Sheep On My Stuff

I was on the very last part of this shawl:

Same yarn as the last time.

when a tragedy occurred.

Okay, maybe you can't see the tragedy.

How 'bout now? I dropped stitches. One minute I was sitting on the couch, watching Prison Break, and the next minute a handful of stitches had fallen off the needles, leaving me with a gap and no idea where it came from. ARGH. I was so close to being done, too!

In the interests of not making myself crazy, I'll probably be ripping back a few stitches at a time, instead of all at once. It may be six or seven rows before I get past the part that fell off the needles, and I'm not looking forward to that. This project might've just bumped itself to the bottom of my list.

In cuter news, that sheep is the smaller version of Lily (from the last post). Bought at the same store, part of the flock for about the same length of time, but she's about half the size of the larger Lily. Just as cute, but still not a troublemaker!

I fell behind on the Mystery Stole when the Harry Potter book came out. It wasn't so much that I didn't have time due to reading -- I flew through HP7 in a couple days -- but with two weeks off, I got out of the habit of working on the shawl. There was, after all, so much time!

Well, I really do want to finish it (it's lovely), so I got started again this week. I'm now finished up through Clue 4, and am ready to start on the short rows. I love short rows. :)

Yarn used: KnitPicks Bare Merino Lace Weight. Beads: My tube reads: "Toho 8T222 / 8/0 Triangle Copper". They are tiny triangular beads in a lovely dark brown metallic color.

The sheep modeling the shawl is Lily, one of the few dark brown sheep in my collection. (Most plush sheep are either white, beige, or cream... that general range. Even "black" sheep tend to be black, despite the fact that black sheep in the wild seem to be a dark brown themselves.) I got her many years ago, back at a store in Bloomington, IN that probably doesn't exist any longer (at the College Mall). Her name is not very dignified ("Li'l Trubbles") nor very apropos to the sheep, in my opinion. I mean, really. Does that look like a troublemaker to you?

Five recently finished projects and some chat about them:
1.
Yarn used: Wool-Ease, 80% acrylic/20% wool.

"Hoosier Fan Scarf", as modeled by Not-A-Blanket Sheep. One ball of Cranberry and Fisherman Wool-Ease, this was part of the ongoing Get That Wool-Ease Out Of My Stash And Make Christmas Presents Early For A Change project. The scarf is about 6' long and was made on 10mm needles (from Lantern Moon, which are beautiful and nice but damn, they got heavy in the long run).

Not-A-Blanket Sheep is one I picked up in my local yarn store, Ben Franklin. I was in the checkout line when someone behind me pointed at him and said "You're not going to cut him up and make him into a blanket, are you?", sounding very defensive of the sheep. Horrified, I clutched the sheep to me! "No!" She seemed satisfied.

2.
Yarn used: Wool-Ease, 80% acrylic/20% wool.

"Stripey Hat", as modeled by Godiva Sheep. 5mm needles. Leftover bits of Dk. Rose Heather and Rose Heather Wool-Ease, part of the abovementioned project. Coordinates with a scarf I finished recently.

Godiva Sheep was picked up at a Barnes & Noble in the U-District after one Easter. It originally came with a small package of chocolate which I did not eat, because at the time I was clearly insane.

3.
Yarn used: Wool-Ease, 80% acrylic/20% wool.

"Blue And Navy Ragg Scarf", as modeled by Deathbleat. The scarf is simple, 2x2 rib on 5mm needles.

You may be wondering how such a cute sheep got the name "Deathbleat". Deathbleat was (is, if I ever return to it) my first-person shooter name. This was the sheep who sat on my lap while I played such games -- she was new and cute and cuddly and who doesn't like to have a sheep in their lap while they flak their friends to death? (Don't answer that. I know, I know...) Anyway, her name according to the manufacturer is not very dignified*, so I rechristened her Deathbleat. She continues to keep me company when I play violent video games.

4.
Yarn used: Lily Sugar'n Cream, standard kitchen cotton.

"Random Dishcloths", as modeled by Not-Blankets-Either Lambs. This is pretty self-explanatory. The lambs were found at the same Ben Franklin, only this time I picked up both the one with pink hooves and the one with blue hooves.

