Because my cat really needed another blanket

She did, though. I left my granny square afghan on the floor in a moment of laziness, and Juniper claimed it and proceeded to spend most of her time lying on it or under it. While I continue to be flattered that she likes my crocheting so much, I didn't really want my blanket to stay permanently on the floor, so I made her a floor-blanket of her own.

Trying out her new blanket immediately after I finished it

I was in the mood to get rid of some stash, so I triple-stranded some Knit Picks Brava in black and white and that purple acrylic that continues to haunt me. The blanket is just rows of double crochet, alternating the colors until I was nearly out of yarn, then I did two rows of double crochet around the border. To give the blanket a rolled edge, I then did a thing that came to me out of the blue and is very hard to explain, but basically, I folded and "seamed" the edge to itself by slip-stitching it through the base of the first row of double crochet.

The blanket is nice and thick, as Juniper likes it. It makes a good place to sleep in front of the radiator, although her preferred use is to burrow under it. In fact, if she's in the right mood, I can stick her under the blanket and she'll just stay there for hours. Seeing her snuggle on or under her blanket is as much of a "thank you" I'll ever get from a cat, but it's enough.

Tiny cat! Tiny cat!

One Sunday at work (in between my other responsibilities, of course!) I got out Anna Hrachovec's Tiny Cat kit and, ta-da, then there was a tiny orange cat! He stayed at the yarn store for a few days to meet my coworkers, and then he came home with me.

Where he met Juniper. And realized what a very, very tiny cat he is.

Crochet stash-busting

Recently I've been in that mood where I dump out my stash boxes and touch all the skeins and stare and plot and then tuck everything away and worry about having too much yarn. When I'm in that mood, crochet is wonderfully soothing and satisfying, because it eats up so much yarn and goes so quickly.

I can't get enough of that super-cute T-rex pattern that I posted about earlier, so when my grandmother requested a new critter (I've showered her with amigurumi in the past), she got a dino, of course. It was a good opportunity to pull something interesting out of my acrylic stash, and I am very pleased to report that one of my Red Heart skeins from my early crocheting days is now 100% used up.

I actually ran a little short on yarn, so I modified the dino pattern slightly by skipping several rounds at the bottom of its body that were not used to increase or decrease stitches. Its tummy is a little less rotund, but it's still nice and chubby. Although this yarn was a bit brutal on my fingers, I do really like the colors, and I'm glad its final incarnation was this cute little dino. (It also became a dragon and a little crab and a little fish.)

Earlier this year I bought a skein of Michaels' house brand yarn, Loops & Threads, in a leaf-green color, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. This is actually a very decent acrylic, but I had no idea what I could do with it, especially since I probably have more worsted acrylic in green than any other color. So then I decided to make something for my cat. Of course.

Yes, I underestimated my yarn usage again. But I'm learning to embrace asymmetry sometimes.

I had an idea to crochet a popcorn-stitch rug to put under Juniper's litter box, to help collect the litter that she tracks around. Tamara Kelly's Blackberry Salad Striped Baby Blanket is a free pattern, and while I felt a little weird modifying a baby blanket pattern to make a bathroom accessory, it worked really well. I burned through the entire ball of Loops & Threads, plus a few other odds and ends that looked nice together. And the rug serves its purpose (when Juniper decides to exit her litter box from the front, which she does not always do, because she is a cat). I guess it's strange to get excited by the sight of lots of cat litter trapped in something I crocheted, but hey, it's doing its job.

More cat toys

To really enjoy knitting or crocheting, it helps to have the attitude of "Why would I buy x, when I can make it myself?" I'm sure this is often perplexing to non-crafters, and depending on what x is, it may appear to border on insanity.

For example, it's probably a little crazy to make cat toys. Really, it's also a little crazy to buy cat toys, since most cats I've known have been delighted by a crumple of paper, a bug, a reflection on the wall, or an imaginary (or maybe just invisible) beastie on the ceiling. This doesn't stop me, of course, from buying or making toys for the cats in my life.

