Mossy Cottage Knits

I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat!

The knitting forums and blogs I frequent often contain discussions about the relationship between cats and yarn. While those tales are often charming and interesting, I believe my sister can lay claim to the mother of all feline/fiber encounters.

My sister has always been very handicrafty, from painting pictures on small river rocks as a child to doing Asian scrollwork painting as a teenager to quilting as an adult. At one point, her handicrafting journey took her into the realm of tatting, a way of making intricate lace by knotting very fine cotton thread. Here is a web site with some examples of tatting and, in fact, here is a picture of some of my sisters tatted edging, which I still have after all this time! The picture makes the tatting look a little yellowish but it's actually the same white it was when my sister originally made it.

Although many years later, I still remember her tatting bobbin flashing in, out and around, and the yards of beautiful tatted edging growing and then spilling from her lap, what I remember most is the day her cat Aristo discovered her tatting stash.

Aristo was a very mischievous, bold and confident cat. In fact, the first time I met him, he walked out of his crate, jumped into my lap and bit my nose. This was also the same cat who, quite on his own, decided that the bathtub was his Safety Zone. If he did something naughty enough to compel my sister to chase him, he would immediately race to the bathroom, jump into the bathtub, skid to a stop and sit down because somehow he had gotten it into his little cat brain that there was a special Feline Force Field around the bathtub that protected him. My sister did her best to disabuse him of this idea but I don’t think it ever really took.

So, you can imagine what happened when this slightly demented cat discovered my sister’s unprotected basket of lace, bobbins and thread. By the time my sister came upon Kitty Ground Zero, her apartment looked like a spider web on steroids. Ultra-fine white thread was festooned throughout every room. It snaked across the carpet, into and out of each bedroom, and wound up, down and around every piece of furniture, every knick-knack, every lamp. And to be perfectly clear, Aristo had gone around the apartment not once, but manymanymany times with wild cat glee, so the thread was well and truly tangled.

If you had been a fly on the wall, two seconds after my sister entered her apartment, you would have seen Aristo tearing down the hall in the direction of the bathtub.

Knitting Knews - Progress!
The first half of the Oat Couture sweater is finished. Here is a picture of my efforts. Although the color is slightly off here from the yarn's actual cobalt blue color, I think this picture does a good job of showing the detail.

Dyer's Dyegest - Past Dyeing Experiments
Last year K's mother gave me some 100% wool fingering weight "dirty beige" yarn that cried out to be dyed so I thought that would be as good a time as any to experiment with Kool-Aid dyeing. However, I had a challenge that most people don't have. Since I grew up overseas, I had had little, if any, exposure to Kool-Aid. So, rather than starting with the obvious questions like "How much yarn do I use?" or "How long do I leave the yarn in the Kool-Aid?," I had to start with questions like "What aisle would Kool-Aid be found in?" and "How do they sell it? Packets? Canisters?" and "Is it expensive?" My friends, who understand some of the challenges I have in learning at age 43 what most people learn at age 4, came to my rescue and helped me procure some Kool-Aid. And here are the results:

The small beige ball is is the original color. The reddish yarn was dyed with Cherry Kool-Aid and came out a beautiful slightly variegated pumpkin color. The greenish ball was dyed with a combination of grape and blue Kool-Aid and came out a nice, also slightly variegated, greyish-teal.

Thank you to K for making me such a fun picture!

Posted by Ryan at May 21, 2003 09:17 AM