5.
Yarn used: Lily Sugar'n Cream, standard kitchen cotton.

"Finished Half-Pique Washcloth", as modeled by Gund Sheep With Rattle. I'm still not that thrilled with this washcloth, but I will pawn it off on someone for Christmas. The sheep is one of the ones that tends to live on or around my desk, and he has a rattle in his tummy, making him very difficult to pose!

* "Jiggles".

*
Yarn used: Lily Sugar'n Cream, the standard kitchen cotton.

Above you can see two of my Domino Knitting WIPs. The first one is a washcloth. Kind of. Sort of. I mean, it's sort of awful-looking (due to it being my first domino knitting project). It needs to have the ends woven in. The sheep atop the washcloth is one of the ones that lives on my (good) computer speakers. We call it "little white Gund sheep". I have two of those (one for each speaker) and two black ones (they live on the bedroom right and left channel speakers).

The second one is a dishcloth. Maybe. It still needs a border. The sheep on it is a small Ty sheep who lives on my desk. We sometimes call it "one of the little Ty sheep", which is not very specific around here.

I am SheepLass, a knitter in her late 20s who is madly and wildly in love with her husband. :) I have many hobbies: reading, writing, playing World of Warcraft, exercising, puttering about on the Internet... but I am also a collector of sheep and a knitter, and here I shall combine those hobbies by knitting things and blogging about them, complete with companion pictures of Sheep On My Stuff.

Conventional wisdom often holds that knitting skipped a generation -- our grandmothers did it because everyone knit back then (indeed, during WW1 literally everyone knit; machine-knit socks were a newfangled thing of the future, so if you weren't fighting, you were knitting woollen socks to send overseas), our mothers skipped it because they were too busy fighting for women's lib/associated it with years of staying at home whether you wanted to or not/etc., and then we're picking it up again because it's damn fun, and it's not every hobby that nets you handmade sweaters, socks, and holiday/birthday gifts.

This is true for me; my great-grandmother on my dad's side knit and crocheted, and my grandmother on my mom's side crocheted. My mom does counted-cross-stitch, which I do as well, and I can certainly crochet (I started out with that and learned to knit later), but mostly I knit. I started in May 2001 when my husband and I bought our first condo, and haven't stopped.

Now, as for the sheep... I've been collecting sheep since summer 1997 (with one bonus sheep my mom got me in 1992, because she is prescient as well as a genius). Most knitters start knitting first and develop a love of all things woollen (including the animals from which wool comes) afterward, but I think my love of knitting may have been inspired by the fact that I could use a sheep product in the craft.

I am allergic to mohair and alpaca. I cannot imagine how devastated I would be if I were allergic to wool!

The origin of my love of sheep is this: Years ago there was a computer game called "Worms". In this game, your intrepid team of worms used a variety of weapons to destroy other teams of worms. We're not talking about balls of dirt, here; we're talking about bazookas, shotguns, dynamite and land mines.

And sheep.

Sheep were an explosive device that ranked among the most powerful in the game. If you picked up an ammo crate containing a sheep, your opponents were in trouble. If you also got the double-damage bonus (which popped up a message reading "SHEEP ARE NOW SUPER STRENGTH!"), your opponents were doomed. A single well-placed sheep could easily take out an entire squadron of enemy worms, bleating woolly death at them all the way. ("Baa... baa... BOOM!")

I was enchanted by the juxtaposition of woolly, cuddly cuteness and FIERCE BLEATING DOOM! I found a plush sheep at a grocery store that summer, and from there on it just sort of...

Well. At the height of my collection (when my collection included ceramic sheep, metal sheep, sheep containers, candles in the shapes of sheep, and other sheep things as well as plus sheep) I had well over 700 sheep items. I've cut down since then, but let's just say I'll have sheep to pose with my knitting for a very, very long time before I have to start repeating sheep.

Happy knitting, and my sheep and I will see you around the blog!