I was relieved when I saw a quote from the Yarn Harlot (and now I can't remember where I saw it; perhaps on her page-a-day calendar!) saying something to the effect of "No matter how big a sock you're knitting, people will always ask if it's a baby sock." I was once knitting a sock for Grant in navy blue, and when I told the waiter who'd asked that I was knitting a sock, he replied, "Oh, a baby's sock," as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. I boggled at him. This was eight inches of ribbing and a turned heel the size of an adult man's foot. A not-too-small adult man's foot. What baby has feet like that? But apparently people are just crazy, and assume that all knitting is for babies or something. It wasn't just me!

Lace mystifies people, but most people take it in stride once I tell them I'm making a lace shawl. Now that Erica's Shawl is big enough, I can hold it up and people see what I'm talking about. They do ooh and ahh quite a bit — and deservedly so; the yarn is lovely and the pattern is clear even before blocking — but most people just get it and don't keep at me about it.

(It's about twice that long now, and I seem to have finally begun to make a dent in the yarn.)

Today's waiter was… a little more aggressive. He said it looked like I was almost done — dude, I have a foot and a half of shawl! I said no — it was barely started, and it'll be six feet long (I hope) before it's done. I held up the ball of yarn I was working with.

Waiter: How many of those will it take to be six feet long?
Me: Just the one.
Waiter: *jawdrop*
Me: *smugly* That's why it makes such great vacation knitting — it packs up really small.
Waiter: *grabs bag of yarn, gauges weight* *to my UTTER SHOCK AND HORROR, attempts to GRAB NEEDLES OUT OF MY HANDS to feel weight of shawl*
Me: AUGHN NO NO NO NO STOP!!!
Waiter: *still pulling, oblivious to fact that I am in the MIDDLE OF THE ROW* Oh, I just–
Me: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! STOP! *tries to keep stitches on needles, grabs back*
Waiter: *finally lets go* Oh, I was just trying to see…
Me: *desperately checking needles and praying I haven't lost hours of work — guess who doesn't work with lifelines?* I need to take care of this now.
Waiter: Oh! Sorry! Sorry! *departs*
Grant: Ack, sorry about that.
Me: Whew. Didn't lose any stitches. Sheesh!

What on earth do you guys do when that happens to you? Does that sort of thing happen? I tell you what: I have shown off lace shawls to many people, and nobody has ever attempted to yank knitting out of my hands before! (The waiter was very lucky Grant tends to pay for meals, I'll say that.)

It's strange to be an introvert who does such attention-getting things. Knitting garners a lot of attention. Reading on my Kindle garners a bit of attention. People see me doing unusual things and get really excited and interested in them. I don't mind explaining it, and I don't mind answering a few polite questions about my knitting. But holy cats! Just because I'm showing you my lace does not mean you can grab my needles out of my hands! Crazy! o_O

Tomorrow I'm going on a trip to the summit of Mauna Kea, where there will be stargazing. The trip's a long one, so I plan to bring my knitting. I'm not sure how much attention I'll get, but I do know I'm not going to let anyone close enough to grab my needles. It had never occurred to me I needed to keep a close grip on them before — no one's ever done that before — but now I know.

So what it is you guys do when people ask you about your knitting? What would you do if someone tried to grab your needles out of your hands? How do you answer people who are just saying crazy stuff, like asking if your gigantosock is for a baby or insisting that you're crocheting when you're knitting on five dpns?

QP: Ooh! Decided you needed a little sock yarn?
Me: Yes! *sheepishly* Well. I don't know if I needed more sock yarn…
QP: Oh, but it's here! And you're here!
Me: *relieved and excited* Yes! Yes!
QP: And this is your Hawaii sock yarn!
Me: EXACTLY! Yes! Yes! You get it!

Actually, Quilt Passions was full of some really wonderful yarn I'd never seen before. This being Hawaii, it's mostly silk, bamboo, and cotton blends — all really gorgeous. I didn't want to go overboard, though, so I picked up a couple of (large) balls of (very very nice) sock yarn from Cascade (I didn't even know they made sock yarn other than Fixation), which will probably be a shawl and not socks at all.

