ohhhh, backup! right!

our hard drive died. we took it to the shop to see if it could be resuscitated and if any data could be retrieved from it, but no. it has died and taken everything that was on it to hard drive heaven. and of course, there is no recent backup. sigh. there were years of pictures on that hard drive. family vacations, celebrations, performances. sigh. oh well, time to make new memories. and back them up.

a splash of...

i had an "ahh" knitting moment the other day. it wasn't because i had learned a new stitch or corrected a delicate mistake. it was because i realized i can now look at a knitting pattern, see it in a different yarn as well as take note of whatever modifications i would need to do to make it comfortable for me to wear. doesn't necessarily mean i will knit it, but at least i have a better understanding of the overall pattern and how it will fit together instead of being intimidated by it and assuming "i am not ready to knit that yet"!

thankfully i came to this conclusion before i purchased interweave knits summer 08 edition. i have purchased this magazine pretty religiously ever since coming back to knitting. it inspires me and, up until recently, was known to intimidate me. i leafed through the issue oohhing and aahhing. there were so many items i heard calling my name! which was a bit of a surprise because quite a few of these items were full of c-o-l-o-r!

i am not talking about the solid, bright or unusual color. i am talking multicolors in one row color. i am talking about patterns and color. i am talking about how do i keep all those yarns untangled color. this is something that usually makes me break out in hives and whisper the "i am not ready..." mantra.

but not this time. this time was more, "could i tone those colors down? could i substitute colors?" though i have to admit one pattern i love has a steek in it which is enough to make the hair on the back of my neck rise.

but i think i could work past that, literally. doesn't mean i am going to knit it up immediately, it just means i am willing to give it a go and see how it all turns out. will keep you posted.

knit of course

so what does one do when in between check-in's while chaperoning the daughter's h.s. choir trip to santa cruz and the santa cruz beach boardwalk? why, knit of course.

amazing

so this is my 100th post.

it is amazing to me that i have been babbling about knitting and various other things for 100 posts. and that there are people who read these babblings, for which i am forever grateful. i have been inspired, challenged, encouraged and well fed by some amazing cyber friends.

i always thought i would have a celebratory contest for my 100th post but the planning of it is just beyond me at the moment. perhaps by the time i am done babbling on this post, something fun and quirky will arise.

but until then, i think i will babble about what started this blog in the first place, sticks and string...

so i was very sick a few weeks ago. like fevers of over 102 and lying in bed doing nothing for 5 days straight. i was so sick, it hurt my head to knit. and at the time i was in the middle of knitting a garter stitch potholder that will be felted, which is knitting at its easiest. as soon as i could pick up needles again, i finished it. it is knit out of some blue paton's merino and a green cascade 220 i had in my stash. of course i did not want to knit 3 potholders out of the same colors so i purchased another skein of cascade 220 in an deep aqua blue that would complement my two stash yarns. (yes, the yarns in the picture are the same, the color is different because of the lighting, booklyn tweed i am not.) this project got derailed for a bit when my cp size 10 straights began to split at the tip. very annoying. i had already done the sandpaper and wax paper thing to no avail. plus, the needles are a bit short for the amount of yarn that needs to be on them. i thought brittany needles would be the perfect solution. of course the LYS has every size but 10 and none of the other yarn stores in the area carry brittany's. grrr. after much hemming, hawing and gnashing of teeth, i traded the cp needles in for another non-splitting, longer pair of cp's and i am off and knitting once again.

once the potholder was done, i went straight to the cute husband's socks and finished the first one, finally. this is out of lorna lace's shepard sock chocolate stripe colorway. can i tell you how much i love this yarn. i love this yarn. i love the feel of it, the way it stripes, how easy it is to work with, even in a darkened theatre. i cast on the second sock immediately and knit on it whenever i can.

the next item to be finished was the lace capelet out of ry cashsoft baby dk, colorway 502, sweet. it turned out pretty well. when i asked my sweet friend to try it on for size, she did not want to take it off because it was warm and soft. which i took as a good sign. i immediately frogged the boring ruffle scarf also being knit out of cashsoft colorway 517, donkey, to start the second lace capelet. these are for two very dear friends who i usually give the same type of present to. i found the pattern on ravelry and it is quite easy. my personal challenge with it was keeping the correct number of stitches consistent. for some reason, whenever i did the yarn over rows i would either lose a stitch or add a stitch. it was maddening. i frogged the finished capelet down to practically the beginning to correct this, just to have it happen again! i finally decided it was one stitch. it really wasn't going to make that big of difference. and, of course, it all turned out ok in the end.

