Ornament Misdirection and Cat in a Circle

Let´s start with the cat thing. About four years ago a video trending topic was cats jumping into circles and staying there. Just last Sunday my oldest son, his wife and I were talking about this. Actually they were talking about how a dog will put their nose in a circle made with your hands and I was talking about the cats. So imagine my surprise when on Tuesday after I emptied my clothes basket Mike, the cat, jumped into it and stayed for about 30 minutes. Here he is at the start of that self-imposed entrapment.

Perhaps it seemed like a circle and box combined.

On a cuter note, the reason I was doing laundry in part was that Mike decided to take a snuggle in my unmade bed covers. It is unclear to me how without working thumbs he managed to get the covers pulled over himself so well, maybe Mara stepped in to help, but I did not. He is a very good snuggler and is adorable, two great qualities for a small gray cat. Oh, and he is handsome too!

He likes my bed as well as I do!

On to the ornament thing.

This little cutey is made from Kathy Lewinski´s Knit Star Ornament pattern. If you click on the link you´ll see it is a three-dimensional and what you see above is only one-half of the star. It is pinned so you can see the lovely lines made by SSK and K2tog. But the pinning also shows the problem, do you see it? Yes, the star will be over 5 inches wide much too big for my collection of ornaments for the advent calendar. So I went back to the patterns on Ravelry last night to see if I could find another small pattern; it seems there is one that will work. More about it later.

When I discovered the current star is too big I paused rather than immediately frogged it. This type of restraint is not topical of me. But this morning a light bulb went off, I will need a tree topper for that small Xmas tree I will purchase for the condo this year. Want to take a guess at what it will be? Yup, a second half star will be knit, the two sewn together and stuffed. It will be the perfect topper, light-weight, the right golden color and most important, hand made. So it wasn´t a knitting fail, just a misdirection.

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