I do like to get yarn when I go places. When we were in New Zealand, I got some yarn. :) I've gotten yarn in California and yarn in Texas, and here I am in Hawaii with more souvenir yarn. I love the idea of knitting something out of it that I can look at and remember how wonderful this trip was — and it has been wonderful!

Still nearly a week before we have to leave. I hear it was snowing in Seattle yesterday. The weather's kind of cloudy here, but we'll take it!

It varies! First of all, there's only one knitting project I do every year for the holidays, come hell or high water: I make my mom a hat. Mom likes hats, and I like knitting, and it is an excellent fit! Also, Mom lives in Indiana, where knitted hats are a joyful thing in the winter. I wonder if she'd like one in March. It's still cold there in March. ^_^ (I have decided that if Mom can send me things for Girls' Day, even though I am 30 and married, I can send her things for Girls' Day, too. So there.)

A hat for Mom takes maybe three days max, depending on the pattern. Hats are lovely and short and generally easy. However, marking out a week is not a bad idea; one of the things I was working on this year got derailed when I cut myself on the finger. It took three days for that to be healed enough for me to start knitting again.

Sometimes I'm working on other projects for the holidays; this year I made an aran sweater for a friend to give to her husband. That probably took four weeks, all told.

Sometimes I do scarves, shawls, or other items that I've made out of love for the recipient; mark out a good six to eight weeks for those.

This last year I made a last-minute argyle stocking for Grant; it took two weeks of only-during-work-hours knitting (and the weather buggered that up for me, too, because he worked from home half that time).

If you've been doing the math in your head, you may have noticed that these add up to a total of anywhere from 13 to 15 weeks, and to pad the estimate a little more, perhaps 16 weeks would be a good way to round that out.

Four months. Just for holiday knitting. Really? Yep! Really!

The moral of this story is this: If you think you might want me to knit something for you for the holidays, ask me by March. ^_^ (It also explains why, after the holidays, I spend a few months going OH GOD OH GOD I CAN KNIT FOR MYSELF ALL MY KNITS ARE BELONG TO ME AHAHAHAHA ME ME ME ME ME. When I spend a third of the year knitting for other people, and as the year goes by it's a greater and greater percentage of that time, by the time I'm done I really want my knitting time for myself again.)

* Merry belated Christmas, that is to say; I'm writing this as a catch-up post on February 16, 2009. >_>

What's up with those people?

The question has never actually been put to me with the phrasing "why aren't you a monogamous knitter?" It's more of, "Why the heck do you need to have seven projects on the needles at once?"

Well! That is an excellent question, and one for which I have an answer.

Different situations call for different types of knitting. My favorite thing in the world to knit is lace — but lace is delicate, involves charts (frequent attention to a pattern), and although it packs well into a purse or suitcase, whipping out a chart at a restaurant can really be a drag.

I've also knit sweaters. I don't mind taking a sleeve to a restaurant, but a whole bulky sweater for a 6'5" guy? What kind of purse does that take? I don't own one, in any event. (Same thing for blankets.)

Don't ask me to knit socks if I can't be sure I can look down at the floor and pick my DPN right up once I've dropped it. A plane? No. Planes move around. If I drop a DPN on a plane, it could roll all the way down the aisle before I can retrieve it. I'll pass!

Are we going to a movie? I need a project that can fit in my purse that has almost no pattern whatsoever. 2×2 ribbing works great. Also, I need a large-ish ball of yarn, so I don't have to mess with splicing in new yarn while I'm sitting in the dark.

In other words, I need different projects because I'm always knitting. I'm knitting when I go out to eat, to the movies, when I'm watching TV, when I'm listening to audiobooks, when I'm on the bus, and if I can get away with it, when I'm in classes. (French? Knitting works great. ASL? Not so much!) If I couldn't take a different project to wherever I'm going, based on the needs of the environment, I don't know how I'd cope!

I guess I just wouldn't knit. Which sounds like a horrible plan!

