After doing some research, I was shocked to learn that Stitchy McYarnpants does not appear on the list of fashion designers allowed to use the term “Haute Couture” in an official sense. I guess it’s my own fault for embracing Freedom Fries. C’est la guerre du mode.

So I have coined a new term and will heretofore be known as the preeminent fashion designer in the Haute Canture movement. In order to keep the fashion pure, I’ve had to put a few rules in place to keep out the riff raff.

-Design made-to-order for private clients, with one or more fittings.

-Have a workspace cleared in the living room that employs at least four cats in order to provide full cat-hair cover.

-Must present a garment to a contestant in a prestigious Drag Queen beauty pageant. The garment must use acrylic yarn already in the designer’s stash so that the only cost incurred is for beer.

With Haute Canture behind her, Shelby is going to be the most stunning Beauty Queen to ever wear a pile of recyclables.

Shelby Free is her name, being cheap and easy is her game. But we all know that you’re not cheap and easy. Well, not cheap, anyway. So please give whatever you can on the “Donations” page of Shelby’s website. All donations go to Aid for AIDS, whose mission it is to provide financial assistance for necessities of life to adults and children living below the poverty-line with HIV/AIDS, primarily in Los Angeles County. Be sure to include Shelby’s name on your donation as requested on the Donations page.

Go ahead, I’ll wait while you make your donation.

.

.

.
Hooray! Thanks for your generosity! And now, on to the dress (as always, click for big):

Here is the front, in all its canny glory. The white tank top is actually going to become the lining for the top. I’m going to sew it just below the edge around the neck, arms and bottom. All of the squared-off parts will be filled in with crochet, and then I’ll crochet another row all around the neck and arms to smooth everything out.

These cans will most assuredly NOT make Shelby’s but look big.

Here’s a closeup of the front. I’m crazy about the bows! I think they add just the right touch.

And here is the back. It’s going to lace up so the fit can be adjusted. I’m going to cut the tank top and bra to sew them in, so this is going to be a saucy little number all nakedy in the back. I’m thinking of adding a nice big butt bow at the bottom of the lacing. I love butt bows!

The 2008 Webby Award Winners have been announced!

The winner of the juried award is: Passive-AggressiveNotes.com

Congrats to a worthy competitor. Here is my first submission.  Maybe I can be part of an award-winning website after all. 😉

We used to have a cat named Mike. We still have the same cat, but the other day, Jon felt that Mike was entering his angsty, adolescent, goth phase and needed a new goth name.

As we drifted off to sleep, I came up with Dusty Sorrow. It suits him perfectly, and I will tell you why in song. Please, feel free to sing along to the tune of Desperado. (Believe it or not, I thought of the name days before the song idea)

Dusty Sorrow, why don’t you come to your senses?
You been hidin’ ‘neath the floorboards for so long now
Oh you’re a skittish one
But I know that you got your reasons
These groomers that are tweezing you
Can hurt you somehow.

Don’t you draw those freshly clipped claws, boy
They’re useless and unstable
You know your shiny teeth are always your best bet

Now it seems to me some crappy things
Have been laid upon your table
But I’m sorry that a new penis you can’t get

Dusty Sorrow, whoa you ain’t getting any cleaner
Your pain and your hunger should be drivin’ you from that hole
And freedom, oh freedom well, that just ain’t happ’nin’
Your prison is walking through this house as you please

Don’t your feet get dirty on that filthy pine?
And its hours past your dinnertime
Its hard to tell if you’re just wasting the day
Or if you’re losing air and getting poked with nails
Ain’t it funny how you seem angry either way?

Dusty Sorrow, why don’t you come to your senses?
Come out from the floorboards, don’t make me wait
It may be scary, but there’s a mummy above you
You better let your mummy love you

(let your mummy love you)

You better let your mummy love you
Before you get even more filthy under there

***

Mike has had a tough week. It started two Saturdays ago with a trip to the groomer and a well-executed “Lion Cut”. The groomer noticed he seemed to be having dribbling issues and what with the whole penectomy and new pee-hole, you really have to be careful about such things. When we got home from the groomers, we decided he needed to go to the vet and got him back into his carrier. As we left, I realized I had forgotten my keys, so Jon put the carrier down and unlocked the front door so I could go get them. Unfortunately, he put Mike’s carrier on the steps.

You see where this is going.

Luckily it was the bottom step, but when Mike shifted his weight and down the carrier went. He only rolled half a revolution, but it seemed to be enough to really piss him off. There was growling and hissing.

And at the vet, well, they did vet things and tried to get some samples but his bladder was empty. They sent us home with two weeks worth of liquid antibiotics that Jon feels are banana-flavored. I don’t know where anyone got the idea that banana-flavored medicine is just the thing for cats, but twice a day, Mike is grabbed and given a mouthful of what is essentially liquefied Circus Peanuts.

So is it any wonder that when Jon’s brother walked into the kitchen last Saturday carrying a cooler that looks very much like a cat carrier, Mike freaked out and dove into a hole under the kitchen sink? And stayed under there, with the rusty nails poking him and the dirt and grime of probably 80 or more years of kitchen grossness from 2 in the afternoon until 1 in the morning?

Eventually, he got himself into a spot where he actually couldn’t get out. (We got pictures by reaching in as far as we could and snapping in the dark.) We removed large parts of the wall that were boarded up from previous work done on the pipes. For hours, I sweet talked him with my kitty voice and a can of tuna, he cried, and finally, I was able to get him to move to the most open part of the hole. He could only get his head and one paw out, so I had to maneuver him in a way that looked very much like childbirth. I was able to get my hand down his side to lift out his other shoulder and paw, then carefully guided him out. Then he went right for the plate of tuna.

So, I guess if you ever need any midwifery advice for a wooden house and a cat, let me know.

P.S. We fixed the hole under the sink.

I have crust pictuuuures!

You guys are nuts. I accept that I may be a little bent for posting those photos of my severed thumb tip, but you. You loved it! And now you’ve really gone and done it. You encouraged my behavior. So now, I will follow through with the narrative that I have begun.

Once again, the photos are in order of grossness. And these are way grosser than the disembodied lump of flesh from the last batch, so think before you click. Are you really up for the glistening, bloody mess? Can you handle the crust? If not, you can scroll directly to the end of this post for the palette-cleansing cuteness that is Dot and her toes.

Before I continue, I’ll admit that I was a little disappointed in the crust. I guess I imagined that I would be able to thunk on it like a melon. Or a delicious salt crust like I saw on the cooking channel once. I’ll spare you the details, but I lost most of it when I had my dressing changed for the first time. I’ll just leave it at “Holy crap, owww ow owwwww!” But it did its job. Now, prepare yourself and . . .

Behold my crust!!

This first batch of photos is from about 4 or 5 days after the incident.

For starters, here is a blurry photo. It’s a close-up, so it’s like watching a horror movie through your fingers. You get the idea without the crystalline splash of blood and guts. Thumb guts. Still, it’s pretty nasty. The rest of the pictures a crisp and clear.

Here’s one that shows a view from my thumbnail so you can see where the chopping happened.

Here it is from the side. I had just gotten out of the shower when I took these, so the crust was wet and had returned to its somewhat gel-like fabric form. It hardened up when it was dry, though. You can also see that by this time, it wasn’t doing much in the way of covering things up.

Here it is in all its glory. Nothing pithy to say about this, really.

A few days later, things got a little . . . odd. You may or may not be familiar with a website called The Sneeze. If you aren’t, you should be. Anyway, Steve at The Sneeze has been documenting a natural oddity in his front yard for a few years now and I do believe I may be experiencing it on my person. You see, Steve has got himself a Tree Brain. A weird growth springs from a tree in his yard every year. You can read all about it here.

And now? Well, I think I’m getting a Thumb Brain!! What else can it possibly be?? These photos are from a couple of days ago.

Thumb Brain

The Thumb Brain Strikes Back

Return of the Thumb Brain

Man, I hope Steve’s neighbor/interloper doesn’t come over while I’m sleeping . . .

If I start extolling the virtues of all things thumby and trying to convince you that the pinky finger is a useless freeloader and the ring finger is only good for one thing, well, you’ll know the Thumb Brain has finally taken over it’s unwilling host. Someone please come over to check on my husband from time to time.