My boyfriend's sister and her husband recently adopted a kitten, so to welcome the new cat-niece to the family, I sent them a few crocheted toys: two of the balls that Juniper loves, and a little fishy. And of course, to be fair, I had to make the same things for Juniper. Given how frequently her toys disappear under the couch, it doesn't hurt to have a large supply of them.

The balls are made with the same Ideal Crochet Sphere pattern that I used before, and the fish are Ana Rosa's Little Fish pattern. The yarn is random acrylic from my stash, and a few of the toys are stuffed with catnip tied inside a piece of muslin. They've been well received by both kitties, from what I hear!

Saturday Things: Little ball of fur

Just something simple today: a happy, sleepy kitty.

Saturday Things

My previous post was my 100th post on this blog! When I started 26 Donuts, it was the latest in my many attempts to find my voice and figure out what I liked chatting to the internet about. Two years and 100 posts later, this hobby-journal of mine seems to be working pretty well for me. At this point, I'd like to put a little more effort and a little more "me" into it, and not let it lapse into silence when I don't have an interesting project, or when I'm disappointed in what I'm working on and don't wanna talk about it. So, I'm planning to do a few regular, weekly posts. Without awkward further ado, please enjoy my first Saturday Things post.

I know that when bloggers do "[Day of the Week] Things" posts, they generally write them as a numbered list of ten to twelve odds and ends. But I don't think I have that much to talk about! Instead, I'll try to share one or two things that have made me a little bit happier, you know, in the way a donut now and then will do.

So, to start things off: cute pets! On Instagram!

Photo by msy1515

Photo by marutaro

I follow a random assortment of accounts on Instagram, including a few real-life acquaintances, some bloggers, and a couple of crafty people. But, most of the accounts that I follow are cats and dogs! As it happens, most of them are Japanese, because the first pet-account I discovered belongs to someone from Japan. I checked out the accounts they followed, and found a gold mine of other cat- and dog-stagrams. The best thing about these Japanese pet accounts is that it's a thing, I guess, to post daily "good morning" and "good night" photos. So now I start my days looking at all these adorable dogs and cats saying "Good night" or "Oyasumi" and wrap up my evenings by seeing them all wake up and tell me "Good morning" or "Ohayo" (it's backwards, because of the time difference, but that's okay).

Photo by hanaruko

Photo by beemo_cat

If you're interested, a couple of my favorites are marutaro, a shiba inu named Maru; hanaruko, another cute dog called Hana; msy1515, who has three cute cats and two pretty dogs; korokoronya, who has both a cute cat and a cute baby; and katetsai, who always has amusing descriptions on their cat photos.

And of course, I would be remiss if I did not mention beemo_cat, who is not Japanese but who is my Juniper's handsome male doppelganger.

Juniper

Annnnd, speaking of my Juniper, of course I had to make her an Instagram account of her own. She's on there (and on Tumblr) as smallsnugglecat, so check her out too if you're planning to start your own Instagram pet collection!

Leave me a comment if you know of any other cute pets on Instagram - or any other accounts I should follow, since I'm still getting the hang of it.

Star blanket

My apologies for another long and inexplicable silence! I thought I would at least get another post up in January, but somehow we're already several days into February.

I haven't posted yet about the projects I worked on over the week and a half that we spent traveling for the holidays, so I'll start with this:

Crocheted star blankets pop up pretty regularly on Ravelry and on crochet sites, and they have always intrigued me, but I didn't know or have any small children of my own and I wasn't sure a bright, star-shaped little blanket was really something I needed for myself. Now I have a cat, though, and she loves blankets, especially ones I've crocheted. (My granny square afghan lives on the couch these days, and Juniper will always and only lie on it, even if it means squeezing on to the tiny corner of it that's not being used by someone else.) I wanted to make her a blanket of her own, so a star afghan, using some bright pink and purple acrylic that I bought on a whim, seemed perfect.