Huh. Now I have a question: How do people cope with not knitting all the time?

* …that's going to come out wrong to anyone who's not a knitter, isn't it? While I totally grok the concept of polyamory and I fully support anyone who does it conscientiously (a lot of people nowadays behave really jerkticiously and then chalk it up to "polyamory"; the healthy version of it involves honesty, communication, and care), that's not me! I only have so much romantic time and energy to give to other people; for me, they are a finite resource. One-on-one works best for me, and luckily, for my partner as well.

Today's chatter is going to be on the topic of "Questions That Make Me Crazy", and it's the major one, the big one, the one most people are likely to ask at some point:

How long did it take you to make that?

This question makes me crazy on two levels. One, I know it's a way for people to gauge the effort required to do something, because if it takes longer to do something, it must be more difficult (and therefore more worthy of respect and praise, because in the Puritan work-ethic culture of the United States, tenacity and the willingness to see something through are highly-valued traits).

Two, I don't know how long it took me.

Knitting is not like World of Warcraft. You can't just type /knit at the end of a project and have it tell you just how long, down to the second, you've spent on that project. If you want to know in that kind of detail, you need to have a stopwatch and a journal handy. I'm sure there are some knitters out there in the world who knit that way, with a stopwatch keeping track of every moment they spend knitting, but I'm sure not one of them!

The best I can do is say, "Oh, probably two weeks of hard work," where by "hard work", I don't mean "sitting on the couch while watching TV after Grant gets home from work." I mean twelve to fifteen hours of knitting. Per day. I'm estimating that the sweater I knit probably took me 168 hours to knit — the equivalent of spending a week straight doing nothing but knitting, not even sleeping.

One of the FiberTrends "Felt Flock" sheep probably takes me 18 hours to make. A pair of socks, maybe 40 hours. And sure, I go through knitting binges where I sit down with a new TV series ("new" meaning "I've never watched it before and thus have seven DVD sets to go through") and I really do knit for fourteen hours a day. But I don't do that every day, week, or month. (Okay, maybe once or twice a month.)

So how long does it take me in human terms? I don't know. I might have cast something on in March only to finish it in August. Maybe I cast something on and was so consumed with love for it that I knit nothing else and took this project to the movies; maybe it took a week. I might have cast on a year or two ago and finished up the project because I thought, hey, I'd like to get those needles back! Or maybe I've been working on it every time I go out to eat, but I don't go out to eat so much anymore, so last year it might've taken six weeks… and this year it takes six months.

I fit knitting into pockets of time everywhere. If I'm waiting for the bus (and the weather's nice), I'm knitting. If I'm on the bus, I'm knitting. If I'm out to dinner, I knit. If I'm watching TV, a movie, a sports event, I'm knitting. I knit while waiting in line at the grocery store, while waiting for Grant to come pick me up somewhere, and if I drank coffee, I'd knit while having a cup of coffee in the morning. Or something. If I can knit while I do it, I knit. My hands are seldom idle.

But I hate the idea of time as a measure of something's value. I hate it because I've had knitting projects I thought were glorious that only took a little bit of time, and I've had knitting projects that I suffered through for weeks on end in order to finish. I've also had knitting projects that took no time at all that I wouldn't want to knit again for anything, and knitting projects that took months that I'd knit again in a heartbeat. The fact that something took a long time doesn't make it great, and the fact that something took barely any time doesn't make it "no big deal". And, especially, the fact that something may have taken me a week or less — or a day or less — doesn't mean I'll whip one out for anybody for any reason.

I've had an awful lot of requests for Rainbow Pride Sheep. People like them; they're cute, and they take little yarn and practically no time; I can have one knit, felted, stuffed, and drying in a day. But I knit fourteen of those sheep in just over two weeks; I am done with Rainbow Pride Sheep, or any other kind of sheep, unless it's for me and I happen to feel like knitting a sheep that day.

