what the mail brought

and everybody here was a friend of mine,
yesterday...

All day I waited excited for my Lucky Lurker October Yarn. I saw Sherri's yesterday, and expected mine to arrive today. When I arrived home there were two things waiting for me, but neither were my Lucky Lurker Yarn. One was my new Freur CD, Doot-Doot, and the other a very lonely cat.

This album was one of my most difficult hard-to-find albums in the late 80s. I searched record store after record store for it. We finally heard a rumour of a store that could actually get this album, and a friend and I both ordered it from them. What we got was a cassette, (we were expecting an LP) and as best we could tell, it was a bootlegged cassette. However, we had searched so long and so hard for this album that we each got it anyway.

I've searched for Freur in a digital format in recent years many times, but usually all I've found have been very expensive used copies or compilations with just Doot-Doot on it. There is actually an in-print version of Doot-Doot available on Amazon, but it lacks the bonus tracks. This album had the super hard-to-find Devil in Darkness, which I was adamant about getting, and came for the reasonable price of $18.99 from a marketplace seller.

So when I came home to find the album finally here, I settled down to listen and also snuggle our poor lonely cat. She would climb up, get very comfortable, drifting into one of those deep snoozes that only cats snooze. And then have sudden! cat! errands! to attend to and dash off. After a few minutes she'd come back and get cozy again. In between the cat snuggling, I managed to cast on the newest pirate mittens, while listening to the new album. It definitely took me back to the days of vinyl, when every alternative album scored was an accomplishment of good record shopping, rather than a result of successful web shopping. Freur is a pretty electronic band, and they pioneered the concept of having an unpronounceable symbol for their name, driving record stores up the wall as they tried to figure out where to file it. They were eventually forced to adopt a more fileable name.

Today I officially finished the double rolled mittens. The final shagging was completed in the weeee hours, after a rowdy cat fight outside woke me up at 4am. The shagging is done by wrapping yarn through the ribbing and around a pencil, and then clipping the yarn.





Pattern: Double Rolled Mittens from Favorite Mittens
Yarn: Peace Fleece, with Spinderella's Thrums used for the fuzzy inside.
Needle: Size 9 Addi Turbo Circular
Started: I forget when I started these. February or March 2007.
Finished: October 11, 2007.
Notes: I had the worst time getting the mittens to match. Even when I thought I had them perfectly matched, after binding off, I found one still a little smaller than the other. The shag is interesting, it doesn't look as full as the pictures in the book. I wish I'd used a chunky marker instead of a colour pencil to wrap the shag around.

Lastly, I leave you with the image of the second try at pirate mittens. I found some black cascade 220 in my stash. This was purchased to contrast with some Kureyon I have. I also found some Knit Picks bare. That was purchased to dye and knit into a kitty-pi. I'm trying very hard to allow myself to redirect yarn in my stash. And if I ever do wind up knitting a kitty-pi, or the mysterious Kureyon project, I can replace what I need then. No sense in keeping the yarn saved for future projects while purchasing new yarn for present projects. Right? This new mitten is being knit on size 9 circular needles.