The Ministry of Silly Hats

One of the first hats I made for myself after I learned to knit was the Kittyville Hat. (It's also in S'n'B vol. 1). I think everyone should have at least one hat with animal ears on it.


I also made wristwarmers to match. I keep meaning to post my easy-peasy pattern, but haven't gotten around to it yet. (Email me at sohopixieATtdsDOTnet and I'll send it to you.)

I found some white cheneille-y stuff in my closet so I started the bunny beanie tonight and got the beanie part finished. Now I get to make some ears. Yay!


If you want to make more odd headwear for small children, I really adore this cupcake hat. (And hey, I'm all about the free patterns.)

Even better, perhaps, is the Baby Viking Hat. (I think you better just go see it to believe it.) If you don't make it for a child of your own, you should definitely make one to torture the parents of some other child.

There's also a Pineapple Hat, but somehow tropical fruit just lacks the panache of the Vikings for me.


And if you really want to freak everyone out, you can make the Gollum Hat. Monster Crochet is one of the most entertaining blogs I know of (crocheted Severed Fingers, anyone? or Fried Egg Wristcuffs, or a Big Strip'o'Bacon chart?). I love it, even though I can't follow a crochet pattern (yet)...

Okay, back to my CSI reruns and bunny beanie ears.

Guess How Much I Love Rabbits?

Easter is coming, and I really have this thing for rabbits.

These are some kind of crazy breed of rabbits called Lionhead Rabbits.

As for rabbits, do I have time to make this bunny beanie and get it off to NY before Easter? (Boy, do I love knitting pattern central, but every time I start wandering around there, I find free patterns for about 89 things I want to make...)

Because I think I must make one for my niece. (Every baby needs silly hats. I mean, why else have babies and cats, other than to put silly hats on them?)

This egg cozy is awfully cute, too. (I'm not really sure why anyone would want an egg cozy...but...it's adorable.)

KnitOwl also has directions on how to knit a rabbit. Her rabbits are awesome, and she has lots of rabbit-y things going on over at her blog.

This is one of my friend Sean's Mini Rex Rabbits. Isn't she beautiful? Sean gave me some gorgeous angora rabbit fiber last year that I'm spinning up with some Graty fleece. It makes the llama so lofty and shiny. It's just taking me some practice to get the hang of it with my beginning spinning skills.


You can see the beautiful angora in the back center, and then blended with Graty in the foreground. (Don't worry, no bunnies or llamas were harmed in the collection of their fibery goodness! *grin*)


Reading Rabbits

Spring time
As for favorite rabbit stories, I have three. One you can read right now, here: The Velveteen Rabbit. (Grab some kleenex, it's a tear-jerker--in the best way). This is a neat version, it has the original illustrations.

Anxious Times

At Last! At Last!


Next is Guess How Much I Love You. Also a wonderful story--readable at that link (very short; if you've never read it, it's lovely).


Finally, Watership Down. I've never seen the animated version, but I absolutely love Richard Adams' book (I also really enjoyed his The Plague Dogs).

Hop hop hop!

Another List: On the Shelves

Oh boy, another meme. I got this one from Gothknits. Why do these fascinate me? You got me. Last week it was movies, now it's books.

This list makes me feel awfully old-fashioned and pretty stodgy. I used to be a compulsive reader--you know, couldn't be caught anywhere without a book. (This from the girl who checked into detox with the Collected Stories of Vladimir Nabakov under her arm because she was afraid she might run out of reading material. As I remember, that large tome didn't even get cracked open during her stint there in January 1996...)

However, after I got clean and sober, I read far less. At first it was because I simply couldn't concentrate or absorb any of what I was reading. Then it was perhaps more because I began to have a bit of a life. Eventually, I no longer lived with my nose in a book every free moment of every day as I had from the time I learned to read as a young girl.

I still enjoy reading, but now I spend more time blogging, knitting, and tending to the animals than reading. And I obviously watch a lot more movies. (Current read: John McWhorter's The Power of Babel.)


This was my favorite bookstore, Books & Co. on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. (No, that's not me in front of it.) It's not there anymore, but it was when I worked next door at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1990-1995. A wonderful, cozy intimate place that held wonderful readings and was a real landmark. Whenever I want to go to a bookstore, I still wish I had a place like Books & Co. to go to.