still on the needles is my sweet friends short ruffle scarf. as you can see, i have picked up the stitches on the short end and added the ruffle, but the long ends has 297 stitches to be picked up which is a daunting task to me. plus, i was expecting the ruffle to be more ruffle-y. since i will also be making this scarf for me, i may experiment with repeating the ruffle pattern. and if i have enough yarn in which to do so. but i need the needles so i better get on with finishing this one.

there are babies. i had never made anything baby so i decided to do hats. the first one was for baby alison, a beautiful and amiable baby at work (i work at the local ymca where there are plenty of staff babies around). much to my sweet friend's chagrin, i decided to knit up the sprout hat pattern by leigh spencer which i found on mag knits. it called for mission falls cotton, which i had never worked with before. i really liked it. i chose colorways 206-peony and 404-indigo. the yarn was easy to work with and lovely when knit up; it complemented the moss stitch well. unfortunately i did not get a picture of the hat before i gave it to baby alison, so here are all the ingredients, you will need to imagine what it looked like. fyi, peony was the dominant color, indigo the accent; picture it in your mind.......ok next.

the second baby hat was for rachael and ryan's baby. they live in the city (s.f.) where the coldest part of the year is coming up, summer, so hat's for a baby are totally appropriate. while doing an east bay yarn store crawl, i mentioned baby hats to the person behind the counter at k2tog. she suggested crystal palace puffin, a bulky polyester fleece ribbon yarn. one ball makes a hat, and she provided the pattern. what more could i ask for? the colorway is dotty circus. and though i was a bit skeptical about the polyester once i started to knit it i was quite pleased. this yarn is so soft and will be so nice for a baby head. and it looks really sweet knit up. can't wait to finish it and give to baby callum.

in the way of yarn, this past januray cheryl had a comment contest on her blog. by lucky circumstance i won a couple of skeins of yarn from it. some beautiful crimson kilcarra in which to make a tudora; and some homespun yarn from craftspun. the original thought was to try my hand at dyeing and dye the homespun, which i would have then shared on the blog. but i am now leaning towards keeping it undyed. it is really lovely but i am not sure what to make. and to be the non-metric american, how long is 250 grams? so i shall see.

and though i have been trying to knit from my stash, temptation is strong, so very strong. so i confess i have been collecting sock yarns. i figure they are relatively inexpensive and one skein equals a pair of socks so it is not like going overboard...is it?

the first sock yarn purchase was via the grey's anatomy knitters group on ravelry. sknitches had a "seriously" colorway. if you are a watcher of grey's anatomy you know the various ways this word gets used. the colorway had sold out but sknitches was willing to dye a special batch for group members if they pre-ordered and pre-paid. score! had to have one! and i love it! seriously. i am hoping to score another one for my sweet friend. she would like legwarmers. we will see what happens.

the second sock yarn purchase was from sockpixie. this woman owned a lovely little yarn store in petaluma, the town above mine. if my LYS was not within walking distance of my home, i would have become a regular in her shop. she offered wonderful classes and beautiful yarns. then her husband was transferred to boston so her yarn store closed. she kept in touch through her blog which morphed into sockpixie, which offered sock patterns, and eventually sock yarn. she and her daughter dye a different colorway selection in various types of sock yarns each week so when the yarn is gone it's gone. this colorway came from the week she was inspired by famous women and named her sock yarn colorways after them. this specific colorway is colette, a writer i met in college, became enamoured with and have read over and over again. so, of course, had to have it; love it; can't wait to knit it up.

whew! i think that is the latest. and i am sorry to say, something quirky is still beyond my reach. perhaps at blog number 150! so stay tuned. many thanks to all of you who amaze and inspire me. it's a lot of fun.

