Knotty Mouse

Just a quick note that the move date has been pushed up by our current landlord and now we have to be completely out of our ‘former home’ THIS weekend instead of NEXT like we had previously thought. We’re in a panic, a tizzy, and whatever other word you can think of. My word lately for what we’re calling this has been “clusterf*ck”.  I’ve cried more than I can remember and been sick to my stomach every day for over 2 weeks now..  my stress level is through the roof, I’m yelling at everyone when I’m not crying, and I have a lovely skin rash from the stress.  My only point of sanity at the moment is my nightly “hanging out time” with Munchkin- I don’t know what I’d do without that kid. My husband has stepped up to the plate fantastically and has really held it together when I was coming apart at the seams.  I’m really grateful as well for the fact that my husband’s friends have come out of the woodwork with trucks and man-power to move us quickly at short notice… and I can’t wait for this to be over so that I can take my first calm breath in almost a month.

I miss you all (I haven’t had time to read or comment.. I’m sorry)  and I’ll be back as soon as I can.  It may take a week or two before I’m able to even respond to emails because I’m not sure about internet hookups or anything else of the matter. I’m just trying to get through this.. but thought everyone needed an update. I’m going to go back to packing now……….

–Mouse

G is for: The Grateful Dead. Now, I’m not the type of GD fan who has walls of recordings or even knows the names of the famous shows & I’ve never gone “on tour”.. but I do really enjoy their music because it never ceases to make me happy. My favorite Dead songs? Sugar Magnolia, Uncle John’s Band & Touch of Grey… I also really love the “Fire on the Mountain” Reggae tribute cds.

While I don’t have a huge collection of Dead related stuff.. I do have cds that I’ve bought to replace my worn out tapes, I still have a dancing bear sticker on my car & a large stuffed GD bear which is faded from the sun (he used to live in my car), and I even have two Dead Lot inspired cookbooks that I’ve actually made recipes out of. By far my favorite GD things are the shirts - my 3 favorites are pictured above (along with the cookbooks) and I have many more that I didn’t feel like unloading from the closet. The one on the far right is a long sleeve shirt and is the one with the most sentimental value… its the shirt I was wearing on the Wildwood NJ boardwalk the night (August 1995) that I was told that Jerry had died. *sigh*

My custom anti-spam words apparently stopped working when I upgraded WP…. I’m hoping to have them fixed shortly. Until then.. SORRY!!! I have no idea what sort of things are pre-programmed in and I can’t seem to make them change back to knitting words! *kicks blog*

Edited to add: Ok.. we’re back to my knitting words and no one should be getting “trout” as their spam word again anytime soon. hee hee.

I’m going to go back to spending the rest of my weekend searching for the floor of my office.. which I haven’t seen since sometime after we moved in. We’re not actually going to start packing until we’ve found a place to move because what we end up with (and whether it has storage on site or not..) depends on how we pack for moving.  I do have ‘donation pick up” scheduled from a local charity EVERY week until we move out and I’m just piling up the stuff in the garage.  That way it gives me a week to go down and retrieve anything that I feel I may have tossed by mistake. I’m already silently mourning a pair of boots that I feel like I shouldn’t have gotten rid of… even though I KNOW that I’ll never wear them anywhere again.

There’s a lot going on ‘behind the scenes’ here that I haven’t been talking about..  I was hoping to have good news to share along with the bad news but that post isn’t happening right this minute and I need to get this damned elephant out of the room so that I can speak freely again.  I’ve been avoiding talking about “the bad news” because I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.  I still don’t (other than it sucks)… but it impacts my life both online and reality as well as affecting both the shop & the blog so I knew I’d need to come clean shortly. So.. here it is.

