horrors and a long over due Fug update.

As you may recall, I mentioned something about yarn having been stored in the garage. I've now brought it all in.  I had thought it was pretty safe out there, since the only yarn I stored there was still in it's bags. I was wrong: my stint cleaning the garage revealed that even bagged yarn is not safe out there when  a mouse has moved in:

This was a happy ball of Caitlin Cotton  -- a yarn put out by Classic Elite so long ago that it was discontinued when I bought it in 1996.  Not sure why I have it, not sure what I'll do with it... only barely recall what I planned to do with it when I first bought it (but it clearly wasn't to knit a baby something for anyone as I bought 2 bags of it).

Luckily, Mousie only got to one ball.  It's attack left me with only 35 g of a 50g ball that is usable. The rest was in perhaps 10" lengths (and shorter) that I simply threw away.

Evidently, I had an equal opportunity mouse, as it also attacked some lovely wool

More long retired yarn (Brunswick LaLaine).  That ball looked far more salvage-able.

What you couldn't see from the outside is that Mousie gnawed a bit of a hole well into the ball.  Despite doing quite a bit of damage, the beastie didn't actually take very much of the yarn away. Thanks to the form in which the ball was wound, in addition to the main surviving ball of 55 g, I have 32 g of yarn in several smaller balls that will be great if I decide to do some intarsia knitting (or even stripes) with this stuff --

and another 12 g of yarn in lengths that would be perfect for fringing, should this yarn wind up as a project bearing fringe.  I can't quite bear to pitch it all yet (the Caitlin cotton was easier to toss), so its resting in a baggie until the yarn tells me what it wants to be when it grows up.

In the mean time, I must put this yarn away, safely, here in the house, where I'm pretending that the cats have not released a mouse. I've no idea how I'm going to integrate the cotton or the LaLaine, or the rest of the yarn from the garage

into the Yarn Closet,

(There WAS organization in here... really, there was.  When I inventoried and photographed all the yarn.. that floor was clear!  sigh.)  One more chore for me to do (oh dear -- I'll have to pet a whole bunch of yarn again.  Pity me? LOL

On a more productive front, I've made some visible headway with the BSS Fug II.

The body, having taken a wee short dip in the frog pond because I had knit past the point where the sleeves fit in, is ready to commence the Oblong Stitch (?) yoke.

And sleeve two, in yet another variation of basketweave (variation four) has progressed even further than sleeve one.

I am watching the cone of the darker yarn warily.  It looks like its getting awfully close to the end.

I need it to make it through the ends of both sleeves, and through at least half of the yoke so that I can incorporate a gradual change from working the two colors together to working only the paler color (of which I have practically an entire second cone left).  Depending on my mood, this looks both probable and impossible.

I do not relish the thought of frogging back any of the sections to begin the transition earlier.

Comments

[D]

12!!?? How is this possible!

Happy Birthday C!

[the divine (yet blogless) Elizabeth]

I can personally attest to the once clean floor space of the yarn closet. But DUDE! Doesn't that picture reveal that binder with all your circular needles in it that was hiding from you? Can it be true that it finally came back to play again?

[Mary the Digital Knitter]

Wire cubes! That's how I've organized a lot of my stash. I got the basic set at Costco a few years ago and recently added wheels and shelf tracks from the manufacturer, Seville Classics, here. By putting the cube units on wheels, you can fill the whole space full and then just roll the cubes out to get to the stuff against the walls. Plus you can see what's inside the cubes fairly well.

This works a lot better than my usual technique of arranging everything around the edges just so and then filling in the center space with a random collection of bins, totes, knitting bags,shopping bags, shipping bags and boxes, etc. It's a lot easier to wheel out a stack of cubes than it is to pick up and move each of the individual pieces. And then putting them back, which usually drives me to attempt, vainly, to organize everything somehow, requiring that every bin, tote, etc, gets emptied out and the yarn reallocated, ensuring that I'll henceforth have to examine every bin, tote, etc to find anything.

[Mary the Digital Knitter]

That link for Seville Classics didn't work, so I'll just put it here

http://www.sevilleclassics.com/merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=SC&Category_Code=SOL_CS_CC

[Carrie K]

Yay! You've got more yarn than me so I can continue to accumulate stash.

Oh, poor you, reknitting the Fug.

And Happy Belated Birthday to your talented daughter!