and the winner is...

Last week I put a hand knit blanket up for adoption. Twenty-five people ended up asking to be in the drawing, so apparently I misunderestimated the appeal of the offer. I decided it would be appropriate to draw the winning name from a hand knit hat:


And the winner is...


Paul Skoglund! Paul is someone I've known since dinosaurs walked the earth, which was when I was in high school. Just ask Sarah Palin if you think I'm making this up.

Knitted goods lotteries may become a regular feature here, because lord knows I make more than I can use. I end up employing the stuff as home decor, for chrissake:


(Wow, that monitor looks so wee and quaint now that it's been replaced by an iMac bigger than Godzilla's head). Anyway, so stay tuned if you're into scarves or whatever. In other crafty news, I made a cute dress yesterday.





This one's not up for adoption; I've got four or five little cuties in my social circle who are wearing this size nowadays, so they have dibs.

free to good home

This blanket is up for adoption. I had fun making it, but I don't need it. And it's kind of wacky, so I don't want to just present it to someone without knowing if they would really like it.

So if you are interested in owning approximately 200,000 hand-knit stitches of sock yarn in patchwork blanket form, send me an email or a Facebook message by September 25th (a week from today). If more than one person is interested, I'll draw a name. If you don't live near me, I will mail it to you. (If you neither know my email address nor are my Facebook friend, then I probably don't know you well enough to give you a blanket that took something like 130 hours to make. I'm just sayin'.)

The photos show the blanket on a queen bed; it's a good size to use as a couch throw (I think it's something like 45" x 53"). Click on the photos to see it more up close and personal. Also, one caveat--although most of these yarns are machine washable, there are a couple mixed in that aren't. That means you'll have to hand wash or dry clean it if you dump your chocolate ice cream on it. But you can be more careful than that, right?

mostly pics because I'm mostly lame

I still don't have much besides photos for show & tell. So here goes...

The other day was Tami's birthday, so I made her a gluten-free chocolate nut cake and even busted out the fancy spoons (from the 1920's at the latest; I think my grandmother got them for her wedding):



Amanda brought me the bestest ever little salt and pepper shakers. They perfectly match my dishes:



When I was researching wheat-free cooking I realized that wheat might actually be behind a lot of life-long problems I've had, so I'm experimenting with gluten-free food for at least a month. Baking has been fun:

German plum cake and blueberry-fig-walnut muffins

Gluten-free bread (delicious)

Banana-walnut muffins

I finally got my butt in gear and made some robot-themed baby items for Casey's brand new nephew Matteo. I have been promising Casey for months that I'd do this!

Here's my friend Steph's sweet little girl Gwen wearing a stripey dress I made for her:





And finally, here's a sweater I recently made for myself--just in time for San Francisco's one month of warm weather.

ass menagerie

I've been on a spree of creating crocheted and knitted mascots for my coworkers:

A dolphin for Amanda:



A dachshund for Dan:



Cthulhu for Casey:



A gibbon for Jim:



A jackass for Lon:



A mutant, bacon-eating panda for Andy:



6/10: Updated to add an aardvark for Johan:

senility: it's what's for breakfast

Yesterday I received in the mail a comped copy of Vickie Howell's new book, Pop Goes Crochet!, as I had designed and produced a hoodie for said volume. As I was flipping through its pages looking for this garment, I came across a pattern for a pair of cute red socks with crocheted cuffs. These socks looked remarkably like my previously published Granddaughter Socks, just in another gauge and color, and maybe with a slightly different version of the squares.

"Hey!" I thought to myself. "That is a total ripoff of my design! Who had the NERVE to submit this for publication?!"

I checked the credit line: "Designed by Karen Baumer."

Oh. Right. I made those socks. This also answers a question I had recently as I was sorting through some yarn, namely, "Where did this partial ball of red cashmere come from, again?"

I can't find a photo of the socks, but here is the hoodie:

HOODIE!

is mah birfday w00t!

It's birthday week here at Casa de Phibetakitten: mine was last Tuesday and James's is this coming Tuesday. James showed up last Monday, and when I got home and saw this hugemongous box in my living room I thought I'd finally gotten that pony I've always wanted:


Turns out it was an iMac 24", which comes in at a very very very very very close second to a pony. Plus, as Jenny Jo pointed out, it's way better than a dead pony in a box. I have to give her that one.


I'm really wondering what James is going to do for Xmas this year, because I am running out of room for Apple products in my home. Maybe I really will finally get a pony!

April is a dangerous month for my pocketbook, because it turns out that I can justify quite a lot of things by telling myself they are "for my birthday." I don't exercise a lot of fiscal restraint during the remaining 11 months of the year as it is, so you can see where this attitude might get me into trouble. My favorite birthday present to me this year is this painting, which I got from a Romanian artist named Andrada Anghel:


It's called "Outer Space Landscape." (Click on the photo to enlarge it and get a better sense of the texture it's got going on.) I love it.

We spent this weekend in Santa Rosa, visiting one of our favorite restaurants (GG's Earth and Surf) and our favorite brew pub (Russian River Brewing Co.) and going on a geeky hike called the Planet Walk in Sugarloaf Ridge state park. I don't have anything particularly funny to report about any of this, but since I refuse to miss an opportunity to use my "inappropriate animals" tag, allow me to present to you two rattlesnakes I noticed hiding out under a bush:


We also saw two ridiculously large wild turkeys running down the trail and making ridiculous noises.

Even though James's birthday isn't till Tuesday, I was unable to resist giving him one of his presents ahead of time. This is handknit sweater #31:





And by that I mean it is #31 for JAMES, not the 31st that I've ever knit. I have no idea what that number would be, but particularly if baby clothes count it is easily in the many hundreds by now. I may need to get a life.

crafty crap

I haven't had any home dec updates lately, mainly on account of my spending 111% of my time sitting on my ass and knitting. But today I installed some really cool wall graphics to show y'all (click on the photo for a better view). They come from this Etsy shop, and if you're looking for a fairly inexpensive way to spruce up your walls on a large scale, take a look at their designs.

I haven't posted much knitting lately either, I guess. Here are some recent highlights, brought to you straight from my couch:

kitties in vegas

The MEOW kitties (a.k.a. my internet knitting posse) decided we'd have our semi-annual retreat in Las Vegas this time, so a bunch of us rented a vacation home for the long weekend and we're enjoying the lovely weather as well as the drinking and the gossiping. And the knitting, of course.

Technically we are in Henderson, NV, which I'm told is a popular location for finding dumped bodies on C.S.I.

Speaking of knitting, I would like to present to you young Diego modeling the 'aviator helmet' I made for him a while ago. Wow that is a cute kid.

fair trade

James and I have a symbiotic relationship of sorts. He does all kinds of things for me that I am probably technically capable of doing but that I either (a) loathe and/or (2) would put off forever if left to my own devices. Examples of such activities include setting up audio-visual equipment, arranging and installing wireless service, assembling IKEA products, talking on the phone to just about any company about anything, ensuring I have proper web security, installing cabinets and shelving, removing dents from my car, supervising and assisting movers, understanding major real estate transactions, and so forth. In exchange I occasionally knit him a pair of socks.

All this is just to supply some background information to explain why James was working on my taxes yesterday rather than allowing me to simply pay an accountant to do it the way I usually do. According to James, my tax situation this year is so straightforward as to render a professional accountant superfluous. You know, because in 2008 I started paying interest on two mortgages, received royalty payments on various knitwear designs, earned stock dividends, paid property taxes on two houses, and god knows what else. Sounds very 1040-EZ, right? Anyway, so he was using TurboTax software, which has you answer various questions in order to establish what all you need to declare, and at one point he piped up from the next room, "Did you get any Ottoman Turkish empire settlement payments last year? Because that falls under 'other income.'"

"Oh crap," I replied, "I forgot about that. (pause) Oh, wait, no...I bought an ottoman last year. I get those two things confused."

"OK, good. I think I can skip this line then."

I'm hoping James doesn't read this blog, because so far I have him convinced that our little arrangement involves an equitable exchange of goods and services. For what it's worth, here is a photo of the hand knit socks I found in his dresser just now:



He also has somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 hand knit sweaters, as well as quite a few mittens, hats, and scarves. The fellow lives in Los Angeles, for god's sake...he needs help keeping warm.

totoro!

Since Rick (and by proxy, Cathy) originally introduced me to Hayao Miyazaki and the film My Neighbor Totoro...



...when I saw the pattern for this baby hat I naturally had to make one for Baby Rick-and-Cathy, who is due in about a month. Yay!!



Speaking of critters, James and I pulled into the driveway at his house in Monrovia today and this guy was hanging out in the yard:



Let's just hope he doesn't come bounding into the living room later.

a.w.a.p.

As a result of James's tireless quest to keep me as wired as humanly possible, I am now the owner of an iPhone 3G. I had an inkling that one would be my Christmas present this year, but in fact James was simply waiting for it to be 30 seconds after my Verizon contract expired, which in his mind should count as a major holiday anyway.

This gesture has forever erased the negative points he amassed a few years ago when I (a) pointed him directly to an Orla Kiely purse I really wanted for my birthday and (b) said "Under no circumstances do I want a new cell phone" and then guess who got a new cell phone for her birthday? The iPhone is pure gadgetry GOLD. I want to marry it. There's most likely nothing I can say that hasn't already been said about its vast superiority to any other handset out there, so I won't belabor the point.

Instead I will leave you with a photo of some baby knitwear that was completed a couple of weeks ago but had to be kept secret until after a certain baby shower.

for the birds

caffeine


+ time change



= just way way too much knitting





(Kate Gilbert's Bird In Hand mittens.)

immemorial

I've been noticing for a couple of years now that I am a lot more forgetful than I used to be. Mind you, I can still recall verbatim every turn of phrase James may have used in a discussion from six years ago when I was convinced he was actually telling me I was unattractive, or what my 10th grade English teacher said about my writing (that it would always be "fluffy"; two Master's Degrees from Yale later, I almost am ready to beg to fucking differ), or what the soap in my German grandmother's bathroom smelled like in 1984. No, I am talking about shit that happened five minutes ago.

Like Friday I got on the bus to go to work and there was a guy in a giant piñata costume (including elaborate horse head) sitting calmly and hilariously among the normally-dressed commuters. I ended up standing right in front of him and was able to spend the next ten minutes admiring the craftsmanship and ingenuity of his work, and then he got off at Van Ness. He was clearly on his way to winning every costume contest in town, provided no one took a bat to him first.

In other words, I was perfectly aware it was Halloween. Three or four minutes later I looked up from my magazine, saw some new passengers standing near the front of the bus, and thought, "I can't believe no one is offering their seats to those nice nuns." And then, "I don't think I recall ever seeing a nun on the bus before." It was only when one of them turned fully around and I noticed they were zombie nuns that I was jerked back to my senses. Oh, riggghht. Halloween. Plus, I don't think real nuns wear Puma sneakers. So many clues.

At work I'll do things such as concentrate all morning on a set of tasks and then report to my group lead something like "OK, I've re-fracked the dirbills and the freenats, and also built for the ungrapped norbars, and I entered the stuff for the padmerizer and made sure it's working properly, so unless you can think of something else, category 1 is ready for a corpus test. Should I go ahead and file the bugzilla?" And then a look of confusion will cloud her face and she'll say, "We ran a corpus test for 1 last night. [pause] Wait, do you mean category 6?" And yes, I will have meant category 6, the very same category I had been focused on with a mad-professor-like intensity for the previous four hours. But a two-cubicle stroll is enough to knock that information right out of my short-term memory's tenuous grip.

And then there's more mundane stuff, like how I often find myself in a room wondering why I am there. I was just in the living room, and now I am in the office. Why? Oh, look at that shiny thing...I need to fix that. And then a few minutes later I will be back in the living room fixing the shiny thing, and remember that I still haven't fetched the book I wanted from the office. Or whatever.

I blank out on people's names on a regular basis, both personal acquaintances and celebrities. The one upside is that I get to experience my own brain doing that cool linguistic thing where, say, I will know that the name I am searching for has five letters, or starts with a G and is two syllables, but then can't get beyond that. Or I'll be trying to remember the name of an actress, and I can imagine the character she played on The Shield, and remember that she is married to David Mamet, but the best I can come up with is "Is it Something Partridge? No, that's not it." Five hours later (and/or after checking IMDb), I'll figure out that the name I was searching for was Rebecca Pidgeon. My brain teases me with the semantic web surrounding my target--nuptial status, some kind of bird involved somehow, employment details--but won't hand over the goddamn name.

Um, what was I talking about? Oh, look, shiny mittens I made this weekend!