(it is a bit sad that life is so busy this post took three weeks to put together! yeesh!)

a gap is forming

my local LYS is closing.

i met some great knitters there; i learned a lot from those knitters; i was inspired and challenged by those knitters; i took classes from them; i had the opportunity to teach beginning knitting and introduce new knitters to the satisfaction of making and sharing something beautiful.

the owner is trying to sell the business but i am not sure if there will be any takers. which is sad because i think the community can certainly hold a knitting store.

but the saddest thing is i feel like a comfortable old friend is going away. i will miss all of the talk with the girls, the sharing, the ooohhhing and aaahhhing, the catching up with friends. all within walking distance of home.

so it goes. everyone will move on to other things. but i will always be grateful for the time i had there.

it started with this

i was pretty excited about going to my first stitches west this past weekend. i had enrolled in one of the hour long classes being offered which gave me a free ticket into the market floor, a yarn haven.

the tuesday evening before the big weekend i was going through various groups on ravelry to see if i could carpool with fellow attendees. in one of the groups there was mention of a special "stitch and ride" version of the capital corridor, an amtrack train which travels from sacramento to san jose (where stitches west is held).

a few clicks of the mouse later, i found the site, discussed with my cute husband the financial and logistical advantages of taking the train and decided to buy a ticket. due to the late purchase, the site said i would need to pick up my ticket from the ticket booth the morning of departure.

but on thursday there was a DHL package by the front door and it contained this...

and the excitement factor increased 10 fold. the cute husband could hardly contain me in the car on the way to the train station.

the train was about 25 minutes late, but once inside all riders received one of these:


holy moly! and all the free coffee you could drink. what could be better on a drizzly saturday morning?!

the train arrived about 11ish; the description had said the convention center was a 10 or 15 min walk away so i thought walking wouldn't be a bad option, but the shuttle buses were waiting with open doors so in i hopped and was at my first stitches west stop, the ravelry booth, within moments.


ravelry did a passport book to introduce members to ravelry supporters and businesses. it was a great way to meet some fellow ravelers and support their various yarn endeavors. it was also a great way to make sure every aisle was explored. there was some amazing yarn being offered. my personal favorites the buffalo and musk ox yarns. so soft and beautiful, so incredibly expensive.


it was suggested i have a plan of who or what i wanted to see. so i put a list together of things i needed; vendors i wanted to see, etc. so between the "plan" and the passport, i pretty much saw every booth on the floor. webs had two huge booths which were always packed. since i didn't have a specific project in mind, i didn't visit them. i was drawn to the smaller, single person type yarn vendors.

i was also drawn to sock yarns. one of the sock yarn vendors i wanted to see was blue moon yarns, which also happened to be in the ravelry passport. the colorway i was truly lusting after was rock star. there had been one skein left when i was in my lookie-lou phase. by the time i went back to do my purchasing, it was gone. fortunately that set back wasn't a deterrent. i just purchased this colorway instead. it is called peaseblossom and it is 360 yards of lightweight 100% superwash merino. rah. can't wait to knit it up.


the second sock yarn i was drawn to were those by lisa souza. this is her elektra colorway which is 560 yards of 100% superfine superwash merino. i am thinking this would make the cute husband a nice pair of socks.

the last big sock purchase was from the bins of a vendor from so cal, the yarn lady. the bins in front of this booth had bags of yarn for 70% off. with the first look-see i found yarns i wasn't interested in; a second look-see unearthed bags of 8 balls of fortissima colori socka color sock yarn all in the same color way. a third look-see unearthed this, a bag of 8 balls of fortissima in 4 different colorways, meaning a pair of socks per colorway. all i could think of was presents! at 70% off! there were very few bargains but this was definitely one of them. i was very pleased.


the only non sock yarn purchase were these two, from terilyn needleart, two sisters who like knitting lace shawls. the first time i passed by this yarn it screamed "shawl!". the second time i passed by, i just stopped and shopped. all of their colorways are lovely but these two really captured me. these are the heather yarns, the light one is colorway 5680, periwinkle and the dark one is 5751, midnight. each hank has 560 yards! i love the midnight colorway but it will be very dark to knit with. i will need very good lighting, especially with lace. but so it goes!

all in all, my first stitches west was a great adventure and i look forward to next year!

holding strong

i made it through another sunday update without purchasing sock yarn from sockpixie. i am so proud. especially since her colors were inspired by the provence region of france, i thought for sure i would get hooked. and i did, but the colorway was sold out by the time i logged in. whew. on to stitches west next saturday!

and speaking of socks, i am wanting to knit some ankle length socks for the big guy and am in need of a pattern. i am sure there is one out there, i just can't remember where i saw it. if anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please let me know. have a good week everyone.

i got to choose

my cute husband and kids are involved with the ymca youth & government program. after 5 months of practicing state government their big weekend of taking over the state capital building is always around valentines day; this year it just happened that valentines day and the first day of y&g were the same. they are going to take over the state capital for five days and i get to stay home to do whatever i want. not a bad trade off.

for valentines day supper i decided i wanted pink food. really i just wanted salmon. the fam isn't fond of me making salmon because of the "fishy" smell. but they are not here and the dog doesn't mind if the house smells of salmon. i had this idea i wanted to have pasta with the salmon. then i decided to mix the salmon with the pasta.

so on the way home from work i stopped at the local market, got salmon, lemons, thyme, chives, italian flat leaf parsley and asparagas. i put water on for pasta and asparagas; made a poaching broth of water, lemon slices, parsley, shallots and garlic; poached the salmon; drained the pasta; sauted garlic and shallots in the pan with some olive oil and lemon juice; added the pasta; sprinkled it with minced chives and parsley; added the salmon and asparagas, which, in the meantime had been sliced into thirds; mixed them all together until everything was warm and served it with a sprinkle of some lovely, fresh parmesean cheese in one of my favorite bowls.

it was perfect. it was just what i wanted. and, there are leftovers. not to bad for being alone on valentines day! hope yours was wonderful, too!

how time flies!

wow, time is flying by! it is already february and i am still futzing about with christmas presents.

i realized the garter stitch ruffle scarf out of rowan cashsoft was b-o-r-i-n-g! and if i was bored knitting it, the recipient would more than likely be bored wearing it. plus, in order to match the vision of this scarf in my mind's eye, the scarf needed to be a bit thinner and have more ruffle. the plan was to make two of these type of scarves which would give me an opportunity to fiddle with the pattern. but i was so bored with the scarf and the knitting of it, i decided it would look better in a verigated, fun yarn instead of a solid color yarn. plus i found this great lace capelet pattern on ravelry and wanted to see how it would look in the second cashsoft colorway.


and it looks pretty good. i really like how it is coming out. apart from the fact i got about 20 rows from the end and realized i had dropped a few stitches about 5 inches down and had missed a couple of yarn overs which are essential to the pattern so i had to frog it practically to the beginning. thankfully it is a real quick knit so i wasn't to concerned. and once i get it off the needles, i think it will stretch to fit nicely. i haven't frogged the boring ruffle scarf yet because i want to see how the capelet turns out. when i get closer to the end of the capelet, i will frog and straighten the scarf yarn.


i also started blossom out of elsebeths lavold silky wool, colorway #56. this is for my mom. since i purchased the yarn moments before christmas, the thought was to have it done by valentine's day. ha! so it is currently languishing on my needles. plus, i am being a little to cautious about the repeats, which i have to figure out on my own, instead of having the pattern tell me exactly what to do. aughhh! once i figure it out i am sure everything will be fine and i will chuckle at my doubt. but until then...


i have also been knitting my cute husbands sock. i am on the foot. and though this has taken me quite a while to knit i feel like i have learned alot about sock knitting or about how i knit socks. so i bring it with me everywhere just in case i get a moment to knit a few rows.

the last challenge i have is to not buy any new yarn. ha! stitches west is coming in a couple of weeks and i am trying to save all my pennies for their marketplace, which i hear is overwhelming, but then i look at sockpixie's new sock colorways and i am so very tempted. it is so hard to keep the finger from clicking "add to basket"! maybe i'll just frog the scarf.

maybe next year

a funny thing happened this past holiday season. the moment christmas was over, everyone told me what they would like me to knit for them. my cute husband wanted a hat; the big guy wanted a scarf and my sweet friend wanted leg warmers. i smiled, nodded my head and thought, where were these suggestions in november?

and instead of telling them better luck next year, i dove into my stash. and then i looked for patterns.

i found my cute husband's hat pattern on ravelry by cheryl niamath of fetching's fame. in honor of the movie, the life aquatic with steven zassou, and jacques cousteau, she designed the zassou hat. this was to be knitted from a worsted weight yarn. but since i was knitting from my stash and had GOBS of misti alpaca suri silk in hematite, colorway 404, i used two strands of this along with a strand of frog tree sportweight alpaca in teal, color 64. the hat is a snap and came out pretty well. the only challenge was in a moment of confusion i cast on 122 stitches instead of the 112 the pattern called for so the decreases were a little wonky. since the hat it a 1x1 rib, i did not notice the mistake until i realized my decreases were a little off. but it all worked out and he loves it, brags about it and wears it.

