animal welfare

EDIT 20.01.2010: I got an email from the owner, and the fur has been removed from the shop. As it turns out, the owner is a vegetarian herself, and answered my mail in a nice manner. I have no problem anymore with buying from Wollkontor Erlangen.

I've been a pleased customer of the German online yarn shop Wollkontor Erlangen - they have a really nice selection of yarns and their service is good.

I just watched this great animation called "Breakfast" by Kris(tina) Hofmann, a UK designer. It's about losing the connection with the food we eat, and made really well! Please watch it at Vimeo, it's only three minutes long bu really powerful!

Greetings from the Mouse Factory!

Well, not quite, but I have been making lots of mice lately, as I was trying to get as many as possible done for Ompelukerho (a Finnish women's action group I am a member of) stand at the Christmas market. The market is today, and I hope they sell well! They did last year, anyway, and because these mice are smaller than the ones last year, they might even sell better (as last year's mice were more like rats...)

Now I've had these done for a good while now, but haven't gotten round to posting them. I made a bunch of finbgerless mittens for my local animal shelter open doors day and fair.

They are knit using various yarns from my stash - the pink/white one is dyed by myself with Kool Aid! They're all knit on 4mm needles (except for the blue-green ones, which are smaller and knit on 3mms) and have the same simple thumb construction (a hole with live stitches which you then pick up).

As much as I like making fingerless mittens, I won't be making any in the near future. Enough is enough! I do hope they brought some money for the animals though.

Happy World Vegan Day! It starts the World Vegan Month, a perfect time to critically look at our eating habits and their effects on our health, our fellow earthlings as well as the environment. I will be cooking a great, vegan pumpkin soup tonight. Here's the recepie if you'd like to join me:

1 kg Hokkaido pumpkin
1 biggish onion
1-2 garlic cloves
4 biggish potatoes
A bit of oil (olive, raps... doesn't matter)
Ca. 1 liter water
Black pepper
A chili shoot (you can use less or more depending on how hot you want the soup to be)
Ground nutmeg
100 ml soy cream

I'm no vegan, but I do try to avoind buying new leather clothes or shoes - basically anything that requires killing the animal to make the product. That's not always easy, but once again I noticed it's not impossible.

I was looking for pretty, warm winter shoes without leather, and had looked at at leat 5 shops already (and slowly giving up hope) when I went (well, actually Nick suggested that I go there) to the local warehouse Galeria Kaufhof, and against all odds found some gorgeous shoes, not only one pair but many to choose from. I tried them all on, thought about it for a couple of days and went back to buy these beauties!

So, I actually knit even more mitts! I had promised Ompelukerho to knit some fingerless mitts for their Christmas sale too, so I did, even though I couldn't really see let alone make another mitten. But now they're done, and I really really will knit something else now!

They're all made with 3,5mm needles, and the black yarn is Novita Julia. The firts pair's effect yarn is G-B Marengo, in the other two it's Debbie Bliss's Maeino aran. They all used ca 30-40 grams of yarn. The 'pattern' is generic ribbing and stockinette. First twi pairs have 36 stitches all over, the last one is smaller with 32 stitches.

I'm very happy how they turned out, and plan to knit myself a pair too.

Ok, this is a bit old (from 2006) but this bloody lab is still alive and abusing animals! 

Please do what you can to stop this pervert "science" lab.

I feel like a good person sometimes, especially when I've been working on my charity knitting. Last weekend I finished another pair of preemie socks (that makes 4 pairs altogehter) for the ongoing charity and some mice to be sold for the benefit of the local animal shelter "Tierheim Essen" They now just need to be felted and filled with a jingle bell and some stuffing.

They're made with different sizes of needles and different leftover yarns, and the pattern is from Kitty Knits be Donna Druchunas. They are so quick to make! I will make at least four more, after that I will need to buy more jingle bells, but there's no problem in that.

I had an interesting discussion with a collague today, he was telling me about a vegetarian couple he knows, and that their 5-year-old is also being raised vegetarian.

Then he went on to say that people (even this kid) should be able to decide what they eat. Apparently the parents deny this kid meat also during visits to granma's etc. My collague's main argument was that kids should't be denied this kind of thing, but let them decide themselves.