(I’m putting the rest of this behind a cut because it has nothing to do with knitting or crafting…)

Read the rest of this entry »

(new WP ‘gallery’ feature inserted here.. not sure if the feed reader will pick it up or not)

• Molly’s Headband- from  IK Summer 2006 free PDF
• Elsebeth Lavold Cable Cotton - not quite one skein
• size 4 US needles
• Mods: I knit the lace section first and added the i-cord ties later to make sure I had enough yarn. I also screwed up the lace pattern because I didn’t read the symbols correctly - next time I won’t print the chart in draft mode to save ink. lol.
• I really love this headband and have the yarn for 2 more.. its great for flattening out my crazy hair.

see more crazy cat pics

Because I’m a geek who spent way too much time playing Magic… this really cracked me up. Have a good weekend y’all.

Edited to add:  Oh happy day…  WordPress 2.5.1 upgrade is live !  It says that it has “many bug fixes” - um.. yeah, that’s the understatement of the year.  I’m hoping this means that I don’t have to keep publishing my blog in HTML anymore…

I was happy to see all of the Earth Day blog posts out there in bloglandia so I decided that I’d throw in one of my own as well - and publicly admit that I’m a ‘green freak’. Growing up in a rather crunchy granola sort of family I’ve always been interested in natural products & green living and I guess I really can’t imagine living any other way. My family recycled long before there was a curb side service, was part of a natural foods co-op, and shopped at the local health food store when it was ‘weird’ to do so… man that place had the best fried tofu samwiches! (I have no idea how to cook tofu.. but this stuff had a breaded crunchy outside just like fried chicken. It had sprouts & some sort of Italian style dressing on it.. yum.)

I get irritated when people bitch about doing simple things that will help to save the planet. How hard is it to wash a can? Please. Recycling here in the county I live in (and I’m in “metro-Atlanta”) is voluntary, which I think is a huge mistake. I also don’t the recycling services are up to par with the ones we had elsewhere because we can’t recycle paper of any kind. We’re one of the very few houses in our neighborhood who even puts out our recycling bins for collection- I just can’t imagine how much other houses are throwing away needlessly! I did notice however that I do throw away a lot of packaging during dinner.. so I’m going to work on buying more things in larger quantities so that there is less packing waste.
Our local supermarket is HORRIBLE about giving plastic bags for every single item, and double bagging to boot! I’m also rather irritated because they recently installed those ’self check out’ lines with the bagging stations that have built in scales so that they know you are putting your items into a bag. If I want to use my cloth bags at that store, I have to go through one of the TWO available ‘full service’ check out lines. Its nice when a company (who sells cloth bags with the store name on them) makes you choose the environment over convenience, isn’t it?

Wow.. time flies! Today marks 4 years of blogging, starting over at my Blogger blog when I was a newbie knitter living in a Tennessee town with one stop light. I can’t help that every time I think of this blog and the things I’ve been through while I’ve had it - the lyrics “What a long, strange trip its been” from the Grateful Dead pop into my head. To be honest, I almost quoted it in the title line of this post until it came up automatically and I realized that I had used it last year. Oops.

I’ve retired my usual “cheese-cake” graphic (with candles added for each new year) for something a little more fun.. I thought we all deserved some chocolate cake with pirate skulls. I hope y’all don’t mind that I seem to have already gotten my paws in the frosting.. it was too good to resist.. lol.

This blog-anniversary comes at a really weird time my life, but I’m not going to get into that today. Instead, I will say thank you to all of the people who have hung in with me on this strange trip. *namaste

(edited to add.. Ok.. I really hate WP 2.5. NOTHING on the cute little posting screen works and I’m doing all of my posts in full HTML. Harumpfh.)

I’m just messing with the blog after upgrading WordPress..  trying to figure out the new posting features.

Honestly I wish that I had something to announce about hubby’s job but I don’t at the moment because we’re still waiting to hear back after the in person interview.  We’re still waiting on money to come in and the utilities are still waiting to be paid.  I’m finally at 90% with the first Avada Kedavra sock and even though I love the Bellatrix pattern - the drop stitches made the sock HUGE and I’m going to have to rip back to the heel and try something else or change the stitch count/needle size.  hmph.