for the big guy's scarf i thought i would knit him the purl scarf from last minute knitted gifts. it is a mixture of three weights of yarn, knitter's choice in a 1x1 rib. so once again working with the misti alpaca and leftover frog tree, i added cascade yarns baby alpaca chunky, in turquoise colorway #560, to match the feather in his fedora, and off i went. except the 1x1 rib did not do justice to the yarns, so i adapted the pattern from the misti alpaca ruffle scarf. i added a repeat and fringed the end instead of ruffled the end. and it came out well and he likes it much more than i thought he would and actually wears it.

my sweet friend's legwarmers on the other hand are going to take some time. since she is a dancer, she wants them up to the knee or above and with a band that goes around the foot, a la mac and me's yoga socks. berroco just released a sock book featuring their new sock yarns which had a pattern much like this, but i am not sure i feel like spending $17 for a book of 9 sock patterns. so i will keep searching. she knitted a pair of legwarmers as a christmas present for her best friend out of ggh aspen. it was a quick and dirty knit so i may try and adapt that somehow.

in the meantime, here is a picture of my second jo sharp urban beanie out of her silkroad ultra. this past fall i decided i really did want a hat that matched the surgery shawl/poncho i knit last winter. what a geek. i do love it though. it keeps my head nice and toasty, cozy warm.

maybe next year they will actually answer when i ask them if they would like anything knitted for christmas. there is always hope!

and by the by, i made my sweet friend crepes as a thank you for being the semi-willing hat model.

may your days be merry and bright

yes, i know it is a line from a christmas song but i saw my hand writing it when signing a card and heard my voice saying it when wishing someone well. what was i to do?

and so on this first day of this new year, i wish the very best for you and yours. may all your days be merry and bright.

tidings of comfort and joy

best wishes to you all. may you have a happy and peaceful holiday season.

just a little steam

when i was pregnant with my sweet friend, my cute husband invited some brits over for christmas supper. they were working on a special project at his company and staying in a hotel with no where special to go on christmas day. to make them feel even more at home, the ch decided to get a traditional "pudding" recipe for christmas desert. so he contacted a friend in australia who faxed over a copy of a steamed pudding recipe she used. having never made a steamed pudding, i was a bit anxious. this first one was steamed in a bundt pan with a tin foil cover. but everyone loved and raved about it and i have been making christmas pudding every year since. so when zorra sent out an invite for sugar high friday to post about pudding, i was in!

since the posting deadline was christmas eve i needed to find an occasion to make one before christmas. i took a chance on the staff holiday potluck. which turned out to be the perfect occasion. i knew the pudding was a success when folks took slices home with them.

this is a dried fruit pudding. the recipe calls for 1 cup of dates; 1 cup of raisins and 4 cups of mixed dried fruit. for the first few years i experimented with various dried fruits but have settled on a cup each of golden raisins, dried cranberries, dried apricots and dried pineapple. mixed with butter, sugar, eggs, and self rising and regular flour. steam for about 4-4.5 hours. because of time, for the potluck i steamed the pudding for about 3 hours the night before, then steamed it for another 1-1.5 hours the day of the potluck. it turned out so well, i thought i would do it for our christmas day pudding. hopefully it will turn out just as nice.

so here is my pudding. the first picture is fresh out of the pudding mold before the staff potluck; the second is after the staff potluck. it is always fun to make pudding and i welcomed the chance. thanks, zorra. once again, this was real fun.

monday randomness

first off, a picture of a package i received from purl(dot)com. i don't know why this wrapping tickled me so, but i thought it the sweetest way to send a package of yarn. and why buy yarn from across country you may wonder. the yarn was for my sweet friend's ruffled scarf and cute husband's socks. i had purchased yarn for these projects at purl soho during the nyc spring excursion trip. but i had a brain burp when buying the pink yarn so was short a hank, and felt i needed one more hank of sock yarn for my cute husband's socks. so i decided to continue the theme of the yarn coming from purl soho. plus i could shop online at midnight. what more could you ask?

the second is the challah i made for hanukkah presents for some work mates. i was thumbing through baking with julia for bread baking day #4 recipes and came across the challah recipe. since braided breads are a favorite of mine, i couldn't pass up the opportunity to bake braided bread and give gifts at the same time. so here they are, fresh out of the oven. the egg glaze baked brown right away so i had to cover the loaves with tinfoil for the last half of baking time. i also used black sesame seeds since i could not find where the regular golden ones had been creatively stored by the kitchen helpers. so though the sesame seeds may look like they were burnt, they weren't. and regardless of any of the above, the breads were much liked and enjoyed. my office mate served hers the next night at hanukkah supper when her grown daughters and their significant others flew into town for hanukkah. she was barely able to save me a slice so i could taste it because it was eaten all up. and that is what gift baking is all about!

