My poor cherry tree.

My poor cherry tree.

It was a sort of stormy day yesterday.  There were periods of grey calm and then wild periods of wind.  Late n the afternoon, it was like a blizzard blowing only rather than snow it was harsh rain and hail.  Lots of hail.  Not flattening everything hail but enough that the poor cherry tree is looking a bit beaten down and careworn.  

So it goes.  Today has started sunny and I am sure that the bees are just waiting for their chance to visit again. 

Bright Thursday.

It's Wednesday, right?  I have to think about that this morning because yesterday was a city sort of day and my sense of calendar is all wonky.  I hate city days.  Really truly and deeply.  I think I am best suited to being a hermit and would gladly live in a cave with the usual mod cons of heat, water, internet, power and mail service.  And my wool. My wool is required.

While I am being a hermit, I wanted to take some time to tell you about some very interesting books I have been reading.  I heard about most of them via some of the vloggers I watch on youtube.   

The Dress Diary of Mrs Ann Sykes, Kate Strasdin author

A Short History of the World According to Sheep, Sally Coulthard author

The Fabric of Civilization:  How Textiles Made the World Virginia I. Postrel author

Women's Work, the First 20,000 Years Elisabeth Wayland Barber author

Add to this the books I read earlier this year

Unruly: The Ridiculous History of England's Kings and Queens, David Mitchell author

SPQR A History of Anciient Rome, Mary Beard author

A Brief History of Japan, Jonathan Clements author

Shakespeare The World As Stage, Bill Bryson author

and I feel I can hold my head up again and call myself a reader.  

These are just the significant books I read this winter.  They don't include the Hamish Macbeths, the Christies, the Mrs, Polifaxs nor the many rereads of old favourites like the Daisy Dalrymples or the Miss Silvers.  

Updated to note:  

That was yesterday.  It seems I did not publish.   Oh well.  

It is more of the same today.  Cleaning.  Putting.  Tidying.  I hate these sorts of days and yet I enjoy them.  It feeds the uber organized side of me.  As much as I seem to be an untidy person, I actually have a side of me that only feels content when everything has a place and is sitting there waiting in its super ordered way.

I also did a very small bit of sewing.  I am testing ideas more than anything else and trying to make my end goal happen in a less complex way.  Think of the Coquelicot Skirt, and you have an idea of what I am aiming for.  

I may yet end up just buying the pattern, yet I am pushing for more.  I'd like to use less fabric overall, and avoid the elaborate pockets and front closing of the underskirt.  

All in an effort to avoid zippers and elastic.  Silly yes?  

More of the same today.  Might even get to cleaning out a big closet mess and that would be a very good thing.

Putz. Dunce. Dunderhead.

I knit yesterday between chores and various adventures around the house.  My hands felt good and all seemed well.

Through the whole day, I knit 5 or so rounds  on the top.  Not a lot of knitting, but it seems it was too much.  My hand hurts again this morning.  

I am entirely convinced it isn't the knitting but rather the hand brace problem that is the root of the issue.  I wear thumb and wrist braces every night and it makes a huge difference to the ongoing health of my hands. Lately I have been taking them off at some point during the night. The braces are irritating to my over sensitized hands and off they go in apparent wild abandon.  I wake to find them scattered around the room.   The velcro isn't holding as well as it did at first too and the slightly too small wrist brace isn't making it easy. It is just a kind of muddle.  Still, I have to do better for my sanity.  Call me putz, dunce and dunderhead. 

On the cheerier side of the world, right outside my bedroom window is a sour cherry tree.  This variety of cherry,  the Evans Cherry is very hardy for prairie climates.  The fruit is good for eating fresh and for canning and freezing.  It is more tart than the BC cherries you get in store but they have their own delicious identity.  I love them.  Can you tell?

All spring, I have been watching the tree.  I watched as the tiny buds formed, tight packed and closed.  I watched the green covers slowly crack and burst into full bloom from the bottom of the tree to the tip of the tallest branches.  At any moment in time, it is surrounded by a flurry of busy buzzing bees as they gather nectar for their hives and pollinate each blossom. I could watch it for hours.

No matter the travails of the day, there is still so much wonder if we look for it. A bee buzzing a blossom.  A bird picking up a stick or some fuzz to fly off to build it's nest.  The shape of clouds.  The winds whispering through the trees.  Some of the wonders of the world are huge, like mountains or waterfalls or the churning oceans or the mysteries of volcanic activity.  More often though, the wonder of nature is is the mundane, the small, the things we don't often focus on, but they are there if we but stop and look for them.  