Yes, I love sheep. I love the pattern. I love the felting. I love everything about it. But imagine if you had your favorite book in your hands. Okay? Now read that one book fourteen times. In a row. Without getting to read so much as a blog post or a newspaper article before you have to start that same book again. You don't even get to read a magazine in the bathroom; you have to take that book with you. (Um, no, I didn't knit in the bathroom, but work with me here; I'm making a comparison.) You might love that book every bit as much after the fourteenth read, but boy howdy, you'll be ready to read something else when you're done reading it for the fourteenth time, and if someone offers you money to read it again? You'll probably say, "No, thanks" — especially if you can do without the money.

I wish knitting did have a built-in WoW-style /played (rather, /knit) counter. I wish I could look back on all my projects and see how long it took me to knit them. But I know me: carrying a stopwatch around, and remembering to use it every time, is beyond my capabilities. :)

I'll have a TON of posts I can make after Christmas, and I have a couple of catch-up posts I can do for projects I've done and given away. However, this post is just to make sure people know I'm still out here and still knitting — and heck, let's put together a list of catch-up posts I can write in the very near future, backdated.

* 12/4: Wedding shawl!
* 12/9: Mom's Yearly Christmas Hat
* 12/11: An Argyle Stocking
* 12/16: The Cursed Ball of Yarn
* 12/18: Buy 4 Mittens, Get One Free
* 12/23: Entrelac!
* 12/25: Mystery blanket
* 12/30: Souvenir scarf
* 1/1: Ornament
* 1/6: ?
* 1/8: ?

And at some point I need to do a round-up on how the yarn totals are going. :)

At least it was on the yarn, not on the finished knitting!
At least I rinsed it off before it began to soak in!
At least it's superwash yarn in the first place!
At least I have extra yarn!
At least it was on the outside of the yarn ball, so the inside is all safe — only the outer layer will need to be removed, if that!
At least it wasn't on the project I'm done with. Oh, God.

Interestingly enough, I have never spilled anything on a knitting project before. In seven years! And I knit at the computer all the time (like while on gryphons in WoW). So…

At least I don't do this often!

Crossposted from elsewhere, in a list of things that make me happy:

I really, really like knitting lace! I love the slender yarn, the sharp pointy needles I use (Harmony from KnitPicks), the semi-delicate nature of what I'm turning out, the YOs, the k2togs, the blocking process. I love that you can get a ton of knitting out of a single tiny ball of yarn. I love the patterns out there, and I really, really need to make myself another Sheep Shawl (the first one, I gave to my grandmother). I also want to make the Pacific Northwest Shawl for myself. But I have so many other shawls in the works before that happens; after the current one I'm working on, I plan to do one for an upcoming wedding. And I can't wait; it's going to be gorgeous. I have two other shawls on needles right now, too, and I love them both to pieces.

One of these days I'm going to design my own heirloom shawl, and even if I don't have kids of my own, I'll find someone to pass it down to. I'm really quite happy that my cousins are starting to be old enough to get married; the next generation in my family may have been delayed a bit by the fact that Grant and I seem not to be likely to have kids, but that doesn't mean the buck stops here. :)

It's hard to believe there was a time when I didn't know there was an online knitting community, but it had never occurred to me to look for knitting blogs, tips, tricks, or patterns online when I first ran into At Knit's End. I think it was sometime in 2005 or so; I know it was a couple of years after Stephanie Pearl-McPhee started her blog. I remember looking at the back cover and thinking Yarn Harlot? Is this woman crazy?

But the book was full of hilarious observations (some of them, I admit, are the kind of jokes you only get if you're a knitter or close to one), and so I picked it up without thinking about what I was getting into. I looked up her website, and suddenly realized OMG, there are knitters on the Internet!

Several years later, I have a knitting blog of my own. :)

Mine contains the following:

• measuring tape

• needle gauge
• tin full of stitch markers
• needles (both straight-tipped and curve-tipped)
• scissors
• spare yarn for emergency stitch holders
• crochet hook for emergency dropped stitches
• row counter (any kind will do; I usually throw in a barrel-style one for space saving considerations)
• 2"x2" post-it notes

And sometimes a double-pointed needle or two… or a full set of sock needles. I'm not sure why those are in there.

