There’s been a rash of feline destruction Chez Blue Garter of late. My camera lacks the ability to really zoom in on the wanton damage here, but you can observe that the right tip of the needle that’s horizontal is, well, completely gone. I left the furry little hoodlum apparently snoozing beside my booties for exactly the amount of time it took me to walk to the kitchen and rinse a peach. Fifteen seconds, perhaps? Since I already lost the fifth needle of this set, that’s effectively the end of their useful lives. I was able to limp through the remaining rounds of booty cuff by slipping the stitches off the back of the wounded needle to the free one each time, but I’m not likely to cast on for a new project knowing I’ll have to do this every round. Darn it, Mingus, I really liked these Brittany Birches, and they were my only set of #2s. Send a cat muzzle…or metal needles.

The Ruffle-Rib Baby Booties are finished! I can hardly tell you what fun these were to knit, except that the zig-zag decorative bind-off was a little tricky on the slippery metal circs. There are many more of these adorable wee things in my knitting future. But it was no simple task to finish this pair after I ran out of yarn. My LYS has a bowl on the counter full of Koigu oddments sold by the gram, and that’s where this pretty blue and green colorway (I call it ‘aegean’) came from. But they didn’t have any more like it, and I didn’t even know the number of the colorway to search for it online. So I had to get a bit creative to finish the foot and toe of booty #2. I bought these:

I worked two rounds in Pacific blue and then one in Toxic Alien green, carrying the blue up the side and stranding the ends of the green along the back of the work and catching it behind every other stitch. I decided not to carry the green so I could snip out the brown and black sections. I got a little lazy during the shortrow toe and just let the top be blue, but I think on the whole it was a pretty successful scheme. Judge for yourself:

I’m so happy with them I’ve already gone out and bought a bunch more ends. It’s going to be a regular booty factory Chez Blue Garter. But I’ve learned my lesson – this time I made sure I had at least 25 grams of each color. And hey, if you know anyone who needs some Toxic Alien baby booties, I’ve got enough yarn left to make them!

Friday was an utter fiasco. Let’s just say it involved boneheaded yours truly and airplanes and one more airport than it should have, and let’s just leave it at that, because it’s still too painful to speak of. The upshot was that I spent about five more hours traveling to North Carolina than I should have, and I missed my friends’ rehearsal dinner on a river boat and spent the evening in a hotel room with Domino’s Pizza and Whose Line Is It Anyway? reruns.

After allowing ample time for feeling sorry for myself, I decided to look on the bright side. On a sow’s ear of a day, what to do but make a silk purse? Actually, the Bible proclaims this is impossible, and not wanting to provoke any more retaliation from Upstairs, I settled for a cotton/nylon purse:

I didn’t have the right handbag to go with my outfit, so I grabbed a ball of Adrienne Vittadini Allegra in a pinky salmon shade and whipped up this little Regency Reticule to hold my essentials. It matched my hat quite nicely.

I also had plenty of time to work on Rosalind, my second Crusoe sock, and a pair of Ruffled Rib Baby Socks (by Ann Budd from Interweave) I’m making for some friends in England. I’m madly in love with these booties. And I love this fabulous Koigu colorway, which I picked out of the Koigu oddments bowl at Purl. Unfortunately, I ran out of yarn halfway through the foot of the second booty, as you can see above. So I’ll be dashing over there at lunch today to see if I can find any more of it. If not, I’ll have to get creative. These are just too cute not to finish.