The only good news is that its Munchkin’s “Spring Break” and we have a week to sleep late, eat ice cream, and generally lay around like a bunch of vegetables.  We have nothing planned except to do just that.. along with a few trips to the park and a lot of video game playing & movie watching.

F is for Fairies.. the beautiful book by Brian Froud who’s works have amazed and inspired me since I was a young child. The book itself belonged to my parents and I would look at it all the time… one day (hopefully sooner than later, right Dragon?) I hope to have this book autographed by the man himself. There are tons of things in my house that are faerie related.. including a tattoo on my shoulder of a faerie sitting in a purple rose - but I was having a hard time photographing my own back.. lol.

F is also for friendship - that’s a photograph of my “BFF” Dragon & I the last time I was home… doing our best OCC impression. lol. We’ve been friends for about 20 years now and our friendship is actually due to our shared love of all things faerie & Froud (Labyrinth, Dark Crystal, ..etc) on top of the fact that we share a brain and find humor in the same things.

1. Avada Kedavra Sock, 2. “dining room”- before 3. “dining room”- after

I know.. I know.. “holy shit.. KNITTING? On Mouse’s knitting blog? No way!” yes, way. I’ve been chugging along at night on the Killing Curse socks and have turned the heel on sock #1 while watching obscene amounts of CSI:Miami. I also found a “new way” (new to me anyway..) of doing a hole free short row heel which can be found here and is WAY easier than my previous method which was rather hit or miss. The pain in my hand from knitting is mild as long as I don’t knit for hours at a time.. so I’m trying to monitor my time and fly under the radar on that one. While I do miss knitting constantly I do NOT want to injure my hand/wrist anymore and risk further and more serious damage.. so I’m taking it one project at a time.

The photos on the right side are a before and after of my (useless for its intended purposes - which makes me wonder what sort of idiot designed these houses) dining room. Our house is a split level and its the room you come into when you come up the steps from the front door - so the mess and the clutter made me sad every time I came home. This is also the room that connects every other room upstairs so I was constantly looking at the mess and wishing it would go away even though I had no idea where to start in fixing it - some messes are overwhelming like that. A few days ago I ended up pulling everything out, throwing most of the contents of the top of the large table in a cardboard box to be sorted later, moving all the things hiding UNDER the table into the garage, and bringing up a small card table in its place. The small table with two padded chairs (also hiding in other rooms taking up space) became a really nice place to do homework with Munchkin at night.

Fair amount of bitching and an overdose of the real life of Mousie and a fair amount of swearing under the cut.. (so if you read this on bloglines you can feel free to skip the rest of this post if you don’t want to hear it) Read the rest of this entry »

E is for Earrings..  long dangly earrings that make a lot of noise when worn.  I’m not entirely sure how many pairs of earrings I have but its definitely a lot..  I’ve taken to using them as a wall-hanging just to have access to most of them. ( I couldn’t capture ALL of the earrings in one shot so this is just a portion of them)  I love natural stone, silver or brass, and exotic looking designs. Most of my favorites were bought in an imports shop when I was in high school..  I take serious measures to make sure I don’t loose my earrings because they are really sentimental.  I buy those little plastic  ‘grippers’ by the bag full every time I’m at the craft store and I always wear them on the ear wires so that I don’t loose my earrings when I’m out.  I’m pretty sure that those plastic thingies are actually to keep the earrings on the cards for sale.. but I found that they work great in my ears.

I have 12 holes in my ears.. 4 in the lobes & 2 in the cartilage of each ear.. and I wear small silver Bali-style hoops in them.  For a few years I had the holes in my earlobes stretched so that I could wear metal eyelets (I think they’re a 4 gauge) but I hated that I couldn’t wear my beautiful long earrings (without having to alter all of the hooks on the earrings) and I took them out again. I do love the look of large tribal style piercing jewelry but I’m afraid that I’d get bored entirely too quick with only having one pair of earrings.

