Things.

I spent five days offline in my crammed kitchen, sort of supervising the guy who was cleaning and painting my floors. As I had nothing to do and for most of the activities also a nowhere to do, I sat in the kitchen. Or ran around the kitchen. Tähti was left with my mom (as a thank you, on saturday she puked all over) - so I used the lack of possibilities for dyeing yarn. And messing around. And doing nothing. I wanted to dye the pink mohair in long skeins, then it makes stripes on the knit matter, not just small spots.... and unwinding created quite a decadent effect - mohair is fluffy. And it reminded me of this. I had another plans, wanted to add a bit of blue and red, creating the sunset palette. I basically managed but the colours got a bit too intensive.... so I named the colour scheme Kitschy Sunset, after all, Mother Nature is allowed to produce creations in bright blue and yellow and my favourite (hääh!) Surgical Appliance Pink, the ghastliest colour ever (I admit, with Rotten Pond Green and Vandyke Brown, hard to define which is the worst), so why shouldn't I imitate. And I forgot to make you a pic. I boiled the green alpaca in some decolorant. It decoloured in Vandyke Brown-ish.* The decolorant smelled like... well, imagine a toxic waste dump. Imagine a dead skunk there. Imagine that all the seven circles of hell came and shat over it. Something like this. It even matched the colour. After three days the smell got better, or rather, less intensive. I'll use chlorine and if it doesn't work, I'll dye it black and knit something cool. Black saves everything.
I added some touches of green and green to the pale green viscose... posing on my new, improved floor. I love the floor and I love the yarn.
Meantime, I started a sweater which I knit from the shoulders down. I started with an 80cm size 5 needle - my arm span is 136 cm, for that matter - and a 60cm size 6 needle (i knit much tighter than I purl) and realized that knitting this on two needles only wouldn't work. After asking in several stores, I got a 100cm size 5. When I wanted something longer, I got disbelieving looks. It works somehow, though. I'll post when ther's something decent to be photographed, now the thing looks like a tangled knot of no-one-knows-what. And I managed to get the beginning right on the third attempt... regarding the topological complexity of casting on from two directions.
I'm catsitting Hiisi. She started to be quite friendly when she got that I'm the one who fills her bowl. Didnt want to be photographed, apparently.
The other day I took the decolored yarn out, it was hot outside and I thought it might dry a bit and i could sit there (although i think that even those hunters-gatherers who are at the end of the neighborhood's food chain and keep the rubbish bins clean.. at least of anything that can be sold wouldn't touch something of a colour of. ehm, final products of animal digestion which smells awful) and knit. I did. People kept their windows open and frtom at least three directions sounds were coming. Techno. For whatever reason it's called music, maybe because it comes on CDs. It played loud. Maybe I could, someday, let the neigbourhood hear a cembalo concert. Someone might put me to the court for it:-)
On Saturday Katarina came. We went for a shopping spree - there was some advert action with discounts and things all over the city and I wanted to get some crap for Christmas. I hate christmas when I need to get gifts for people who don't need anything and if they want something, they just go and buy it. But anyway. Mom is gonna get another load of antiwrinkle stuff, either she uses it up or it'll wait for me, Dad is going to get socks for trekking - not that he'd walk more than 50 metres these days but he likes to think that he's a sportsman. I'd get him a paddle but he might consider it sarcastic. And something against hair fallout. Not that his hair was falling (whereas Mom does have soggy eyes and wrinkles and stuff) but he thinks so. I thought about knitting socks for Mom, she has varicose veins and cold feet, but she would be pissed off. She has some sort of twisted thinking that says We're not so poor that we'd have to make things. (And, I'm not sure that I can knit socks, for that matter.)
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*There's an anecdote about Anthony Van Dyck, the court painter of Charles V. (I think, I'll check) of England, where he was called Vandyke, to make it clear. And, the little story says that he was working on some canvas and needed the right shade of brown and he couldn't get it. His greyhound was running there and back, wanting to play or something, and as his master largely ignored him, the dog shat in the middle of the atelier. The painter, upon noticing the guano, exclaimed Yes, that's the right shade.