Back at it

The puzzle is complete.  Keith finally took pity on me.  It really was the most miserable one by far.  The pieces were cut loosely and you had pieces you knew fit there, but they would not work.  Until you had other pieces in place.  It was really annoying.

On the other hand, irritating puzzles do have their place.  It kept me from trying knitting to soon.  However, Sunday morning dawned and after the race (boring and thrilling at the same time.  Leclerc won his home race.)  I gave knitting a try.  

No pain at all and my hands seemed normal.  

I only worked for a few minutes each time, but I did get some done and it felt so wonderful.

There is a zone I go to when I knit. It is different than when I read a great book.  I get into the story but I don't go to another zone like happens when I knit. When I knit, I am no longer in space and time. I am become one with the rhythm and the yarn.  It is a true meditation and it brings me peacefulness in the deepest parts of my soul.  It isn't surprising that I miss it when I cannot knit.

I will knit a bit today in between household chores (my nemeses,  dishes and laundry).  I will think about sewing but only a little. For today, the knitting is enough.  

Setting pzzles is not something I look forward.  Till now.  I haven't been able to do anything at all this last few days so doing puzzles yesterday was thrilling.

I am working at the top at the moment.  And yes, it is a knitting puzzle.  Things are much better today but there is no strength in it at the moment.  I can barely lift a coffee cup so I know it still needs more time.  But it is looking better. 

Waiting to Play

I had a bit of fun yesterday.  A package arrived from the fabric store.    

An exuberant packager used lots of tape.  This is with most of the stuff that went from one end to the other taken off.  

I don't need more fabric.  Not at all, but this buy was about getting cheap fabric to test out skirts and some top ideas before I cut into my pretty fabric. The fabric store had an online deal for a whole bolt of fabric (15 metres in this case) for $89.99.  That means that each meter was $6.00 per metre.  That is a seriously great price.  Even a plain unbleached cotton is $10.00 a metre at the moment. 

The plain black fabric is great for test sewing and is very wearable should a test sew work out.

As I was planning my summer sewing, I realized I wanted a few more shirts in my wardrobe.  I picked up this red striped cotton fabric

And this wonderful blue patterned linen and cotton fabric for that.  

I thought that would be the end of it but in the really good sale markdowns was 5 metres of  this wonderful khaki linen.  I have some of this colour already.  

I really did not need it.  I have 4 lengths of linen from last year that need making into bottoms or dresses, but the price was great and I adore this colour.  It is just so perfect.  I don't really need 5 metres for any one thing, but it was the last they had and I hate when I am searching for fabric and find only 1 meter left.  There is always a way to use up a bit of extra fabric.  

All of this makes it even more anxious for my hand to heal up.  I want to play.  

The saga of misery continues.  But let us not focus on that.  Only time can change that.  I would rather focus on anything else.  

Fundamentally, I got nuthin'.

If I come across something interesting, I will update this post later in the day.  For now, I need to feed my sluggish sleep deprived brain some more coffee and maybe some breakfast.

A Cookie Crumbles

My first version of the Tolsta Tee is complete.

I am really pleased with how it fits.  Every raglan sleeved pattern is a bit different where it starts at the neck line and I have to say, I really, really like this.  Not too close or too crew neck, not to deep or wide.  It is just right.  I am glad that I changed out the yarn for the last stripe sequence at the bottom though. This is all I have left.  

It would be enough for a two row stripe but not for the four row or seven row at the bottom. And as you can see on the first photo, that very orangey skein worked out quite well.  You know it s different, but not painfully so.

I was so hyped that I started a second Tolsta

and that is when it all stopped being fun.

Not the knitting. The knitting is all fun, but I mean everything else.  I did something Saturday night while I slept and I kept getting sharp spasms of pain shooting down all the nerves in my right arm and into my hand.  Laying down seemed to make it so much worse.  I have not had a proper sleep for a couple of nights now and I cannot move my right hand without it causing intense pain.  I can't lift a coffee cup.  I can't hold a needle to sew anything. I cannot hold a book to read.  It hurts too much to do puzzles digitally or otherwise. I can't even open the door on my clothes dryer.   Whatever it is, is getting a bit better but I am taking it careful and am not really doing anything with my right hand.

The irritating thing is my left hand is okay other than I can tell I am not wearing braces at night.  I need two hands to do those up at night.

