Turn, Turn

I can no longer deny that summer is truly over, and fall is upon us.  The days are shorter, the leaves are starting to change color, and suddenly it's all about the hats and mittens.  See?  We've got more kid mittens.

And I finally got around to trying the Fox and Geese hat pattern from Robin Hansen's Fox and Geese and Fences, with some help from Biscuit:

Despite that, I managed to finish the hat:

And then I decided I had to try the two color variation, see what it looked like:

And I still had some dark blue left, and there was a concert so I needed something with strong contrast I could knit in dim light.  So I cast on another hat.

And then last night there was another concert, so I cast on yet another colorwork hat.

Have I mentioned lately that colorwork is really addictive?   It's really addictive. 

And in other cat news, Jake and Cookie are staring to get along better.  Despite Cookie stealing Jake's new catnip mouse right out from under him.   But they made up:

Jake's not used to the constant clicking of cameras yet.  But he has got the hang of where the soft sleeping places are.  I woke up the other night with Cookie curled at my feet, Jake curled up beside my knee, and Biscuit patting my face to wake me up because he was hungry.   Some things never change.

This weekend I'd planned to cut a swathe through my to-do list at home, but I've come down with a minor bug that has nevertheless sucked a lot of the get-up-and-go out of me.   Which makes me grumpy.  I've hit the high points anyway and spent the rest of the weekend sleeping, reading, and drinking hot cider.   Not necessarily a bad way to spend a rainy fall weekend, but I'll have to turn up the hustle as soon as I finish kicking this crummy cold back where it came from. 

Meet Jake

In other summer news, we came out our kitchen door one afternoon to find that we had a visitor.  He was thin to the point of being emaciated, but very friendly...and even friendlier after we'd offered him a meal.   A few days went by, and it quickly became clear that our new friend had no other home to go to.  So (in an admittedly blatant abuse of a guest's trust) we popped him into a carrier and took him to see the vet. 

We found to our surprise that our little friend had a micro-chip.  But if we cherished illusions that we would soon be restoring him to a loving home, they were quickly dashed.  The last entry in the microchip database was 2007, and the address and phone numbers for his prior person were no longer current.  We tried searching on the name, on Facebook, on lost pet forums and at the local humane society and everywhere else we could think of with no luck.  About the only thing we found out for sure was his name- Jake.  We took Jake home with us, and gave him his privacy in the basement, while we set about trying to get a little meat on poor Jake's bones. 

Shortly thereafter Jake's tests came back from the vet showing that he had not picked up any dangerous illnesses in his long hungry ordeal, and so we introduced Jake to Biscuit and Cookie.  There was surprisingly little acrimony, though Cookie in particular was quite weirded out.  He still hadn't figured out how Biscuit joined us, and now here was another cat joining the household. 

Jake seems to have been used to being on his own.  He found Cookie and Biscuit to be rather uninteresting, especially compared to the cornucopia of cat food now available to him.  But the house has many interesting places to explore and nap. 

You'll note that Jake kind of resembles Cookie- though where Cookie has a flourishing white handlebar mustache, Jake favors a small tidy French mustache.  (It's possible Jake is short for Jacques- we don't know for sure.)

Cookie is starting to get used to Jake, though he still gives Jake a wide berth and frequent suspicious looks.  Biscuit keeps trying to entice Jake to play, bouncing out from behind furniture at him and then tearing around the house.  Jake is quite baffled by this, and gives Biscuit a look I interpret as, "What on earth was that about?!"

Now that Jake is starting to put on some weight, he's gone from surprised pleasure at each meal to wild enthusiasm. And it's a tossup who will try first to push Biscuit's nose out of his kibble- Jake or Cookie. 

Still a certain amount of settling in to do, but unless Jake's old family puts in a belated appearance, it looks like we have a new addition to the household. 

And in Fiber News

There's something about summer- the heavy social schedule (lots of cookouts!), the yard work, the travel, and the heat- or some combination of the above- that fills me with laziness and I fall off the blog wagon.  Every darn time. 

But.  I haven't given up playing with yarn.  You knew that, right?   And while I haven't been writing about it, I at least took a few photos.  So here is my summer in crafts:

For those dog days of really hot weather, there was more cotton.  I did another bag, more or less to the same pattern as the first, but this time in blues.

When that got too big to travel, there was a plain blue watch cap. I like to turn out a variety of hats, so there's something to suit all tastes.

Then I surveyed my somewhat bloated stash and decided that while I'd cut the cotton down to size pretty smartly, I still needed to do some more strategic crafting.  And one way to blow out a lot of bulk quickly would be to take a large bag full of squares and turn them into an afghan.  (The squares had come from a friend of my mom's, along with a bunch of yarn.)  So I set to work with a will.

Despite occasional feline assistance, I finished that one in August.

Then I realized that it had been months since I'd done any colorwork, and so I whipped out a quick hat to stave off withdrawal.

And in betwixt and between, there were mittens.

And that's the FOs.  I'm still futzing with the neckline of the bulky weight sweater (I've knit and ripped it twice so far- third time's the charm, I'm hoping.)   There's a mostly finished sock that I should cast off and start its mate one of these days. Last week, I even went through all the new yarn (since I sorted the stash in the spring) and separated it by weight and fiber content to make it easier to find.   And I keep thinking about sewing, but I need to knit some more first because the sewing room is awash in yarn.  And there's been some connubial carpentry with my husband which also is currently in a partially finished state.

And that isn't even getting into the two shorter trips we've taken since the England trip--so many hobbies, so little time!