(sorry about the crap quality of the photo..  the weather is disagreeing with my need to take photos)

D is for dreads… about 3-4 months old at this point. I decided not to start out with my entire head dreaded because I know that they have a tendency to shrink as they get older and I wasn’t sure that I was willing to lose a lot of length - I also wanted to be able to “hide” the dreaded bits by pulling them up in a bun and having loose hair underneath. Admittedly I would probably have dreaded all of my hair if I had someone willing to backcomb my entire head of waist length hair… but since I had to do it myself I decided to start out with a few and let the rest form by themselves. At first I started out with only a handful of dreads & braids.. and now its about 50% dreaded & braided - I’m planning on letting the rest of it dread until there is no loose hair left or until I get sick of this.. whichever comes first. The photos are sort of in a time line - on the left is ‘day 1′ so I had a record of what I started with and the one on the far right was taken today after I cleaned everything up a bit and added a bunch of new beads to the back.

(I think its funny that I’ve gotten stumped by the same letter twice already… last ABC-Along I couldn’t think of anything for D either. It took me so long to come up with a “d” word that I actually am behind - the rest of the along are on “E” now. )

Blah blah blah yarn blah blah blah handspun blah blah *cough sneeze* blah blah. Yes, I’m still sick and its making me miserable. If you’re expecting a package from me (not an order.. just a package.. ) they haven’t been mailed yet because I’m still in the “curl up under a blanket in the corner” phase.

The photos above are hand-painted Corriedale from Spunky Eclectic’s shop which I spun into 132 yds of worsted weight 2 ply…. The label says its “Rocky Mountain High” - which I’m sort of confused about since I lived in Colorado for 2 years and can’t place where green and wine ( I wrote “whine..” lol) come into play.. For the record, I’m calling it “Rose Garden” and it will be in the shop within the week. The stuff in the right hand corner on the bottom is my spinning in progress - a sport weight merino single in very bright colors.. which reminds me of Rainbow Brite.

I would have knitting to show you but apparently my gauge was WAY off and the Felicity hat wouldn’t even fit my son. Unfortunately I realized my error about 5 inches of stockinette into the hat so the whole thing is going to be frogged. My father in law has requested a hat (in black.. yawn..) that covers the back of his neck, so I’m in the process of either finding or tweaking a hat pattern to work for this. I found the Blue Hills Hat but unfortunately its bulky weight yarn and its just not cold enough for that here in GA… except for today.. because its 34 degrees outside and it was snowing this morning when I took Munchkin to the bus stop. Its supposed to be 66°F later this week. *boggles* No wonder everyone is sick.

Thanks to all of the comments I decided to keep Mousie Masala as the shop name and use “Two Paws” as the name of the yarns. I’m now having issues with Ravelry and its yarn system because I’d like to have photos of each individual yarn.. so I may end up naming things by colorway after all. *grumble* Its definitely not their system that is the problem.. its the fact that its set up for commercial yarn with set yardage, fiber type, etc. and all of my yarns vary from skein to skein. The actual problem is that I can’t get the page and the database to do what I want it to do.. best laid plans of mice.. and all that.

I wanted to thank everyone for their two cents regarding the Ravelry/yarn naming post.. I’m still working on emails from comments because (to put it mildly..) I’m sick.  Actually, I’ve spent the entire week doped up on cold medicine and  barely alive because I was hit with THE CRUD that has been going around Atlanta.  It started out with waking up last Saturday morning to the tune of yet another case of strep throat and the addition of some sort of sinus/ear infection and buckets of snot (was that TMI? you’re welcome).  If I blow my nose or sneeze one more time.. I’m going to cry. I don’t do well with adult cold medication (it makes me loopy- even at low doses) so I’ve been chugging grape kiddie cold medicine, eating cherry cough drops,  and walking around in a haze.