all the time

though my latest blogs have been filled with baking, i am knitting. i mean, christmas is coming up, of course i am knitting! though i tried to start early on all projects, and i have even completed some of i still feel waaaaay behind the eight ball.

with that being said, here is what i am working on...

two ruffled scarves out of ry cashsoft in the donkey and foxglove colorway. it is a pattern that i am sort of adapting to what i would like it to be, long with ruffles. i also chose to just knit simple garter stitch for the scarf, but with a much larger needle than called for. which makes the ruffle and scarf drape well. so far so good. having it be simple garter stitch makes it very simple, quick and mindless for me.

misti alpaca ruffle scarf in the ember melange colorway. technically i have not started on this yet but it is such a simple scarf if i just devote a couple of days to it, it will be done.

non-stop knitting of nubbins for ta-ta's dishcloths by vyvan neel at knitting in a happy camper. i am making these out of every sugar 'n cream colorway i have. they are quick, cute, quirky and fun.

mac and me's shorty ruffle scarf. i got the pattern and yarn for both my sweet friend and myself from purl soho in nyc last spring. another garter stitch quick knit with picked up stitches to knit a lacy ruffle along the four edges with a different colorway. i am trying to finish my sweet friends for christmas. mine i will do after the holiday knitting.

blossom shawl from mag knits for mom out of elsebeth lavolds silky wool in claret. can't wait to start this, the yarn is really yummy!

and as soon as i can get WIP's and camera in one place at the same time, there will be pictures! until then, take a look at tudora on knitty.com designed by fellow blogger cheryl. it is really quite beautiful. congrats cheryl.

it's to cold to rise

in honor of bread baking day #4, i offer this post.

bread baking day #4 was hosted by baking history. many thanks, this was real fun. the assignment was to bake a bread with spice and post about it by 1 dec.

since it is baking in december and the beginning of various holiday celebrations, my first thought was to bake gingerbread. the silver palate cookbook has my favorite gingerbread recipe. very quick, simple and wonderfully good. i bake this for my sweet friend and i quite a bit during the holidays. since i am always striving to trim the fat, i used cholesterol free liquid eggs and substituted half of the oil with applesauce. and since i do have an incurable sweet tooth, i used all of the lemon glaze recipe for pouring over the hot gingerbread! i am not sure if it was the lack of fat or that it was freezing cold in our house or that i poured the complete amount of glaze that made it harden instead of soaking into the bread. it is probably a mixture of all of those things, though it did not affect our enjoyment of it. there is barely enough of the loaf left for tomorrows breakfast tea!

and since gingerbread is a quick bread instead of a yeast bread, i also chose to bake swedish cardamom braid from bernard clayton's new complete book of breads, the revised and expanded version. this is a very rich bread with both butter and eggs. again, i used the liquid eggs and put in 1/2 cup of flax seed meal for a bit of the butter. i also substituted currents for raisins. and since our house is drafty and cold, this dough had a bit of uneven rising. once i turned on the oven and let it rise on the open oven door, it did much better. i brushed the braid with an egg white glaze before baking and baked it on a stoneware cookie sheet which browned the outside of it nicely. while slicing i was a bit worried when the crust seemed a bit hard. once past the crust, the bread inside is so crumbly the browned crust kept the bread from falling apart. the bread is a little rich for me, though the cardamom offsets the butter well. but i love braiding bread and the look of braided loaves, so it was nice to do that again.

but i love baking bread and it is always great to see what others bake, so thanks for hosting bread baking day #4, baking history. it was great to be a part of it.

thank you all

we were supposed to go to some dear friends house for thanksgiving supper with 40+ of their closest friends and a tour of their vineyard. but last night i discovered nothing i ate stayed with me and i couldn't seem to get warm. and though this morning i was up and ready to go, i really didn't feel much better, so my sweet friend and i slept the afternoon away.

coming from a family of non-meat eaters, we had pasta with homemade marinara sauce and steamed cauliflower for supper along with peppermint ice cream and low fat pumpkin custard for desert. my cute husband and i then watched casino royale, with the guitar strumming son and room cleaning daughter wandering in and out.

