Lost and Found

This is a mouse I made for Lassy last weekend. The pattern, from Oddball Knitting, is extremely simple, and a little catnip in the stuffing goes a long way.


Lassy spent a great deal of the weekend torturing this new friend, attempting to tear it to shreds, rolling around in a sunbeam.


Check out those claws!


But later in the week, we had a bit of a nightmare on our hands. Lassy went out in the morning, as he usually does when the sun is shining, and went off to play with the other neighbourhood cats. Now our block has a lot of outdoor cats, and Lassy is well loved by the nieghbours. It's a fairly low-traffic area, and since he came to us as a stray, he really does like to spend some time outdoors wandering. Usually, if not before, he's on the doorstep waiting to get in when I get home from work (Nick is home during the day to let him in and out as he pleases).

On Tuesday, we were a bit distracted by a plumbing problem that my dad arrived to fix, but became concerned when Lassy stil hadn't come home by the time it got dark. This is a cat who doesn't like to go too long between meals!

To make the story shorter, he was still missing on Wednesday, and we started canvassing the neighbours, putting up posters at the corner store, and even got an announcement on the local radio station. By Thursday morning, after two nights missing, we were losing hope, assuming the worst.

But on Thursday afternoon he appeared out of nowhere. Absolutely starving, and meowing for food, but he was home! It's such a relief to have him back.

Our best guess is that maybe he got accidentally locked into a shed or garage in the neighbourhood for a couple of days. There's no other reason really that he would be out so long and come back so hungry. What was that about curiousity and cats?



Things are pretty much back to normal. The catnip mouse has gotten such a workout that it's completely felted now, and Lassy has been even more cuddly than usual.

In the stress of last week, I knit a Swallowtail Shawl (photos to come), and a few more mitred squares for a blanket.


I hope we never have to go through that again!

Coming together

The very astute Martha noticed the mitred squares blocking in the photo in my last post. This is something I've had on the go for a long time. It's going to be a baby blanket eventually.


I started it some time back, when there were several different amazing mitred square blankets showing up on blogs. For me, it was an answer for what to do with lots of leftovers of sock yarn (my frugal nature never lets me throw out even the smallest little ball!). It's neat that it reflects a history of most of the socks I have knit, with a few sock-yarn baby sweaters thrown in for good measure. I overdyed some of these yarns in my early experiments with Wilton cake dyes and Kool Aid (some of the greens and purples), and I've even picked apart variegated yarns to get some of the colour blocks!

Now with a 13th square completed, I'm beginning to wonder how big I'll want to go. I may try sewing it together at 16 sqaures, but I think ideally, it needs to be 20 or 25. But in the meantime, I've run out of interesting colours again, so I'll probably tuck this away again until I've finished a few more pairs of socks.