Building the stable

We don’t sleep. G is camping out on the floor of the living room because Skye is now limited to living in the front hall, the only room with a dependably impermeable floor, until we can get a handle on his incontinence.  G tries to wake up every time Skye needs to go out.  But spends half the night Lysol-ing the floor in his jammies.

My job is the surgery twins.  Stripped of their manhood (and for some reason, suddenly lifting their legs to mark things????), the Terrible Two did not sleep through the night last night, but required “OUT” three times, which means lifting them over all the Skye gates before we can get to the back door.

All of this on top of the doctor bill for the surgery and $150 worth of meds for Piper’s weight and dry eyes.

Were you thinking of getting a dog?

Presently, all are sleeping.  So why aren’t I?

Okay, I snuck in that stuff above here because I don’t want you to think this post is about dogs either.  This post is about knitting.  First Rachel decided to take up knitting and took a class from Heindselman’s (oldest yarn shop in America and probably misspelled), then I found Little Cotton Rabbits , then I started looking around Etsy for knitted animals and found —HORSES— and then patterns for everything BUT horses.  Then I started buying books of really cool knitting stuff, including the weird Japanese art of knitting animals you’ve never even heard of outside of Discovery Channel and books mostly written by Danish people, translated (badly, some of them) into English (knitting English, which is arcane to say the least).  I found three major horse patterns, made all of them, and have been experimenting ever since, trying to come up with a pattern for myself, cobbled (love that word) out of all the stuff I’ve been learning.

In sewing you deal with bias and its effect on shape – not so much with quilting, but with clothes.  And I’ve been interested in making stuffed fabric animals for some time (without ever managing to get past the buying books about it part).  But knitting is a whole nother ball game.  Not woven.  Like repetitive tiny macrame, sort of.  But you end up with a fabric, and you end up with a bias.  I’ve taken to making little bitty horses so as not to waste yarn or time (time – HA, same number of stitches, just smaller needles), and so I thought I’d show you what I’ve come up with.

Dick and Gordon, you don’t have to look.  Everybody else has to.  Pretty soon I will be posting the pattern on here and explaining why I did what I did.  Nobody has to read this to qualify as a beloved friend.  Only knitting people will care, and of those, only people who like knitting toys instead of clothes.

Anyway – here’s the collection of tiny horses.  There are two that are still naked so you can see how they look without the band-boy hair.  I still haven’t got the hang of making manes yet.  The naked ones don’t have ears, either, I think.  All of them are engineered differently through neck and shoulders.  I  think the beige naked one is going to end up being my favorite design.  You can vote if you want.

So, maybe if I can exorcise the horse thing, I can get on to doing something else – like a giant squid, perhaps, or a Siberian Husky.  Or another chapter in our book –