it was a wonderful day. though the boys were a bit bored, we all cracked jokes, watched tv, took care of each other, ribbed and teased each other and generally had fun.

it is a lot to be thankful for and i am very grateful. so thank you for stopping by to visit. may you be well.

so close

i have been working on the flying v scarf out of exquisite little knits since last christmas season. it was a last minute knit for the department christmas gathering. and i have to admit, for the most part it has been at the bottom of the knitting pile. but i recently dug it out and have been taking it with me everywhere so i could knit it whenever i got the chance with the hope of finishing it before this christmas season.

i was so close to finishing it that i started to get worried. worried? yes, because the more i knit, the wider the scarf got. i thought my tension had changed; i thought i had loosened it dramatically. until i had the thought of counting my stitches. the last 15 rows of the scarf pattern depend on having a certain number of stitches. so i counted the stitches. and found instead of the 32 stitches i was supposed to have i had 46 stitches. this is why the scarf was wider. my tension was fine.

so i frogged...and frogged...and frogged until i reached the needed 32 stitches which resulted in the scarf looking like this:

it seems i forgot to do the middle SKP stitch on a regular basis. which meant i had an extra stitch on a regular basis. which, in turn made the scarf wider on a regular basis.

so i will start from here and knit it all again, in hopes that i can finish it sometime soon and be comforted by the fact that at least there will be fewer stitches to knit!

a nearly perfect weekend

so i have been alone this weekend. the big guy is at school and my cute husband and sweet friend are at a ymca conference for three days. i had the whole weekend to myself.

and i nearly did all the things i wanted to. i got some material to make more knitting project bags; i picked out new lip colors; i bought a waffle iron; i stopped by the LYS for the first time in weeks; i made myself turkey meatloaf; i knitted; i slept in; i made buckwheat waffles; i cleaned the house a bit and did a bit of laundry; i took a long walk; took pictures of my stash for ravelry and baked bread. and believe it or not, the list of things i did not get to is longer than those i did. but that's ok. i did whatever i wanted to and did not feel pressure to do more.

and i got to bake one of my favorite breads, pioneer bread. it was a baking staple when i was single. the recipe calls for cornmeal but i would substitute millet. since there wasn't millet flour, i would buy millet in bulk and grind it up in a spare coffee grinder in order to bake with it. maybe it was the name, maybe it was the fact i had to grind up the millet to make the flour, but the bread always reminded me of something ma ingalls would do. so i always appreciated baking day.

but this time i got to use the new bread pan. which is cool, but may be to small! who knew my bread loaves were hefty size?! so the bottom of the loaf did not brown like the rest of the bread(s). the recipe also has eggs in it which makes the bread very soft. the first few slices were quite wiggly. it may have been because it was hot out of the oven! but it is very good. and it made a mean turkey meatloaf sandwich!

i had to do it...

my first knitting book was cheryl oberle's, folk shawls. this book offered 25 shawl patterns gathered from around the world. shawls being of various difficulty knit from an array of yarns. the one that caught my eye for a first knitting project was the garter stitch prairie shawl. it was simple, something i would use and ma ingalls would think it practical. the pattern was as the name implies, garter stitch with a yarn over border. at the time, the most challenging stitch for me was the KFB.

but it was the book and the project that started me knitting. i would look through all the beautiful shawls, struggling with deciphering the various stitch patterns, keeping a list of which shawls to knit some day. though i still want to knit half of the book, my ideal was the bird’s nest shawl from the himalayas. this is a 80”x20” shawl with a relatively (now) easy lace pattern. the pattern calls for the shawl to be knit out of pure cashmere…yarn held double while knitted. lust as i may, buying 2,267 yards of pure cashmere is not in my budget.

a few weeks ago i received an email from knit picks announcing a yarn sale. and though i had secretly vowed not to buy any more yarn until the beginning of the year, i thought i would just look. but there it was...as i was perusing the alpaca cloud, one of the suggested patterns for this yarn was the bird's nest shawl. i audibly gasped. for a fraction of the price, yarn for a bird's nest shawl could be mine. and, because of the secret vow, i thought about it for a couple of days before actually purchasing it.

the yarn came a couple of days ago. i chose the moss heather color. and it is really lovely. both my cute husband and sweet friend said, oh, yarn came for you today...as if you need more. but i don't care what they think. i can knit a bird's nest shawl.