June Sweater: Puff-sleeve maternity sweater

I just realized I forgot to post my June sweater.

It wasn’t supposed to be a maternity sweater, but I went a little nuts with the hip shaping, apparently. It’s even too loose for my fat ass (the pictures are forgiving. It actually looks baggier & more awkward in real life).

I also thought the same pattern would be cute much shorter, for a 50s look (I guess that’s where I was going with the July mini raglan, sans puff sleeves, because I had so little yarn):

Even if the bagginess didn’t bother me, it turns out the  yarn does. It’s baby soft & totally passed the neck and face test, but my chest doesn’t like it. Maybe I’m a little sensitve to angora? From now on, I’m stuffing a ball of yarn down my shirt all day before I make any next to skin garments. So this will either go to my next friend to gets knocked up, or maybe I’ll do a raffle or something. I wouldn’t mind getting together a bunch of prizes and doing some raffles to raise money to fund a mobile rural neuter clinic once a year out here.

I’m so bummed by the vast numbers of squashed kittens in the road lately. Yesterday, I was driving Sugarfoot to the vet, and there was really fucking adorable blue-eyed siamese kitten dragging itself across the road. Poor little guy–I guess he must have just been hit. I picked him up and took him with me, but I don’t know whether they were able to fix him up. I thought maybe he wasn’t too bad off, because he wasn’t crying, he was sitting up, alert, just kind of chilling and checking it out with those blinky, unfocused kitten eyes. lt turns out it was worse than I thought when I scooped him up (I didn’t realize at the time, but he had a scary-looking are-those-his-guts? big open wound on his abdomen, oddly un-bloody, though, and his tongue and gums were nice and pink, so maybe not too much blood loss?)–but even if they couldn’t help him, at least he got a little love and didn’t end up repeatedly squooshed or slowly baking in the heat or eaten by buzzards, or bait to squash his mom or siblings as well.  The cat situation is pretty awful out here. Spay/neuter has not caught on and there’s a very 1970s vibe about pet ownership. It’s weird, pet stuff that’s considered kind of uncouth and barbaric is pretty par for the course. Even the attentive, relatively responsible pet owners have no qualms about producing bushels of kittens and puppies, though there are clearly limitless unwanted pets. Anyway, so yeah, I’ve been thinking about trying to come up with something like SNAP on a once-a-year sort of scale. Ron said he wasn’t sure if people would do it even if it was free, so I thought maybe we could get Hill’s or someone to donate free bags of food as an incentive. I don’t know. But it’s worth a look.

7 Replies to “June Sweater: Puff-sleeve maternity sweater”

  1. Please let me know if you need help with getting donations etc… for your SNAP type project. That really makes me so sad for YOU not only the smooshed animals and ones that have to have so many babies.
    I’m happy to help with donations of time or money or both. :)
    tuliptoe (at) gmail

  2. Kudos for the spay/neuter clinic idea! Get your local Girl Scouts & Boy Scouts involved for getting the word out or something. Poster contest? Girl Scouts at the junior high & high school level are big on community service projects, and many are also looking for special projects to do as silver or gold award (GS equivalent of Eagle Scout). Local 4H group might also be interested in helping.

    Incidentally, just two days ago I rescued a little blue-eyed siamese kitten from the side of the highway. He wasn’t hurt yet and is currently living the good life at my house with undivided attention from my 13 yr old daughter and our Boston Terrier.

  3. The sweater is lovely, but I don’t understand why you say you’re fat. Maybe you’re being tongue-in-cheek, but I think you’ve said this before and I have to tell you, you most certainly are not fat! :o)

  4. i love hte sweater!
    i’m terribly sorry that you had the kitten experience. i hope the little guy is okay. i noticed that about people in missouri that i worked with. dogs are pets that live in your yard. and cats are mousers. nothing more. surprises me that there are siamese running around though. i’m glad you stopped and gave the guy some help. even if he didn’t make it, he got some loving.
    i think the clinic idea is a good one. and i think getting local groups and vets to volunteer and help out, it’d be a good idea! even if they don’t take advantage of it ths year, maybe over hte next couple years it would get bigger and more custom for people to neuter. the door just needs to be opened!!

  5. I will see if the Lawrence Humane ever does those in other counties near here…seems like when I went through training there they talked about how even though they were Douglas County they did things regionally tooo. I would be down for helping out too.

  6. awww… I wish we were friends! I love this sweater and I’m all knocked up and could use it! ;-P

    Sorry to hear about the kitten. It’s all somehow harder when it’s a wee one…

  7. Thank you for having such a kind heart to help the little kitten. Most people would’ve looked the other way. It breaks my heart.

    Love your blog…I guess I’m now officially delurked! :-)

    Jenny

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