I had dreamed of having another Tolsta at the underarm by this coming weekend, but it is not to be.  It will happen, just later than I hoped.  That is how the cookie crumbles sometimes.  Time for knitting later.

A Different View

And so the body is complete.

I have just started on the bottom ribbing.  Yarn consumption is right where I thought it would be. The last stripe is much brighter than rest, but so it goes. Ribbing this morning and with a bit of luck I will be on to sleeve one by this afternoon or evening.

As you may have noticed (or not) I have been really monogamous with this top. According to Ravelry, I started this top on May 2.  It is moving along pretty fast.  A lot of that has to do with stripes.  Stripes are fun to knit.  It is straight forward knitting, but you are also looking forward to the next switch of  colours.  Your focus is always only a few rows away.  And then you look up and you have a top!  

Which takes me to the second reason I have been monogamous.  I am so bored with my clothing.  I have only a few knit tops and a few shirts and I am utterly bored with them all.  The obvious solution is to make some clothes, since I have pre-clothes, yarn and fabric, all over the place, just waiting to be made into something wearable. 

It helps keep me on track if  look at all these things as pre-clothes.  A different view on my stash.  Pre-clothes. 

Lucky

Yesterday I showed how this new ball of yarn is different by the way it looks on the needles.  Today I will show you something else about this skein.

This skein at this gauge, over this number of stitches is doing this and I kind of like it. 

All the soft colours together.

All the bright colours together.

It is just the sort of funky fun  I really enjoy.

And why do I enjoy it?  I think it was how I was raised and by whom I was raised.  My mom and dad were such great parents.  They showed us so much about the world and all of us kids know how blessed we are that they were ours and that we were theirs.  I have been thinking about them a lot with Mother's Day just past and my dad's birth day today.  Not his birthday.  Those are past for him.  His counting of years is over to my sorrow, so this is his birth day. 

It is time to sit down and write a letter to my mom.  In a letter, you can write down all the things that are so hard to say to someone.  We share photos these days.  We share comments of the many social medias.  But in a way, those medias keep us from saying the whole of it. I wrote letters to my dad before he died, things I remembered from when I was a kid.  It was my way of saying thank you to him for all the big and small things for how rich my childhood was.   It is time to write to my mom.   I think of my mom so much when I work with my hands, when I sew, when I bake or cook.  I think of her when I read recipes and remember her drawer of recipe books.

My mom sewed and crocheted when we were kids and gardened and baked and cooked all her life.  She was a masterful baker.  Her kids remember so many great food stories and grand kids still talk about the thrill of the year she made them sticky buns for a Christmas gift and many of them bake her poppy seed rolls themselves, because she can't really bake anymore. She was very good.  Very, very good at it.  She tried to pass on these things but some of us (me) were a bit stubborn about learning, and some things never did take (again, me) but I did take in all the things that were between the lines, that were often unsaid.  Love is in all the spaces between in her life.         

Lucky is what I am.  I never forget that.  

It is All a Go

The first thing I did yesterday was to pull back four rows in the longest stripe in the sequence of stripes so I could start on the new ball of yarn.  I want to put the first skein's remaining meters into the sleeves.  I think I will notice any difference more if it is at my shoulders.  I debated alternating skeins but you know what?  Nope. I am just going to let it play out.  

I was trying to figure out how I could show you the difference between skeins best and felt this might show it.  The first photo is as I was knitting the yoke of the sweater and the second is yesterdays work.   

 

You can see the very long stretch of golden orange and the almost non existent darker greens.  You can see how the pinks are very short and soft in tone in the second photo too. Nowhere in either of these skeins is there any of the vibrant blues of my remaining skeins. You get what yo get with hand dyes and there is always a way to make it work for you.   

I didn't get very far with knitting.  My brain kept slipping over to sewing.  I pulled out my sewing stuff and I am going to sort out a pocket that will open widely to get the skirt on and close up securely without zippers and without elastic.  I hate sewing  zippers, seriously, deeply hate sewing them. The adventure and the challenge is in seeing if  I can make my idea work. 

I am working with an old sheet today making a mock up of the the top of an A line skirt pattern.  I am going to consider the mockup as the step before a toile test.  Doing that will give me the information I need before trying it on my real fabric.     

Happy Tolsta

Trouble is in the wind.  I am going to run out of yarn.

