Xmas Sale, A Missing Kitty & Charity Giving

I made the mistake of not remembering to take the camera along to the Senior Center while I babysat our K4 Xmas Sale at the beginning of the month so no pictures. We sold enough to keep us in yarn for the next year and had a huge (lawn-size) bag of extras to send off for charity. This is on top of the bags of hat & scarf sets that went to the veterans, the 15 sweaters we sent to Knit For Kids & the earlier afghans & lap robes that went to Beaumont Hospital. All in all, it was a good year, plus the Oxford American Legion Post honored our group with a certificate of thanks for the work we did for the veterans!

The same week of the Xmas Sale, Sadie went missing. All we can surmise is that she slipped out when some missionaries came to the door after 8 p.m. (!!) We searched without any luck the following day and worried because she's an indoor cat & front declawed. The Michigan Humane Society offers a "Lost Pet" template on its website that I downloaded & filled in as well as posting the information on their Lost Cats page. We took the print-out of the poster to the Oakland Animal Shelter & checked through their new intakes just in case she'd been picked up & turned in. (This also gave me a chance to drop off 20 Snuggles for the cat cages.)

Coming home, we pinned the posters to file folders & enclosed them in plastic food storage bags so we could staple them to light posts & mail box stands in our neighborhood. Six days later, we became part of the fortunate 20% that finds a lost pet. A neighbor two streets away called to say that she thought Sadie was under her deck. We grabbed a can of cat food & were there within minutes. Big gold eyes showed up in the far corner of the under-deck space & we recognized the yowl, but Sadie was too scared to come out. I crawled about halfway under the deck with the open food can and, once she got her nose into it, backed out slowly until I could pick her up and get her in the carrier. WHEW!! We're extremely happy & grateful to have her back.



I felt so sorry for all the cats at the shelter. There are so many that Animal Control is offering two for one adoption fee and that fee has been drastically lowered for cats 6 months & older. We have a house full with Sadie, Boomer & Callie, but I'll be taking another bag of Snuggles to the shelter in the near future so the cages will be a little more comfortable while the cats wait for their forever homes.

Back to K4, our project for the start of the year is fulfilling a request for wheelchair sized lap robes for several veterans' hospitals and group members are hard at work. I'm using leftovers from earlier projects and making a version of rag-tag afghans in the Brick (Box, Brain-dead - it has several names) stitch. It only involves a little more work than my earlier straight double crochet versions & I like the texture that the stitch adds.


I got a little carried away on the blue one and after a few rows realized that it was 36" wide instead of 30". Rather than frog it, I decided to do lengthwise stripes.


I'm working on a third lap robe that will have dark ends and a mix of whites & creams in the center.