She likes our feet, she seems to regard them as puppies in need of cuddling, washing if bare (right in between the toes, an ordeal for the ticklish) and generally grooming. The socks Tom is wearing in the picutre above have seen better days, but they're quite a popular pair so I darned them with some blueish print sock yarn, as you may just see, part of my personal visible mending project. However, as you can also see, they continue to pill, and yesterday Elfie was assiduously nibbling at and pulling off the pills, spitting them out rather as she does goose grass and other seeds in her own fur.
Funny dog.
6 comments:
Aw. She's wonderful.
That's a wonderful portrait of the lovable Elfie.
oh man, what an adorable girl!
So the little bobbles that form on the outside of clothes are called pills? I didn't know that. I once had a suit tailor-made in a sage green, felt-ish sort of material which rose up in pills. I complained to the shop, they took the suit back and shaved it with a razor, as if it was a face afflicted with advanced dermatitis. The pills returned but soon after I moved to London and met VR (then VT). She didn't approve and I discarded the suit as I did the West Riding carapace that by then was no longer fit for purpose.
A pill was also slang for someone who is insufferable. Quite an effective insult, don't you think?
Love that Elfie! Didn't know that licking human feet was a dog thing - maybe I could train my visiting cat Pushkin to do that?
Thanks again. A rather gorgeous subject, I think.
Robbie - you can get special battery powered shavers for de-pilling clothes, I have one somewhere but the problem is one uses it so infrequently the battery is always flat. There are also 'sweater stones' a kind of pumice thing, and most useful so far a thing called a cashmere comb which combs and abrades finely. A pill was, I suppose, anything rolled into a little ball; the French for the ones you get on woollen items is 'bouloche' (I think, I often transpose or mistake the vowels) which is also used for an annoyance, a rub, but I think that's a coincidence, the English etymology is rather that of 'a bitter pill', something nasty but necessary to swallow. It's a little obsolete as a familiar word now, which is a shame, perhaps I'll try to resurrect it!
Natalie - heheh, a cat's tongue would be much more exfoliating than a dog's, you could hire him out, like those fish that you can put you feet in the water with and they nibble off the dead skin!
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