Ha ha ha.  Not really but sort of.  There was a short time last week where I thought I was going to get away using only one ball of the Adam and Eve but I am midway through the largest stripe in the sequence and there isn't going to be enough to do the rest of this sequence and the sleeves.  So...

which one of these lovely things should I use?  Three of the skeins are quite close in tone and colour and could be used together for a project.  One is a real outlier, with much stronger orangey/golden tones than the other three.  Which would you use?  

I think that I am going with the outlier.  I don't need much and I think that I can fade in these soft tones easier than the clearer stronger colours of the other three.

I have to laugh at myself because all along, I was worried about running out of the greige but I have lots left of ball three of five. I will use most of ball four finishing the body and ball five for the sleeves.  Should be just about perfect.

In fact, I am pretty pleased overall.  I am not running out of yarn.  I like the way it looks.  Its a kind of fun and funky with a lot of a minty green colour that I don't normally wear. With the base of greige, I can do it and enjoy.

It isn't that far from the body being finished. The sleeves will be short so no worries there.

I should say a bit about the pattern I am using.  I am making this with the Tolsta Tee pattern.  Fundamentally, it is a top down raglan.  Rebecca Clow's brilliance with the pattern is that she speaks a great deal about how to take Tolsta and have some fun.  She not only tells you how to make that well balanced and fun striped top that sells her design, but has a brilliant add on pdf with six pages of modifications to make Tolsta your own. When I see a pattern on Ravelry with a lot of projects, I always wonder what it is that makes it so popular. And this is why.  It's a great pattern and there are superior resources supporting it.  

Fresh and New Adventures

I did some knitting yesterday but my brother came for a quick overnight stop.  He is fun to sit and talk with about geography and the many ways there are to experience a place while travelling and kids and grandkids (though he has no grandkids yet, he is familiar with mine) and things from when we were kids and things we did and places we lived and so much more.  I just enjoy talking to him.   

He did go for a walk to downtown Mundare and stopped by Lori's Eats and Treats  and he brought some of her great food home.  We have had her wonderful Jamaican patties before and some of her jerk chicken too.  She is a great cook and you can find her at the Ardrossan Farmers Market, the Morinville Farmers Market and the Farmers Market at the Terwillegar Rec Center parking lot in Edmonton as well as here in Mundare.  Lionel, my brother picked up some soup that I can't wait to try for lunch and a taste of her Jamacan yam pudding.  The pudding is a little bit like my yam pie/pudding but gentler and more complex.  There a raisins in it too and let me tell you, it is magical.  He brought back some of her fresh bread too and some of her amazing onion and cheese buns.  You haven't had onion buns till you have tried hers.  Lori is amazing. 

Because I had to tidy up some to get the spare bedroom/sewing room/storage room ready for an overnight, I spent part of my day taking a good long look at my skirt patterns before I folded them up to set away for a bit.  Like usual, I have been avoiding them because I have no confidence in my ability to draft and measure.  I should have a belief in me because after measuring them against my body once again, they should work.  Plus, I have fabric, that old sheet to try them out on.  

I only have one sheet though so, I will only be able to try one pattern on complete waster material. I have to decide between the basic A line, a 200% A line suitable for soft gathers or pleats and a half circle skirt.  The one that will have most value to me (I think) will be the 200% A line because it deals with some of the fit issues I have. I am very hopeful that I can make an A line or the half circle skirt to accommodate my body shape though. It would be nice to have a smooth fitting waist. I am very interested in the other patterns because they could easily be adapted to pants or culotte style pants as well.  

I am going to hit the sewing room to see what other fabrics I have that I can use for a trial skirts and see what happens.  Plus I have to invent a pocket/skirt opening so that I can still avoid zippers.  I have lots of pattern paper and a good idea of what I want. I just need to make it work in real life.

So off on another adventure with knitting tucked into corners of the day.  The sky is clear and promises to be warm.  After our rain earlier this week, the grass is green everywhere and the trees are fully budding.  The world is all fresh and new and it looks like it is going to be a very good day.

Monogamous Stripes

Yes, still working on this top.  I know that the main colour is a plain greige (and therefore already a complex colour) but the rose pinks and greens and golden say spring. 

I seem to be able to do one stripe sequence a day so not a lot but acceptable.  Each sequence is 4 cc, 2 mc, 7 cc, 2 mc, 4 cc, 4 mc.  That seems to be keeping my dream of a greige top with multi colour stripes alive.  I am only on the second ball of the greige yarn ight now, so I should have at least enough for solid greige sleeve cuffs.  If the bottom needs some sort of striping, that will be fine.