I think she agrees.

The particular pattern I chose is the Chromium Star Blanket by Laura Lynn Hanks. I picked this one for Juniper because it modifies the traditional ripple pattern to make a solid piece, rather than having the usual small holes at the peaks and valleys. I thought a solid blanket would work better for a cat - fewer places for tiny toes and claws to get caught.

Don't tell Juniper, but I did misread the pattern, and the blanket is a tiny bit awkward as a result. Every three or four rows, you're supposed to make fewer dcs in the points, which keeps the rows from expanding too quickly and getting rumpled. I anticipated this problem, but due to reading the pattern on a teeny, tiny smartphone screen, I didn't notice the fix for this that the designer cleverly put in the pattern. It would be nice if it was highlighted or something, because the written pattern is very repetitive, but I can't blame the formatting. When I finally noticed what I was doing wrong, I was on the verge of ripping out almost the whole thing, until I remembered that this was for a cat. I don't think she noticed the rumples.

Christmas for kitties

Somewhere in our apartment, there's a Bermuda Triangle filled with the toys that our cat loves most, because she plays with furry things and catnip-y things so enthusiastically that they vanish. Sometimes they reappear (the donut has disappeared and returned twice now) but we usually have to supplement with crumpled-up balls of paper. Juniper thinks these make pretty great toys, but we feel a little weird about literally tossing trash around the apartment. So, rather than buying her another handful of mice to lose, I made her some Christmas toys.

I used the same balls of Sugar'n Cream Christmas colors that I bought several years ago to crochet tree ornaments. This year, our collection of "real" ornaments has grown enough that I didn't feel like making any more, but crocheting something Christmas-y has become a sort of mini-tradition for me. So, why not give the cat something festive?

The pattern is The Ideal Crochet Sphere, which uses math that I don't want to think about (but will happily benefit from) to make a more exact sphere than the traditional method of crocheting a ball. As with the donut cat toy, I made the balls more enticing by tying off a few pinches of catnip inside a piece of pantyhose and stuffing that inside. Juniper emphatically approves - one has already gone missing.

If you give a cat a donut...

...Make sure you stuff some catnip inside because that's what they're really after.

I made this toy for my cat using Melissa Trenado's mini donuts cat toy pattern. It was inevitable, really. And she seems to like it:

And I, of course, like watching her gnaw a tiny donut while rolling around in glee.

I'll be making this pattern again, because after two weeks of fun, the donut is in a very sad state. Fortunately, it only took an hour or less to make. I used odds and ends of yarn, so the frosting and sprinkles are acrylic and the bottom part is cotton. I would definitely recommend using cotton for the whole thing, because the acrylic is very fuzzy and splitty. It has not held up nearly as well as the cotton to my cat's affections, plus I want to minimize the bits of fuzz she could potentially ingest. To keep the catnip in it from leaking out, I cut a couple squares of old pantyhose, put a pinch of Cosmic Catnip in each one, and tied them off, then put them into the donut with the stuffing.

Back, with a kitty cat

Apologies for the long silence. I have several excuses, none of which, even combined, are good reasons for not updating for five whole weeks. But they do provide me with a few interesting things to post about, so for this entry I will start with the first and most exciting excuse: kitty!

We adopted her the day after my last post, and for the next two or three weeks I was much too busy coaxing her out from under the bed, cuddling her, and photographing every cute thing she did to think about blogging.

She is still being unbelievably cute, playful, and occasionally a pain in the butt, like most cats, but the novelty has worn off enough that staring at her doesn't monopolize my time anymore. Already, it's hard to remember that six weeks ago we hadn't even met her yet.

She is enthusiastically interested in my yarn-related hobbies, which is another reason I haven't posted lately - things were a little slow on that front for a bit. Once I figured out her napping schedule, I was able to get in some knitting time, so I do have an update or two on that for my next post.