The pitter-patter of little feet

There are six new feet at Villa Incognito this week! Though one might be led to believe that this means I have adopted triplets, think again. Here’s one pair:

The long-delayed socks that I started in March are finally a reality! My knitting process seems to be very much a start and start-over methodology. I cast on, get a few rows done, realize I’ve goofed something up, and frog it all and begin again. In the case of these particular items of footwear, I started (several times) and managed to get to the heel after a number of false starts that caused me to frog back to the toe at least twice. We last saw these at the heel, where my first idea was to do an afterthought heel; the color changes in the yarn meant that, had I decided to continue with the main yarn, the front of the sock would have had a noticeable jump in the progression of the colors.

The Most Wonderful Cat in the Universe

For the past several years, Zinah has been on kidney meds, and was doing well, but in the last month she had lost a lot of weight, and it was obvious she was in decline. Last Thursday, it was evident that she was ready to go, as she’d stopped eating and was having difficulty moving and was in some pain. She went to the great catnip fields in the sky Thursday morning.

Eighteen years ago in March, I went to the SF SPCA and knew from the moment I saw her that we were meant to be together. She was just a “catolescent” when she came home with me at the age of 8 months, and delighted in chasing her treats from one end of the house to the other. Every evening she would meet me at the door to say hello. She loved to chase her catnip mice, delighted in sunning herself in the studio, and enjoyed meeting all the dancers who came to classes on Francisco Street. All of us got a great laugh when she walked into the studio as we were all practicing one-footed shimmies and holding onto the walls – she saw what we were doing, and obligingly propped her little front paws on the mirror and started wagging her tail in time to the music!

What the Flock?

Aloha, Shalom, Salaam Aleikum, Bienvenue, Wilcommen, and Hello! What the Flock is my first attempt at blogging, and thank you for taking a moment to check it out. It represents how bemused I am at the rate at which knitting is taking over my life. You’ve heard the one about what the sheep herder did when things got heavy – he got the flock out of town…

I’m a semi-accomplished knitter who took up the craft about 5 years ago; it seems I’m a very slow starter but am getting up to speed and enjoy finding ways to challenge myself to develop my range of techniques and build my confidence, as you’ll see by some of my projects and how they grow.

Depending on the circumstances, knitting is an obsession,a learning curve, a tonic, and a depressant. But Obsessive seems to be the dominant mode.The fact that my car seems to have developed a yarn compass, or that yarn seems to be hiding in an inordinate number of places in my house, could be an indicator that I’m well into the compulsive stage. If I find myself in a new town, is it a problem that the first thing I do after putting down my suitcase is to look in the Yellow Pages for a yarn store – that is, if I haven’t already Googled that information, located my hotel, and mapped a course to everything that’s conceivably in reach and ascertained their hours of operation?