I have gotten a lot of spinning done because I lack the concentration to knit - so at least something good is coming out of this cold.  The above photo is about 55 yards of 2 ply worsted/bulky weight baby alpaca/silk blend handspun from roving that I picked up at Maryland Sheep & Wool 2 years back. I wish I would have thought to get more than an ounce or two but at the time I was a spindle spinner and didn’t think in ‘bulk’ roving.  Fortunately I have another ounce or two of a fawn colored alpaca/silk from the same MSW vendor that I could play with.  I definitely enjoyed spinning this fiber - its SO soft! Even my husband commented on the softness of this skein when I shoved it in his face and demanded that he pet the yarn - he’s pretty much used to living with a fiber addict at this point. I’m not sure what I’ll make with this because of the yardage.. but I’m definitely keeping it for myself.
Speaking of fiber addiction.. I’ve put my spinning ‘in progress’ up in my Ravelry projects list so it shows up on the sidebar.  My wheel has taken up permanent residence in the living room and my nightly routine has been to spin while watching ‘CSI:Miami’.  I’m hoping to have a few yarns for the shop available soon as I picked up a couple really nice rovings on Etsy from a favorite vendor.  They’re totally out of my usual color preference (purple.. purple.. & purple..) but I’m enjoying the change.

1. Ms. Kitty, 2. cheshire, 3. knitty kitties, 4. bastet, 5. buddha kitty, 6. brush stroke cat, 7. green cat & whisker jar, 8. egyptian cat

 

(clicking the links will take you to bigger photos on Flickr with descriptions)

C is for: Cats, Cats everywhere!  These are some of my favorite cat things around my house.. the ones that jumped out at me first anyway!  (Including Ms. Kitty.. who stopped to pose on the steps.. as if to say “You’d better include me in this cat collage or you’ll be sorry tomorrow!”) Looking around my office I spotted about 5 more things that I could have taken photos of - including a few ‘knitty kitty’ cards that aren’t up on the wall yet and my other plush cats (Artemis & Luna plush from Sailor Moon) that are on the bookshelf.

The other thing that didn’t make it into the collage is the cat that is constantly with me.. the tattoo on my arm of Bast taken from the D&D deity book illustrations.  Its my largest tattoo (taking up my right arm from shoulder to elbow..) and also the one I’m least happy with, hence the reason there are no photos here of it.  The artist and I clashed on the piece (regarding colors & his “artistic freedom” on MY skin) after the outline was completed and it was never finished.  I haven’t had the money to go to another artist and have it re-worked.. but its my first priority as far as tattoo work goes when the money does come through.

1. relief, 2. closet in progress

The photo on the left was taken earlier this morning and those trash bags are filled with clothes from my closet bound for charity.  At the moment its up to 4 trash bags including one not pictured with clothing that went directly into the trash.  The box at the front is now completely filled with shoes for donation. The photo on the right is my closet in the process of being organized - the clothing is hanging freely with moving room as opposed to its usual ‘crammed’ state. The floor is now empty except for a line of shoes and two small laundry baskets of stuff that didn’t get sorted because my back finally gave out on me.

The big deal about this being “eye candy” for me.. is that I’m very attached to my clothing and pretty much unwilling to part with any of it.  People who know me joke that they would NEVER sign me up for something like TLC’s “What Not to Wear”  because I’d probably try to off the hosts when they either tear up or try to throw away my clothing.  I’m sentimental about my clothing, I’m also cheap and refuse to get rid of things that are still “perfectly good” even if I did purchase them at the thrift store’s 99 cent day.  Now none of this would be a bad thing if the mess that is left from having all of these clothes (aka- nowhere to put it “away” or possible way of ’storing’ all of it) didn’t make me stressed out - but seeing it all makes me crazy.  I’ve tried to get rid of stuff in the past.. and succeeded in removing a few items here or there when they become unwearable but it was never enough to even put a dent in fixing the problem.