I actually have two of these — one in a zippered bag, one in the sheep bag made for me by a friend. :) That way I can take one with me when I go places, but I don't have to move it back and forth between portable knitting and house knitting.

Other things I'd like, but don't necessarily have room for: a pencil and a calculator. (I have a tiny calculator, but only one, darn it. I should have bought several; then I'd have enough for both knitting kits and to keep in the nightstand.)

Things That Make Me Happy: Yarncrafts! For me, that's knitting and crocheting. I started crocheting in late 2000/early 2001. I'd always wanted to give it a shot, and I'd even found a kind of cheap yarn that had a cute picture of sheep on it and a little bit of wool (this turned out to be Wool-Ease by Lion Brand, which I used for years and years and am just destashing the last of these days). I made a few blankets and was quite happy with them.

Then in May 2001, we bought our condo, and right around that time I learned to knit. I mainly learned by using The Complete Idiot's Guide To Knitting And Crocheting, and I learned using 14" long straight metal needles on acrylic yarn. In retrospect, it's amazing I learned at all with those materials, and I totally deserve an award. It is not surprising to me that, while learning to purl, I grabbed the needles out of the yarn and threw them against the wall. Also, I was trying to learn from a book that was primarily teaching me English-style throwing instead of Continental-style picking. After several months of crochet, I was used to holding the yarn in my left hand and keeping the tension there. I finally gave up on doing it the way the book said and started trying it the way that felt natural to me, and it worked much, much better.

More than seven years later, I'm still doing yarncrafts all the time. I still know how to crochet (and have been doing a good bit of it lately as I turn out small market bags, which I'm going to try to post the pattern for over at the knitting blog soon), but I do prefer knitting. So far this year, I've completed 50 projects (as well as tossing or frogging 17 others), as part of my goal to wind up with a neater, more organized stash. (It's not working as well as I might have hoped, but at least I have a spreadsheet now.) Meanwhile, I'm also trying to knit from the stash more often than I buy new yarn. This is working somewhat better, as I've knit or started 67 projects from the stash and only 38 from new yarn this year. We'll see how I do by the end of the year. This doesn't really keep me from buying new yarn (and man, it doesn't help that Cascade 220 is the yarn of the month at Ben Franklin — I so want to pick up enough yarn for a sweater, maybe one for me and one for Grant, both, not to mention that I could buy lots and lots of yarn for new sheep), but it's kept the yarn-buying under slightly more control. More or less.

One of my most meaningful projects was a stained glass project using yarn from my late great-grandmother. My grandmother sent me her stash when she passed away, and though there wasn't enough yarn in any one color to make any specific projects with it, there was plenty to make a scrap afghan. And so I turned all that yarn into an afghan that looked a lot like this, and gave it to my grandmother that Christmas. In retrospect, since it came so early in my crocheting career, it may not have been my most skilled, polished project ever, but it made my grandmother happy, and it makes me happy when I see it.

Knitting makes me very happy. :) Yarn makes me very happy. There are certain things I've never tried to do, because I don't need more hobbies at this point (dyeing my own yarn and spinning), but I love the parts of yarncrafts I do participate in, and I'm glad to have finally gotten around to discovering them.

I'd always been interested in learning to knit, but the closest I'd ever gotten was making big floppy loose I-cord on my fingers, something I learned in elementary school. (And man, that's fast. If I ever need big floppy loose I-cord, not that I can imagine why I would, I'll do that instead of knitting it.) My mom didn't knit, although she did do counted cross-stitch. I'd done plenty of cross-stitching over the years (and eschewed stamped in favor of counted, which just looked nicer to me), but knitting and crocheting had always intrigued me.

So one day I picked up a booklet called 10-20-30 Minutes To Crochet, and gave it a shot. It didn't take long to figure out what I was doing. I bought a ton of acrylic yarn, made blankets and throw rugs, and for a few months was pretty much obsessed with crocheting and very pleased with myself.