And now, as promised, a little wire brush for the soul. If this doesn’t scrape those ghastly images from your mind, well, I’m afraid you’re stuck with them for the rest of your life. My bad.

*the mouse is one of Mel’s handmade, felted creations. It’s a household favorite and so far, indestructible! Yay Mel!

Over the past few months, I been experiencing a bit of Blog Ennui. I’ve enjoyed being a blogger and although I’ve never been prolific, I really do love writing. When I began, I was always enthusiastic about adding something new and hoping to give you a chuckle. Over the past year, it’s become something of a chore. I think a big part of that is that it’s a knitting blog and I really haven’t been knitting a lot lately, so I often feel as though I need to write about something I really haven’t been doing. I still love knitting, but I’ve been making all kinds of things lately.

I’ve been seriously questioning my vocation as a blogger. Given my lack of posting, can I still consider myself a blogger, or am I just some washed-up has-blogger who types in a box on the internet from time to time?

Well, last night, I got my answer.

I am a Blogger, baby!

The answer came to me as I was cutting an onion. Actually, it wasn’t cutting the onion so much as it was lopping off the tip of my thumb.

Uh-huh. I totally chopped off the tip of my thumb. And as I looked at my newly enhanced digit, now resembling a freshly sliced salami, there was an eerie calm. And then a whole bunch of running around, looking for a napkin and wondering if I had just done what I thought I had just done. One look at the plate with the onion on it was all the affirmation I needed, for lying there by my just-sharpened knife and half a chopped onion was a dime-sized piece of me. It didn’t look like me or anything, but you could tell it was me. And being the proud, I don’t know, could I be considered a parent of this thing? I mean, it is part of me, right? So being a proud parent, I had to make Jon look at it. I probably should have prepared him better, but it’s too late now.

Since Jon doesn’t drive, he was left in charge of my remains and my brother took me to the hospital. And then, like a Voice From on High, it hit me. I knew what had to be done. Before I even got to my brother’s truck, I was on the phone and calling Jon to ask if he could please photograph the scene of the Great Onion Incident of Ought-Seven, for it must be blogged. I giggled for the rest of the evening at the very thought of it.

Now, I’m going to take the same approach here as I did with Dot and her knitted poop that one time. In order to see the photos, you’re going to have to make that decision yourself. I would never force you to look at my do-it-yourself home surgery. If you would like to see the photo of the liberated tip of my thumb, click the photo of me getting signed in to the Emergency Room. I will tell you that the photos aren’t bloody at all. I got a napkin over it before it started to bleed.

Ok, that was just a test. If you clicked the photo, you’ll see that it’s a just a larger version of that photo. I just wanted you to have a second chance to decide.

Now it’s for realsies. I’m putting them in the order of grossness. The first one is not graphic at all, it’s from a distance and is very out of focus. The last one is really nasty.

This is the scene as I left it. We were going to have a lovely vegetable goulash with ground buffalo. The Bailey’s was for after, so I was not chopping under the delicious influence. It’s blurry, but you can see the piece in front of the onion.

There it is a little closer.

Here is the top, closer still. You can see a fingerprint! Neat! It has all kinds of intriguing sci-fi possibilities.

Here is where Jon really decided to mix it up a little and add some of his own flair to the photo session. As the photo is titled, bllleeeegghghh!!!
So there you go. Blog fodder, folks. Take it where you can get it.

As far as my thumb goes, they couldn’t give me stitches because there was nothing really to stitch. They covered the wound with some sort of foam that absorbs the blood and helps it clot. As the doctor so delightfully informed me, it will form a hard black crust. Tasty! So I just need to change the bandages regularly (but not the crust! No, I must leave the hard, black crust.) It hurts off and on, but they gave me some painkillers. Unfortunately, it’s going to take a looooong time to heal. It’ll be a few weeks before it really starts to scab and form new skin, and even then, it’s a long way from healed. So no knitting for me for a little bit. Once the initial throbbing goes away, I might be able to finagle something with the needles, we’ll see. I had just picked up a sock again and was hoping to have it done soon. Oh well, best laid plans and all of that.

Until then – thumbs up! (I have no choice)

(On the plus side, Maryse has promised to knit me a thumb cozy!!)