I said quite some time ago that I was going to make a major announcement as my 3000th post on this tumblr. The announcement was to include a link to an Etsy shop by the name of Yotsuba Yarnworks which would offer for sale items knitted by hamsters.
Yes, you read that right.
Some human labor would have been involved. For instance, I would need to thread the yarn into the machine at the beginning, decide when the knitting was finished, and go through the steps of tying off the end of the yarn. The items to be produced would have included hats (for which I the hamster would knit a tube that I would then sew closed at one end, possibly adding a pompom) and laces – either for shoes or for corsets or whatever might need lacing.
At the time the announcement was made, I had already developed 3d models of parts needed to create a converter that would transform the motion generated by a hamster wheel into the motion needed to operate a knitting machine. I had even printed the parts. The machines were mostly assembled. I had already begun the process of creating the Etsy shop. But then things got postponed due to illness. And then they got postponed further because I discovered that turning a crank on a knitting machine required more force than a hamster could provide using the setup I had created. If I turned the hamster wheel, the knitting machine would run. But my hamster tried running in the wheel and it would not move – the hamster was not heavy enough to get the wheel to turn when it was hooked up to the machinery. I had still hoped to make improvements to my power-conversion-mechanisms, to redesign them to make hamster-powered knitting a reality, which I could announce victoriously in a massively celebratory 3000th post here on hamsters in cups. But the redesign process is proving much more difficult than I had hoped. I have not given up, but I have come to accept the fact that hamster-powered knitting will not become a reality any time in the particularly near future. It is time to stop keeping this blog on hold, and move forward.
This blog will resume, hopefully providing you with at least one new post every day for the foreseeable future.
I am posting this information with the image I had planned to post with the Yotsuba Yarnworks announcement, which features a hamster in a cup with 4-leaf clovers along the inside of the rim (because “Yotsuba” is Japanese for “four-leaved”). And to end, here is another image of a hamster in a four-leaf clover cup:
