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She knows I like yarn

I consider myself to be pretty lucky with my kitty. While she will totally go after a piece of yarn dangled in her face, and knitting needles left poking out of a project are awfully tempting for a chew, she mostly ignores my yarn. I can safely leave a ball, cake, or hank of yarn sitting on a table without fear it’ll be batted around or chewed. Anything with needles or small bits I’m careful to tuck into a project bag when I’m not working on it, but she generally doesn’t go after my projects while I’m working on them – she’s learned they are boring because they simply disappeared every time she did try to play with them as a kitten.

That said, she’s fully aware that yarn and woolly things are important to me. This is apparent in a couple ways. I’ll set aside her penchant for sleeping on knitted and/or wool items – that might just be good taste. However, if you’ve been following my blog for long you’ll know I have a yarn wall:

A large white wall decorated using wood clothes pins in over two dozen skeins of yarn in reds, blues, purples, greens, yellow and natural colors as well as a couple braids of fiber in blue, orange, pink and brown.

Or two:

A white wall decorated using wood clothes pins with nine skeins of white, orange and pink yarn as well as a long braid of orange wool fiber.

Most of the time, this yarn is uninteresting to her. It doesn’t move or even dangle all that appealingly.

However, we have one skein we call her “symbolic protest” skein. It’s the red mohair to the very far left of the top photo. This is the one skein she pulls down regularly. Not for fun though – once it’s down she leaves it where it falls. Oh no. She pulls it down when she is annoyed with me, whether because I’ve locked her out of my office (usually for being intentionally disruptive while I’m trying to work) or because I won’t stop the rain so she can go outside (I’m flattered she thinks I have this power). While sometimes yarn does just fall off the wall, the sticky mohair is unlikely to slip out of the clothespin and we’ve watched her do it. She casually reaches up, hooks it with her claws, and pulls it down. It’s all extremely precise. No leaping, no unnecessary force. But down it comes. She knows that the yarn is important and this is her way of saying “you have displeased me.”

This morning though I saw the flip side of her understanding that I like yarn. As I said, sometimes the yarn does just fall off the wall. Most often, this is because the putty came loose and the clothespin fell. Sudden changes in either temperature or humidity make this more likely. Last night we had both – it went from sunny dry spring time warmth to rainy March like temperatures in just a few hours. I woke up around 3:30am in the morning with a bit of a headache thanks both to allergies and the sudden weather change. I also found my kitty had brought me a present. The yellow linen (right next to the red mohair) must have come down, clothespin and all, due to the shifting weather* and she had dragged the whole thing into the bedroom for me to find when I woke up. She clearly thought it was important I receive my errant skein of yarn, since a skein of yarn (plus clothespin) is about 3-4x the weight of a mouse and about twice that of a small bird, not to mention far more unwieldy. In short, it took effort and commitment.

Like I said, she knows I like this yarn stuff. So here’s hoping she likes her new kitty cuddle blanket:

A cat is stretched out sound asleep on an aqua colored ironing board. She is partially covered in a small knit blanket in dark purple and dark blue. A small wicker basket is behind her.

I used up the Brooklyn Tweed for it. I alternated colors each row: knitted a row of blue, returned to the beginning of the row, knitted a row of purple, turned the work, and repeated. This created a sort of elongated garter stitch and resulted in a nice little mindless project. I cast on 125st on a size 7 needle and kept going until I ran out of yarn. It’s definitely cat-sized and no bigger.

*I’m 95% certain it was this, not the cat, since she pulls her protest skein straight down out of the clothespin instead of away from the wall with the clothespin. I’m even more sure since I watched another skein drop at breakfast this morning.