I’m sort of stunned that I had so much in my wardrobe that either didn’t actually fit anymore or was in such bad shape that I didn’t even consider it worthy of donating to charity and instead it went into a trash bag.  I’ll be taking the bags of clothes to the thrift store tomorrow.. and I honestly can’t WAIT to be rid of it all.  I actually walked into my closet ( a feat in itself) today and was looking through the hanging clothing and saw more things that I could part with - which is something I never find myself thinking. I’m hoping that its the motivation that I needed to jump start a huge house-wide purge of clutter. I’m also finally feeling like I could get this all under control soon, which makes me very happy.

I’ve sort of been off in my own little world lately and have been doing a lot of thinking about where I want my business to go and how I want to get it there. Admittedly I try to keep the ‘business stuff’ off of this blog because I’ve been told before that people don’t really like when someone’s blog is all about their business. I can totally understand that but I also really love reading blogs that are written by women with their own shops & crafty businesses where they talk about their daily routines - be it cutting a million squares for quilts or knitting tons of hats for their craft show booths. I have a ’shop blog’ but I barely use it… its on blogger and I actually forget that its over there half the time. Its mostly a ’shop update’ announcement place anyway. I’ve been kicking around things about the business lately and when I got frustrated by having to explain so much to a non-knitting or spinning husband I was told that I should ask “the blog”- which is hysterical that he’d suggest something like that. (and he doesn’t even read Yarn Harlot.. lol)

So.. where was I? Oh yeah.. shop. I’ve decided that I am going to list myself as a “yarnie” over on Ravelry b/c I have been selling my handspun for a while, its likely that someone might have it in their stash, and I’d really like to pursue that part of my business further. I recently sent out a skein (in the photo) with the name “Two Paws Handspun” because its the name that I have all of my handspun yarns listed under on Ravelry in my own stash - and the name seems to have stuck. So this is where I get all confuzzled… In Ravelry you have a Brand name which also comes up under your user name in the “yarnies” section (say “Lorna’s Laces”for example) and then you can have different sorts of yarns (and LL has Shepard sock, Lion & Lamb.. etc) and you get a line that says where the person bought the yarn (”Knitch yarn shop” for example) or you can add in a website address. I’ve been sitting here for DAYS trying to decide how I want to list everything in Ravelry because I know that its a data base and would be a big fat mess to try and edit once its been done.. so I want it to work properly.

What I’m getting at here is that I basically need help deciding what name I should use. I could list the “Brand Name” (which would also be my Yarnie name) as Mousie Masala & then list ALL of the yarns as Two Paws Handspun - the whole whack of them regardless of plies or type. OR I could list the “Brand name” as Two Paws Handspun - then come up with catagories and names for the types of yarn I am selling/will sell (single, two ply.. art yarn.. etc). I really want to use Ravelry’s system to see IF anyone and how many folks have either stashed my yarn or used it as projects.. so I really don’t want to name each individual yarn by its colorway as I’ve seen some folks do. I have looked through Ravelry’s Yarnie section so many times that I’m starting to recognize people’s icons without looking at the names.

Where do I stand? I’m confuzzled to say the least. I’m not sure how I want to be “known”- whether I should go with my shop name of Mousie Masala that’s been out there for a few years.. or use the Two Paws Handspun as my brand (because Mousie Masala is technically the SHOP itself.. and Two Paws is the yarn..) and hope that people make the connection but then have to “name” all of my yarns. I’m totally over-analyzing this but I also want to be able to come up in the search thing when you type in a yarn. I *have* however changed the banner on my Etsy shop to reflect this name addition.. so I’m pretty committed to the name itself.

So, I’d really love to hear your opinion. I know there are some Rav Yarnies that read my blog too so that would be helpful to hear from y’all as well. Thanks in advance.

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
–Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems (1916) “Fog”
US biographer & poet (1878 - 1967)

for more information on the silent poetry reading in honor of St. Brigid : go here

♥ ♥Also.. its my 10th wedding anniversary. ♥ ♥

Casting on for a pair of Fetching mitts in Zitron Avanti - I really love the colors of this yarn.