At that point, we moved from our apartment to a condo, and I picked up another book — The Complete Idiot's Guide To Knitting And Crocheting. I bought — and wow, big mistake here, which I wish I'd had someone around to tell me — a pair of 14" aluminum straight needles. With which I proceeded to try to knit slippery acrylic yarn. HORROR. Oh, man, what a terrible, terrible idea that was. I remember throwing my needles against the wall at one point as I tried to learn how to cast on. For some reason I was trying to learn the cabled cast-on method first… another horrifying mistake!

But I perservered, and eventually I produced a peach-colored acrylic dishcloth. After that I had a little more confidence, bought some better needles, and turned out hats and dishcloths and blankets for a few years, using mostly bamboo needles and acrylic yarns — although I quickly reserved Red Heart-style yarns for crocheting, as I realized it just wasn't as good for knitting as Wool-Ease and other such things. It crocheted up fine, though!

A few years later I taught myself how to knit socks, and I've probably made more socks than anything else — it's the only thing Grant will let me knit for him (well, this is not strictly true, I just have yet to design a sweater for him that would look good on his body shape and would be comfortable for him to wear; I think if I made him a zip-up cardigan he could take to work and wear when he's cold, he probably would), so most of his socks have been replaced with wool socks at this stage.

It has never occurred to me not to knit in public. I get a lot of comments from strangers on it — mostly they just want to know what I'm knitting — and it's an interesting ice-breaker, although when I'm not really feeling like being social it can be kind of frustrating having my knitting thrust social contact upon me. But you know, c'est la vie — I'd definitely rather take my knitting places and have it to occupy me rather than being bored or having an activity that I can't do and talk at the same time. (Okay, the awkwardness of that sentence's construction makes me hurt, but it's early in the morning, whaddya want.)

First up, there's the Regia 4-ply mouline socks in brown. (You may remember them from the post on WIPs or this post on socks.) They're finally done! Here are a couple of pictures…

*
Yarn used: Regia 4-ply mouline in brown. Needle size: 2.5mm.

Modeled here by a mom and two lambs, and then that small Ty sheep, who bleats that there should be some continuity in pictures of sheep and projects; I'll try to take pictures of projects with the same sheep throughout all the parts of their creation.

Then there's the pair of brown socks that I found 1/4 of the way done in a drawer, oops that I just finished. These are for me, and took a surprisingly short amount of time once I got them out of the drawer.

*
Yarn used: Essential by KnitPicks, in Cocoa. Needle size: 2mm.

Modeled here by a Russ Berrie sheep I call Woola; she's part of a family whose tags all proclaim them "Woolo", but seems much more a ewe than a ram, and anyway we have several Woolos. It's good to be individual, even in a flock. :)

Now, as for goals for the new year:

I've decided I want to start working up some of the stash. I have a very nice room in my house devoted to stash yarn, and a lot of nice little boxes to keep yarn in. Yarn should, therefore, not be taking over the rest of the house. (A lofty goal that I bet few of us, craft room or no, can actually achieve.) In the interests of working with the stash (and after all, I love the yarn, or why else would I have it?), this year I plan to:

• work two stash projects for every one new-yarn project

• work or throw out one in-progress project for every two new projects I start

This gets sort of complicated when I have an in-progress project that needs another ball of yarn (that's new yarn, but it's a WIP! But…), but I'll figure out how to work it as I go.

The two projects above are languishing WIPs, which means I could start up to four new projects under my own rules. ^_^ But I have so many WIPs hanging around — and I finally seem to have the desire to finish them — that I'm just going to hold onto those "new project" vouchers until I can't resist anymore. :)

I also have a non-knitting-related goal for the year: a fitness goal! This year I'd like to get into shape and run my first organized 5k. In fact, I'd like to run a lot more than one. :) For every organized 5k I run this year, someone's getting a sheep. I'll be donating a sheep to a family via Heifer International every time I finish an organized 5k.

How am I doing so far? Well, I'm working through the Couch to 5k running plan. I'm halfway through week 4, although I've actually gotten as far as week 7 in the past. I'm really motivated this time around, and I look forward to tracking my progress. I'll be updating the fitness goal page as I go, so check there for updates. :)

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!