The really interesting thing is how far the Adam and Eve multi colour is going.  This particular skein is a very soft set of the colours of Bird of Paradise.  The tones are delicate and muted.  

The skein I am working with is the top left skein on this pile of yarn.  See how soft the greens are?  They are the palest dusty green and that is why this is working so well.  As you can see on the skein and the sweater, the pink is the power colour.  The other skeins all vary, with one where the strongest colour is the golden tones and the others where the teal speaks volumes.  

I am in the very merry middle of this top.  I am just going to keep working on the body because I don't want to have to cut yarns and if I can, I want the entire top make with this palest skein of multi colour.  

It isn't often that I am project monogamous  but  this top is really moving along.  Stripes help.  Just sayin'.

Problem Solver

And this morning I have plenty of pep.  Life is weird.  It may have had something to do with an all day rain yesterday.  I love the sounds of rain.

I knit a fair bit yesterday.  

When I started, I was two or three rows above the arm hole.  I had to try it on first to be sure that it was long enough and that my math wouldn't fail me.  All is well.  Now it is just knitting till it is time to do some body increasing in my usual manner.  It is striped so it feels like it is knitting up fast.  It is happy knitting.

Happy knitting means lots of good thinking time.

I was wearing this very simple top that I made a few years ago and thinking about how much I enjoy wearing it. It is Blanche by Veronica Jobe.  

  

I made it straight across at the back neck and gave it a bit of hip shaping but that was it for mods.

The sleeves are just right and the fit is perfect.  It is so comfortable to wear.  

In my meandering thoughts, I asked myself why I wasn't using this as the basis for the shaping of the teal top.  I actually stopped knitting, it was so an earth shattering.  I asked myself that again.

All along, the plan for the teal sweater was to use the sort of short row shaping that the Elysium vest has.   It would work so well for how this sweater is knit, with it's vertical garter stitch, but I was having such trouble getting the stitch counts right.  I spent way too much time fussing with that already.  The project is currently in a corner.  BUT, if I use the dimensions from the green top and do all the shaping at the side 'seams', I can just keep knitting and not worry.  I don't have to set up arm holes.  I don't have to try to match short rows.  I don't have to worry about matching the longer back hem.  I can just knit.  This is simpler shape is exactly what I needed.

So that resolves that conflict.  And I can get back to that sweet top.  After this greige one is complete.  Of course.

Not peppy this morning.

I worked hard on the little greige striped top yesterday.  I did do a lot of thinking about all the other things on my needles and why on earth I am not knitting on them.  The answer is, most of them are thinking things or are at the thinking stage.  Counting, deciding shaping, and a dozen other details are in the way of free and easy knitting on them and that is why I am knitting on a little uncomplicated raglan top. No matter.  I am still knitting and in the end, that is really all that matters.

The little top is about to be divided for the armholes and then, for a little while the knitting will go fast again.  I am debating knitting the sleeves before finishing the body again.  I really would like to see proposed short sleeves finish off with a greige ribbing.  If I do them first, then I don't have to think about it while I work on the body.  

I am thinking about sewing.  I would love to be finished sewing but even there, I am practising avoidance.  I have my skirt patterns to test and I think I am chicken.  Correct that.  I know I am chicken.  I am not sure what I am chicken about.  Learning that my pattern drafting wasn't as good as it felt like it would be?  Learning that the thinking behind what I did is not perfect for my body?  Learning that I still have to factor in a side closure because I really don't want to sew in zippers?   Worry that I will waste fabric?  It isn't any one thing.  It is all the things.  I just need to push myself to do it.  

In the meantime, I did a bit of baking. 

I love pumpkin pie but I really didn't feel like making a crust.  I did my next favourite thing and just made pumpkin pudding.  I love the spices and the rich taste of it.  I don't even miss the crust.  

Not sure what I will focus my energy on today.  I am not even sure if I really have any energy today.  It is just one of those days.  So be it. I wll focus on the success of my pumpkin pudding. I will knit on little greige tops till I feel peppy.  That greige.  The rose and oranges and golds and greens will be my salvation.    

Magic

One of the last steps making the kitty, was to embroider his nose, eyes and mouth as well as to mark his toes.  I needed a finer black yarn so I was off to search in the leftovers bin.  I found what I wanted, but then something magical happened.

