Knitting Up A Dog

Knitting

I finally finished knitting my mom's birthday socks. I'm happy with them. I don't enjoy knitting socks much but my mom loves my knitted socks so once in a while I find an easy pattern and knit a pair of socks for my mom. My blog friend Guinifer is a super fast and very accomplished sock knitter. I'm in awe of her. It takes me forever to knit a pair of socks. Truth be told, my mom wears the socks I knit for her to bed so they are never to be seen in public. And that's perfectly fine with me, my mom has neuropathy in one of her feet so I'm happy they make her feel warm and comfortable and I don't have to worry if they are not quite perfect.

Here's the finished product. The pattern is Dublin Bay Socks  knit from Pagewood Farm yarn on 2.25 dpns.

Now that I've finished the socks, I'm starting on a knitted Pembroke Welsh Corgi.

I know, as if I need another dog!I've started knitting the Pembroke Welsh Corgi from Knit Your Own Dog. It's super easy knitting, yet, I've managed to complete only the two back legs.

Why? Because I can't motivate to complete the rest of the dog. It's all in bits and pieces. The sewing up of the dog is going to be oh so futsy, putsy. It makes it difficult to continue. I can knit up the pieces with no problem, just not sure I want to bother with sewing together all the teeny pieces. Here are the two back legs knit in Elann Pure Alpaca Fina on Size 2 needles. I'm thinking of ripping these up and starting over using the same yarn doubled and size 4 or 5 needles so the sewing up is a bit easier.

I've knit a few of the Fiber Trends sheep and dogs and they are not knit in tiny, little pieces. So I'm a bit concerned about the finishing work required on these Knit Your Own Dog patterns.

Also, I don't think the Pembroke is very realistic. Some of the other dogs, especially the Jack Russell, the Westie and the Scottie are very realistic. I have a friend with both a Scottie and a Westie and at first I thought I'd knit up both for her. Now that I know how much finishing work is required, and since my friend is a knitter herself, I think I'll just loan her my book and she can knit her own!

A very nice feature of the book is stating the number of stitches at the end of each row. There's a lot of shaping going on and it's especially nice to be able to check you work after a shaping row. The quality of the pictures and the paper the book is printed on are excellent. There's a number of errors in the descriptions of the dogs and their jobs, for example, the Pembroke Welsh Corgi is stated to be a dog who "use their agility to nip at the heels of sheep and horses." Horses? Actually, Pems were used as cattle driving dogs and yes, they did nip at the heels of cattle. But horses? I can't imagine any horse owner I know allowing a dog to nip at the heels of their horses. I only hope the patterns themselves do not contain as many errors. Still, over all, a book I had to add to my collection and am happy to have done so.

Indoor Gardening

Don't these tomatoes in my hydrophonic garden look fantastic? I thought they were ready to eat but I picked one and not only was it difficult to pluck off the vine, a good sign in itself the tomato was not ripe, but it also tasted like a green tomato. I thought for sure I'd make a nice meal out of these this weekend but looks (or rather tastes) like next weekend instead.

My herbs and leaf lettuce are doing great. The romaine lettuce, not so good. About half my Romaine lettuce has wilted, the other half is looking and tasting great but I wish I knew why I lost the other half.

Dogs

2011 has started out great for the dogs. Tinkerbelle is racking up the QQs, Fancy finished her OA and is making good progress toward her OAJ, Rumor started agility with one weekend in February and one in March and has already completed her NA and NAJ. Also lots of obedience training happening here. I'll need to give up a few agility weekends for obedience trials later this year.

Percy spent all winter indoors, which was quite unusual for him. I guess he's getting old. I can't really blame him, it's been a long, hard winter here and still no spring in sight. Percy's now starting to insist on going outdoors several times a day which makes me very happy. I know, it's so politically incorrect of me, but Percy's always been an indoor/outdoor cat and is a working cat here. I cleaned and bleached the cat box today. I confess, I'm happy to know, barring any illness or injury, the cat box won't be used again until next winter.

Pictures From Japan

A good friend and long time co-worker and teammate lives and works in Japan. He was in the Philippines at the time of the quake, about to board a plane to return home to Tokyo. His flight was cancelled on Friday and he finally made it home on Monday. He has sent us a few pictures and has given me permission to post them on my blog. It's such a horrible tragedy. These pictures do not show the terrible devastation, but they certainly make it more personal for me.

My friend's home suffered no damage. This is in a high-rise in Tokyo. I was happy to learn his family and his family's home are also fine.

Having been gone from home my friend went to the supermarket looking for vegetables and toilet paper and this is what he found. I was happy to learn this morning he was able to find another market today with plenty of vegetables and also - toilet paper!

Above is a picture of a line for gas. I'm pretty sure I would not have the patience for a line as long as this. Hopefully in a time of crisis I would surprise myself.

My friend's lovely chocolate poodle, Taro, was being boarded while his owner was in the Philippines. He's now safe at home though still feeling stress from the quake.

My friend in Tokyo told me the best place for me to donate is the Red Cross.

I'm sure all my dog friends have seen this picture circulating on the web of the tsunami just before it wipes out an agility field set up with jumps, A-frame, weaves. Makes you realize what a small world we live in. Sometimes for me it's difficult to wrap your mind around the scope of such a tragedy, this picture really hit home. Agility folks around the world are rallying to help.