Roo, meet your adoring public

A week ago on Wednesday we brought home the newest member of our little family. Our elderly cat, who we had been taking care of while her mom (and Eric's mom) recovered from cancer, had enough of our two-bedroom college apartment, and let us know by gaining a ton of weight, screaming incessantly, and becoming depressed.

I was depressed to see her go, but apparently she is much happier back with her mom, who is also happy to have her back in Lansing.

But there was a kitten shaped hole in my heart, so without more ado, I introduce...

From Winter 2009

The wonderful tabby-cat, Haruki Murakami, or "Roo".

He's a rescue kitten, and he couldn't be more loving or fun. Or cuter!

From Winter 2009

He also thought that my camera was the coolest toy ever, making most of the pictures blurry.

Roo was born in August, and lived in a garage with his brother until January. Luckily, before the temperature plummeted here in Michigan, the Kalamazoo Animal Rescue snatched him up, and placed him with a wonderful foster mom. And now he's in his forever-home, and we love him!

From Winter 2009

Chaaa-cha-cha-changes

There are some pretty obvious changes going on here at Skeins and Steins, ones which I am thrilled about.

• A few hours fiddling with Picasa got me a new banner
• Twitter means I am having more fun staying in touch with the fiber and craft community, and meeting lots of like-minded people
• The Etsy Shop in the corner will be updated soon. I'm pretty excited about being able to offer my recycled yarn to more customers than my kitten Haruki. He's highly disinterested.
  

Soon I may even get back to posting about knitting, but for now I'm having fun playing in the tech world :)

Recycle that!

More and more I'm discovering people who, like me, are obsessed with recycling sweaters. We buy them buy the armful, stash them in corners of our house, and may or may not have panicked when the cat mistook them for a bed. We fill up the bathtub to wash them, and prioritize sweaters before showers.

There are SO many great resources out there. The more time I spend thinking about recycling sweaters, the more amazed I am at the resources. I am going to work on compiling them over the next few weeks, but for now I thought I'd show you my favorites.

The Twice Sheared Sheep has a great tutorial and also great yarn for sale.

Of course there is a yahoo group for everything...

This downloadable booklet is GREAT. I highly recommend it.

There are also a ton of resources on Ravelry, including:

Thrifty Knitters

Unravelers

and Raveler's Recycled Knits and Crochets, just for starts!

There are also great youtube videos that show you how to start seams, and other techniques.

And, of course, once you get all that yarn you have to store it. Mysticspiral.com has a great yarn label to print out, and organize your new stash with!

If you have other resources, let me know, and I'll start making that list!

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

I'm pretty sure I've used that title before. What does that say about me? Oh well...

I have continued to binge on thrift store sweaters and recycled materials. It's an addiction, and it's weird. I enjoy thrifting more than shopping at yarn stores, and lately I've enjoyed the process of reclaiming the yarn more than I have actually enjoyed knitting it.

Part the First of this bizarre obsession:

From Winter 2009

The gigantic bag of yarn sitting on my living room floor waiting to be measured and skeined. I'm ashamed to admit how big the bag is, but let's just say that it usually carries half my groceries. I'm not going to do anything with it until I get my new swift!

Part the 2nd:

I may or may not have gone thrifting yesterday. For $1.09 a sweater, who would have been able to say no?

Certainly not me...

They're all wool blends. No acrylic. All soft and luxurious and HUGE. I can't wait to sink my little fingers into them.

And, perhaps the most exciting thing I've done in a while...

Part the Third:

Yarn from a t-shirt, lightly plied, and





AWESOME plarn. Plastic bags and casette tapes spun together. I love it. LOVE it.

Tonight I have 2.5 hours of Bach Choir, but hopefully I'll be able to post a tutorial on making plarn and t-shirt yarn in the near future. It's seriously addicting.

Squeeeeee!

Okay, I know it's only halfway through February, but Joanne's was having a President's Da y Sale, and they had a 50% off coupon and shipping was only $2.95, and, and, and...

...I ordered a swift.

It will be here in 5-10 days. I promise I'll keep my no-coffee pledge. Really! I just really really really wanted a swift.

I am weak. I am also excited!

Loose Ends

I've been binging on sweaters from the thrift store lately. Seriously, it's getting to be a problem. I have a wicker laundry basket that contains no less than 10 sweaters waiting to be unraveled, plus a pile of half-unraveled sweaters, plus another pile of recycled skeins of yarn. The problem is, I never really DO anything with the sweaters once I unravel them.

