Off the needles

 Okay, the title should be Off the Needles a Looong time ago.

I finished this shawl, knit with yarn from Organized Chaos Yarns, back in April and I am just now getting around to photographing it.

The yarn, Colorstravaganza, is fingering superwash and I love, love, love it!  I think it looks like faded denim and I want a whole sweater knit from it.  I absolutely love the faded denim look with little blips of color.  

My daughter says it doesn't look like denim but I think it does.  My faded out jeans even usually have the blips of color on them from dropped markers, paint and/or nail polish.  So yes, my jeans and my shawl will match this winter.  I can't wait!

And because I'm excited about my new roommates...

Meet Pumpkin, the platy fish.  Her little black nose reminds me of a puppy's.

And Spot, the nerite snail.  I love his spots.  They look like they've been drawn on with a Sharpie.

Spot has his work cut out for him.  Captain Morgan, my old nerite, died and the tank got overrun with algae.  Again. Argh!

Hopefully Spot is hungry and has an appetite close to Captain Morgan's.

On the Needles

Timeless Pullover

I'm still plugging away at Timeless and will probably still be knitting on it this time next month.  I knit and I knit and I knit and I knit some more... and it seems I make no progress what so ever.  And that's weird because with the two strands of mohair held together, I'm getting gauge at five stitches to the inch.  I think it just feels like it's taking forever because I can't read while I knit all this stockinette. Well, I can, but I find myself only grabbing one strand too frequently to bother.  

Despite not being able to read while I knit, it's still a fun project.  The yarn is just so light and soft and it hasn't shed all over my clothes a single time.  

And, the sweater fits!  Actually, it might be a little bit too big.  I was in between sizes so I opted for the larger size because I'm not into body hugging clothes these days.  

And for those of you interested in the tank....  I have a new addition.  Meet Herman.  He's a Mystery Albino snail and he is going to help me with my algae problem.  Apparently I can't count.  I had the timer for my lights set on 10 hours, not 8.  Oops!  A big, giant oops actually.  Everything was okay until I got Viviane, the second female Emperor Tetra.  She came from a shop that specializes in plants rather than fish and her tank wasn't the cleanest.  Two days later, Bam!  I had a Massive algae problem.  I'm blaming Viviane's water but I know my light timer miscalculation may have been the cause.  Anyway, I've been fighting algae ever since and hopefully Herman is going to help.

Now, if I can just resist the urge to get Herman a girlfriend....

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends on social media. Until next time, Happy Knitting!

Good Days

Yesterday was a pretty good day!

Despite the rain having finally stopped, I spent most of the day inside watching the fish and knitting.  I'm not exactly pleased with that orange stripe, but I wasn't happy with the first orange stripe either and I've grown to like it so there's hope.  Whether I like it or not, I'm continuing on with this sweater.  

I'm deviating from the pattern quite a bit.  I decided to do a garter stitched split hem instead of ribbing at the waist.  The front is finished and the back is only a few rows from being bound off.  My plan is to do the sleeves like a Swoncho with the whole forearm being knit in ribbing.  It may look weird with the garter stitch waist hem but I didn't think about the sleeves until after I'd started the hem and well, the whole sweater is going to look a little weird anyway.  I really don't think it will matter.

I'm sure you are wondering why I was obsessed with watching my fish all day.   Doris and Charlie spawned.  Can you see the teeny tiny white things on some of the leaves?  It sort of looks like course salt was spilled over them.

Is that better?  The camera on my phone just isn't that great and the leaves move in the water and every photo I take is slightly blurry.

I always watch the fish while I do my morning pages and the tank was all clear when I finished writing.  I went for a walk and came back to find the leaves dusted with eggs and the water full of floating ones.  Tetras lay their eggs by "substratum egg scattering" which means they just drop them and let them land where they may.

At least that's what I hope happened.  Charlie and Doris were showing typical breeding behavior the night before so I'm fairly sure they were eggs and not something horribly wrong in the tank.  What ever they were, they are gone now.  The corys won't need to be fed for a week because they ate every single one of them.

And yes, my tetras have names now.  Charlie is the leader of the pack and is named after Charles Manson.  He's the only cult type leader I could think of and while I hope he doesn't turn out to be a fish murderer, the name sort of fits.  His followers seem to love him, but he has a bit of a mean streak and as much as they love him, they are also slightly afraid of him.  And he's definitely the leader of the group.  

Doris is Charlie's girlfriend.  The two of them have definitely paired up.  Doris gets her name from Greek mythology.  She is Amphitrite's mother (Amphitrite was Poseidon's wife) and daughter of Oceanus.  I chose the name Doris because I could pronounce it.  :)

Then there's Fabio, so named because he's pretty and isn't as camera shy as the others.

And since Charlie and Doris had hooked up and Fabio seemed a little lonely, I bought another female - Viviane.  Viviane is another name The Lady of the Lake went by.  Besides being a King Arthur fan, the tank Viviane was in at the pet store looked a bit like a lake so...

As for the corys, they don't have names yet.  I can't tell them apart.  I can't even tell if they are male or female.  Despite being from the catfish family, they will probably get typical dog names because they remind me of puppies.  They are fairly round with shortish tales and they look like excited puppies the way their tales constantly wiggle.  They are either wiggling or grouped together on the bottom sleeping.  Either way, I haven't been able to get a close enough look at them to compare their details.

Sorry, but I warned you that you were about to know more about fish than you ever wanted to know.

And...  I bet you'd forgotten - this is a post about good things that happened yesterday...   

Hayden is learning to laugh.

Fish

I hope you like fish because you are about to be bombarded with blurry photos of my newest passion.

I have wanted an aquarium for as long as I can remember.  I've wanted a giant, wall sized one full of big, beautiful salt water fish.  But I never, ever wanted to have to take care of such a tank.

Since moving out of the house several years ago, my son has become impassioned with fresh water fish tanks.  And every time I'd visit  him, I'd think about how much I wanted a tank and how much I liked his tanks and....  And well, he set me up recently.  

First he brought me a tank, a bunch of rocks and some plants.  I mastered setting the light timer, (it's more difficult than expected!) watched the plants grow for about a week, and yesterday, he brought me fish.

Pepper Corydora

There's only one young one in the photo, but I'm now a proud mama of four Pepper Corys, or Corydoras.  I just Love the name Corydora.  It's so much fun to say.  Anyway.... Corys are tiny, miniature catfish and mine are even smaller than normal because they are still young.  They also seem to be very camera shy.

Emperor Tetras

I'm also a proud mama of three Emperor Tetras.  Two boys and a girl.  Know how to tell the difference?  The girls have green eyes and the boys have blue. They don't show up that well in the photo but in real life, there's a huge difference in their eye color.  There are other ways to tell the difference, but that's the most obvious.

I was so excited to become a fish mama, I barely knit yesterday!  I pretty much spent the whole day obsessing over watching them swim around and become acclimated to their new home.  The tetras were so cool because they were fairly stressed when they arrived and they were almost completely clear with no color at all.  Within a few hours, their stripes had shown up, they'd turned fairly purple and the gold on their fins was shining bright.  And no, their colors aren't showing up well in the pictures.  I have a Lot to learn about trying to take photos of fast moving fish!

Now, don't be surprised when the next thing you hear me talk about is trying to knit sweaters for my fish.

Oh, and I'd like to wish my sister and her husband a happy 44th (I think) anniversary today.  They are fish parents too.