So here's the book meme.

"In the list of books below, bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of."

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. +The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. +The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. +The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery)
9. *Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. +The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. *The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. *The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. *I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. *The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. *The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. *Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. *The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. ++++Bible [yes, we have four of them]
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. *She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. *Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. *The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. *The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. *The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. +Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. *Not Wanted On the Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. *Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. *The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. *Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. *The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S. E. Hinton)
97. *White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. *A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)
101. My Sister's Keeper (Jodi Picoult)

Where's Mr. O'Kitten?

Whenever one of us is away, we always say that the girls think one of has gone to the watering hole for entirely too long. I was just off to the East Coast for a three-day weekend, leaving Mr. O'Kitten alone with Emma, Morgan, Isis and all the farm critters to attend to.

Now it's me here for a few days while Mr. O'Kitten is away. Doesn't Miss Morgan Freeman LeFay look as if she's waiting for the phone to ring? "Where's Mr. O'Kitten?" they all seem to be asking me.

Thanks to everyone for asking about Mr. O'K. He's going to be in hospital for a few days. He's been feeling pretty lousy for some months and they're going to try to adjust some of his medications. Hopefully, he'll be home in just a couple of days.

Well, Morgan, here's Mr. O'Kitten:

More than Foxy Sox...

Here's the package I got from my PRGE Secret Pal today.


There is a big fluffy ball of Savanna, an alpaca/linen/wool/nylon blend. (The color is more rose than in the pic.) You can also see the corner of the passion fruit & melon sachet (which made the whole box smell yummy), a pair of red (I love red!) folding scissors, a big pink tin of lip balm, and the aforementioned fuzzy socks.

There was also a fabulous purple crocheted hat, which looks uncannily like the one I have on in this photo:


Said hat came in very handy today as I had to rush out to take Mr. O'Kitten to the hospital and was having a really bad hair day. As we were running out of the house, I noticed a package on the doorstep--from my SP! He'll be in the hospital for a few days and there really was nothing better than this package to brighten what was otherwise a long and grueling afternoon and evening. (Oh, and I wore the lovely crochet cap for the entire day.)


Three skeins of Sirdar cotton indigo. Gorgeous. A pair of 100 cm/4 mm Addis (how did she know I've wanted to try Addis for the longest time?). A citrus shampoo, body wash and soap; a candy can of apple "novelty sherbet" (hmmm!) and a heart-shaped lollypop; a fun pair of heart-shaped earrings; and finally a lovely hand-made card with adorable pink stiletto heels, sequins and rhinestones on it.

I swear, I couldn't have gotten this box full of PRGE goodness on a better day. My pal is a goddess! Thank you, SP!

Foxy Socks and Cat Yoga

Foxy Socks

I got a package from my PRGE Secret Pal today. Not only did it smell like the U.K. and have all kinds of yarn-y goodness in it...

...but it contained this fantastic pair of socks that Isis and I were both quite smitten with.

Apparently they were quite tasty.

Not to mention fuzzy, black and red and toasty!


In the Bag

Everyone becomes very intrigued when it's time to empty the litterboxes. For some reason, I suddenly have several assistants (usually waiting with full bowels and/or bladders to use the freshly cleaned box). Here's the scene this week when I had one nice (supposedly) empty kitty litter bag.

Morgan: What are you looking at?

Isis: Hey! You aren't kitty litter!

Morgan: Well, of course I'm not kitty litter, dummy...do I look like garbage (or worse) to you? [muttering under cat-breath] Not that I'd ever call you trash, you silly weed--despite the fact that they gave you thumbs when they were handing out brains...


Cat Yoga (Emmalayana Style)















Namaste!

Project Spectrum: Around the House

A few more thoughts from the blue, grey, and white palette before the month is out.


Out-of-Doors

The front of the hen house.



Hens doing some spring cleaning.


Indoors

Grey cat bowl.

Grey cat helping.

Blue jeans.

Lavender.

Kitchen shelves.

Cat-and-mouse toy.


Happy First Birthday, Isis!

This was our Isis last year.

She was very small (except for her feet).

Today she is a year old, and now she is big all over.