From Skeins and Steins

But I can't stop! There is something addicting about the process--washing, unraveling, and skeining the yarn. Right now I'm ripping apart (with a great amount of satisfaction)a men's XL sweater, 70% wool and 30% nylon. I love the feeling of the stitches succumbing to the ball of yarn in my hands, and unventing the cables as I go. I love stretching the sweater out and thinking what its next life will be. I really just love every step of the process.

From Skeins and Steins

I'm not sure what this lovely brown yarn will turn into, but I do know that it is a fun weekend project! I'm so close to having it all unraveled, then I just have to put it on my Niddy-Noddy, skein it, and figure out the yardage.

A commemorative moment

Finally.

After over a year of thinking about it (May of 2007 to now...), and 8 months of writing, editing, writing more, editing more, and more reading than I care to think about, I turned in my Senior Individualized Project.

Which means, as long as I don't flat out fail anything in the next 5 months, I am for all intensive purposes done with my undergrad degree. I have finished my English major, all my pre-requisite courses, including but not limited to: two religion classes, several econ classes, three Spanish classes, and a stats course. Now, I need one more PE credit, and I'm done.

Life is looking a little less stressful!

But now, onto the thesis. 69 pages of literary analysis. 69 pages of the words "patriarchy," "Gothic heroine," "Ann Radcliffe" and "Maternal Figure." You don't know how lovely it is not to have to repeatedly type those words again. And again. And again. It was a labor of love, but the feeling of turning it in on Friday was wonderful. I simply couldn't stop smiling!

Kind of like this:

From Winter 2009

Or like this:


Now I might have time to do other things. Like knit, and run with my dogs, and play in the spring-like weather we are having!

Also, see that thermos? It's helping me a lot in the no-coffee-February. I just bring tea bags, and fill it with hot water throughout the day. It's lovely!

One more picture, just because I can. Look how confused Melissa looks as to why I am taking macro shots of my thesis...

Look how big it is!

Hard to beleive it's really done!

Writing it down makes it real

February Goal--

For the month of February I am attempting to not buy coffee. It's an effort to wean myself away from the caffeine addiction and simultaneously save money. While a refill of my 16oz travel mug at Biggby's is only $1.25, it really adds up.
So, no coffee for the rest of February means I will have saved $1.25 X 28, or $25. And you know what that money is going towards?

A yarn swift...

The thought of winding all my recycled yarn off a swift is making not buying coffee very easy...

In the Bleak Midwinter

IMG_4882, originally uploaded by littlemissmuffet.

This winter, as anyone in the Midwest will attest to, has been brutal. We have reached record snowfall, roads are treacherous, and quite frankly, morale is low.

Every day is filled with the cacophonous cries of animals whose cabin fever is worse than mine. Merlin, Wheaten Terrier Extraordinaire, is not handling the winter well. He's 11, and his joints are achy, his spirit is low, and he looks old. His 9 year old "sister" is in better shape, but due to her brother's old age and my lack of energy just sulks all day. I'm sure she'd like to be out in the snow for hours, but by the time I get home from class/work/voice lessons/choir/etc I am too tired to play,and too worn out to walk for a mile in the unshoveled snow. I'm sure they will be just as happy as me when the snow finally gives way to Spring.

Too bad that won't be for a while.

To pass the time, I have been doing nothing but knitting and reading. And singing, and helping Eric brew beer, but mostly just knitting. Christmas knitting led into New Year's knitting, which is leading into just plain ol' knitting. And, it's been a while since I posted so I figured it was time to emerge from that snowy hole, like the groundhog will hopefully do on Monday, and say hello.

I was lucky enough to have LOTS of time over Christmas break to knit. One of my favorite projects was the Swallowtail Shawl from IK. It was a quick knit, since the shawl itself is small, and I really enjoyed it. The finished product was stunning; the recycled silk/cotton I used lent itself well to the subtlety and depth of the lace pattern, and I love the ice-blue color, especially knit up into something so delicate.

The shawl, knit up, blocked, and ready to be given to Eric's mom, seemed to cast a spell over me for a brief moment. At this point we had nearly 18" of snow. We were snowed into our driveway. The city of Kalamazoo was at a standstill, and the whole world seemed to be silenced under a think blanket of Christmas precipitation. Standing outsidewith snow past my boots, I laid the Swallowtail shawl over the white snow to take a picture. The beauty created--the synthesis of art, nature, and silence--made me forget that I was standing in a dirty parking lot in a student ghetto. The snow hid all of that. The shawl simply amplified the beauty of winter.