Cheesecake & Cats at Christmas

Well it’s now December 27 and Geoff ate the last of the Christmas cheesecake for breakfast. I think I can safely say I never want to see a cheesecake again. That’s the problem when there are only two of you in a household – a cheesecake takes days to eat.

We got a bit of a white Christmas courtesy of a hailstorm. We thought the hailstones that fell on Bacchus Marsh were impressive, but closer to Melbourne they were the size of cricket balls.

This is what our looked like.

I was lucky enough to receive lots of yarny and crafty gifts, including handpainted yarn, needles, a crochet book and a pair of pinking shears. There will be much snipping and stitching at Chez Jen.

But before I get to play with my Christmas yarn, I need to finish my UFOs. I have actually completed four more over the Christmas break but today I’ll just post about one – the Cotton Kitty.

There was a bit of a cat theme to Christmas this year. It’s hard not to have a cat themed Christmas when every surface of your home is covered in cat hair (thanks Cobey). As well as Cobey’s omnipresent dander, another two cats joined us on Christmas day.

One of my gifts from Geoff was a felt toy cat. Apparently when he was buying it the woman on the craft stall was discussing the advantages of each felt cat she had made – this one has a brooch that a little girl can use to dress kitty up, this one doesn’t have any buttons that can come off and accidentally choke a baby etc. Geoff didn’t tell her that the intended recipient was in her 30s.

Despite being way too old for a felt toy cat I am very pleased to own one. I haven’t officially named him yet but “Felty” seems appropriate.

Here is a picture of the three cats of Christmas 2011 – clockwise from the front are Cobey, Felty and Cotton Kitty. Cobey is not pleased.

I haven’t told you about Cotton Kitty yet, but she was one of my UFOs.

I finished knitting her on Christmas night. I bought her as a kit about a year ago and just lost interest. It seems to be a bit of an ongoing theme with me.

Anyway, I would absolutely not recommend this kit. Ever. Seriously, it sucks.

I bought the kit from Lincraft. According to the box, this is what the finished item should have looked like (the kit contains yarn, instructions for the three different animals and fabric for its clothes).

After knitting the head, body and ears I threw the pattern in the bin. Toy knitting is fiddly anyway, but the instructions in this kit go out of the way to make it more tedious than it needs to be.

The point on the body where the arms are meant to attach are just buttonholes and you’re meant to attach a knitted-flat arm to a buttonhole opening which is a lot easier to describe than do. Why not put in a half dozen stitches using scrap yarn where the arm is meant to join so you can later remove the scrap yarn, pick up stitches and knit the arm down from the shoulder IN THE ROUND?

This is just one example but there is so much wrong with the pattern that I’m surprised I finished it. Once I attached the head to the body I put some button eyes on Cotton Kitty and that’s when I knew I had to finish her. Once a project has eyes it can’t be frogged. I was actually a bit distressed by the thought that she was sitting in a box with a completed face and no legs – it just seemed mean.

Oh, and the supplied yarn is smooth cotton – not a good idea for a toy because the filling shows through and the stitches don’t close up like they would with a fuzzier yarn.

So I threw out the pattern, knitted the limbs in the round and made her a knitted dress instead of using the fabric supplied. Considering her difficult start to life, Cotton Kitty turned out quite well. I think she’s a lot nicer than what she would have been if I’d followed the instructions.

Cotton Kitty now sits on a big jar of buttons on the shelf with Felty. Now I have to deal with the real cat who won’t stop complaining abut nothing in particular just because were are not at work and he has an audience.