One of the first things I saw in the bin was this lovely yarn.  It is RCYs Adam and Eve in the Bird of Paradise colourway.  When I bought it, I had hoped that the colours would be closer because I wanted to make a fun summer top but you can just see the dye bath exhaust through the skeins.  I didn't know it at the time, but it was the last of the yarn they had so it was what it was.  Most of it was the strong clear colours but two balls were quite different in tone.  It wouldn't do quite what I wanted. That can happen with hand dyes.  I used some of it for a hood and wrist warmers for Olga and I knew there would be lots of things I could do with the rest.

Sitting right beside it in the bin was some griege yarn.

There were five balls left after making a tunic with it a few years ago.  It is listed as green but reads as the greyest of greens ever.  It is such a wonderfully neutral green and beside the bright colours of the Bird of Paradise, it was stunning.  Magic.

I had to knit with both.  The need consumed me so I cast on a Tolsta Tee.  My stripe sequence is set to use as little of the griege as I can get away with.  I have tons of the multi colour but not so much of the griege. 

And I just knit and knit.  It is a lot of fun.  My hope is that by knitting something striped, the hue changes will matter less and be the perky colour that I need right now.  So far I love it.  The hues just don't look close to what is in front of me. It does not photograph particularly well but in real life, yummy yummy, yummy. I hope to be able to do solid greige for the cuffs and bottom ribbing.  I would like to pretend that it is my main colour and the stripes the accent.  I want a griege t shirt with coloured stripes and not the other way around.   

Sometimes you might have plans for knitting.  Sometimes the plans don't happen and you follow an different path.  It's okay.  It is your knitting after all and there are no knitting police.

And in case you were wondering where the kitty went, it went to my Owen who claimed both ball and kitty right out of the mystery box.  

And now on to a couple more kittys and much more work on the striped tee. 

Finished Things!

Finished things! I want to run around and shout because of finished things! 

Yesterday while pondering if I wanted to redo the kitty body, I was doing a bit of reading through patterns and one of them said ' If you can make a ball, you can make this'.  I have never crocheted a ball so I thought maybe it's time.

I have no idea how to actually make a ball.  Most of my crochet, ok, all of my crochet has been flat, not structural.  I made baskets once but still.  I used the pattern A Large Fluffy Stress Ball by Maegatrons Market, a free on Ravelry and made only one change.  With the Blanket yarn, I found I needed to use eight stitches to make the right shape at the start.  Six stitches would have been great if you wanted a football.  That probably has more to do with my tension and personal crochet gauge than anything else. I stuffed it with what I had on hand, ahem, the remainders of the yarn from last years blankets.  

I decided to just keep going on the kitty.  This is just the test kitty and I wanted to see it all complete.

I am thrilled.

I did make a few mods on this kitty.  I shortened the legs by one round and I made the tail differently.  I used a simple 20 stitch chain (or 14.  I can't remember) and then slipped stitch back.  It gave his wee tail the littlest bit of curl naturally.

Because of the yarn choice he is about 8 inches long without the tail.  Its a really cute pattern and now I have to do it again with Marcus' yarn for a kitty that looks like his beloved Casper.

Kitty, Day Two

The kitty continues.  

It looks just the smallest bit gruesome at this point. (It may be influenced by the book I am reading.  Very good but hard in a psychological thriller/mystery sort of way rather than my usual cozy mystery) I need to redo the fist leg.  It is too long so I will take out one row and I want to redo to make it sit a nicer angle to the body.  

The pattern I am using is the Mittens the Realistic Cat.  I would link to the website but the website is so full of ads that you cannot see any content.  And now I am going to have to get the powers that be to run a virus thingy on my laptop.  

With respect to the designer.  I do not have her permission but considering her website...

The pattern is really sweet and according to her Ravelry page, the designer has a lot of nice little things. This pattern is only recently released and has no makes yet but I will give it a go.  I am struggling with the way the pattern is written but that is most likely because I learned to crochet eons ago and my familiarity with terms and processes is not quite how patterns are written today.  I will insert a dadgummit and plea age. 

She gives a stitch count for each row but my counts are not matching.  This doesn't bother me at all and the shapes are coming out as the pattern, which is heavily photographed, seems to be.  The leg holes look different and I figured out why just now as I was writing. It will mean going back to redo much of the body, but I am okay with that.

This whole kitty is a test kitty anyway so I am not bothered by it.  Plus, I know what to do instead.  Someone has to make a thing first and post it publicly so it may as well be me.  

In the mean time, I made a little funny for Marcus.   

Cat slippers for his kitty Mochi.  

Insert loony grandmotherly laughter here. Bahahahaha