The Knitting Post.

I mentioned I have been doing a lot of knitting lately. I can knit at work when things are slow and I am there for 50 hours a week now, plus commuting time on the train to knit, plus it's cold and dark anytime I'm at home, so I knit while watching TV. Here's what I've been doing:

Rose Bud Beanie. OK, to be fair, I made this in the Spring. It just only made it to its recipient recently and got its photo taken. It was my first lacy project and it was pretty challenging to start. I think it turned out all right in the end.

Texas Sweater. I made my mom a cardigan. She's always cold, but it is still Texas, so it's a nice, light sweater if you leave it draped, or you can wrap it to make it warmer. I splurged on the yarn - it was so nice and soft! I kind of want to make one for myself now.

Hat by Request. I whipped this one up for my sister-in-law's birthday. I had been toying with cables, but this is the first finished project using them. I didn't think it was working very well the whole time it was on the needles, but once I got it off and finished and on a head - it looked great!

Sky Scarf. I posted about starting this one a couple months ago. One row a day, color dependent on the weather. As you can see we've had a surprisingly blue winter. There was that one week in there that was soppy, but we've had no rain and either clear or foggy skies for over a week now. Wacky.

Portland Fog. These were my traveling project over Thanksgiving. I had 10 hours of flying time to work on them. I finished them really quickly, despite being a more complex pattern. It was about 2 good days of knitting per hand. They are my favorite accessory now. I want to be wearing them constantly.

Phew. So, that's a lot of knitting! I didn't even realize it until I put it all in one place. I have several work-in-progress going right now too. "Not So Secret Christmas Hat", some leg warmers for those cold morning bike rides, and a cabled cowl that may or may not ever get finished. I kind of lost my gusto on that one. If you are a Raveler you can find me there as bomburdoo. Happy winter knitting y'all!

Winter is Coming.

The garden has been given up on, as has any hopes for a social life. My job has finally broken me and I'm just not even trying anymore. Sure, I'm still making bread every couple weeks and when the milk starts to turn I make yogurt. Maybe next year we'll rip out the grass and expand the garden, but maybe not. I'm just not even going to think about it right now. Winter is coming and the biggest thing on my mind right now is knitting and preparing for the long, dark, wet of it.

We are finally getting new windows for the house. It's going to be glorious. We're upgrading from single-paned and aluminum framed to triple-paned and insulated vinyl framed. It should lower the heating bills substantially and make sitting on the far side of the living room bearable without an extra layer.

The cooler and shorter days are making knitting seem much more pleasurable too. I had to force myself to knit through the summer. There were so many other things I could be doing and needed to be doing, but now it seems a lot more seasonal. I'm about three-quarters of the way through my current big project. I've got two more projects in the queue with yarn already bought and I just started up a new experimental project last night. I went a little nutty with the online yarn ordering. It was all so cheap!




I'm starting on a "conceptual knitting" project, a Sky Scarf. The idea is you knit one row every day. The color of that row depends on the color of the sky. I have also seen people do mood scarves, with a different color for each mood and even an exercise scarf, tracking their different activities with greens and reds and gray for days they didn't do anything. That's good motivation - try for as little gray as possible!




For my Sky Scarf I have three shades of blue and three shades on gray. I'll be done when the scarf is long enough to suit my fancy. It will probably be done in the late Spring. I think it will be a pretty cool thing and end up mostly gray in the middle, flecked with short spurts of brilliant blue.

Fashionably Late.

Two weeks prior to my niece's first birthday I decided I would knit her a garment. I found a simple cardigan and thought at most it would take me three weeks and it would be fashionably late. Well....it's two months later. But it's done!




Well, I still need to sew on the buttons, but it's pretty much done! I'm still in disbelief that I actually finished this. About the time I realized I had sewed on the front panels of the sweater backwards I started to doubt my ability to finish and very nearly just went to the store to buy a sweater. Hopefully I'll be able to update with a shot of her wearing it soon.

'Twas the day before Christmas...

Merry Christmas Eve!

I've been so busy the last few weeks with work and preparation for the holidays and other various projects that I haven't had time to sit down and write about any of the things I've been doing! First off I finally finished the arm warmers I started back in September. They are riddled with mistakes, but I told myself I didn't care and that they were practice, so I just kept knitting. And, now when you put them on and look at them from across the room, you can't even tell.

I had a busy weekend last weekend with holiday cookie baking. I made German Honey Cookies, Whipped Shortbread and Peppermint Fudge.

I made some yogurt too, which I have fallen out of the habit of doing. Of course, as soon as I told myself we didn't eat enough yogurt for me to keep making giant batches there was a bout of gastrointestinal distress in our house and we had to go out and actually buy a big carton of yogurt. I had failed. But I found myself last weekend with half a carton of milk on the verge of expiring, so it got me back in the yogurt-making swing of things.

We are going to do the family Christmas celebration tonight and the kitchen has started working! I made my little timeline of oven temps, cook times and prep times to make sure everything is ready to go by 6pm. So far we are on schedule! Bread is rising, beans are simmering...

And in between things I've started my next knitting project. It's going to be a cowl with a big wooden button. I'm knitting on size 19 needles, which, frankly, makes me feel like an elf. They are gigantic! On the plus side it makes knitting go super fast, which is in need after the last 3-month project. Some instant gratification is needed around here.

And, lastly, here's a cat. Merry Christmas!

Back at work.

I'm getting back into the groove of working all day. So far I have been fairly successful in still cooking from scratch most days and doing my projects in the evening, like making pickles on a Tuesday night. I was sure this morning to wake up a few minutes early so I could prep my pie dough for dinner tonight. It didn't take more than five or ten minutes to mix and then place in rounds in the fridge to rest until this evening. Of course, doing this and not getting home from work until 7pm means dinner time is now usually somewhere around 8:30, which means by the time we eat and finish cleaning the kitchen there is only another hour or so until bedtime!

I started a new knitting project last weekend too. I've had the pattern picked out for quite some time, but I just hadn't gone out to get the right size needles and the yarn. I'm making some nice tall arm warmers with thumb holes. I'm pretty excited about them. In discovering my office mate is also a knitter (and much more accomplished and experienced than myself) I have brought my knitting into work. I've been able to work on it during the lunch hour, and the last couple days during the day too. I'm working on a feature film now and since there is only one project we are all working on, when one department gets backed up it goes down the line. We have been waiting for that inevitable tidal wave of work to rush into our department all week and while we've been waiting, we've been knitting.




On the schedule for work this weekend: Cat-proofing the garden! It's been a constant struggle all summer to make the cats learn that even though there are three giant boxes filled with dirt in the front yard that it does not mean they are litter boxes. We tried the stuff you sprinkle around the edges of the garden that is supposed to repel cats and other critters. Our guys were walking right through it ten minutes after application. We tried the motion activated sprinkler, which only goes off for shadows of a windy tree, but not for cats walking right in front of it. We tried BBQ skewers pointy side up throughout the garden. I managed to poke myself on them a few times, but the cats are more agile than me and just wrap themselves around them. Now, however, that we are starting a new season and going back to the dirt level with new seeds we are going to get some chicken wire and lay it down on the dirt and let the plants grow up between it. This way (theoretically) they can't dig at all. They'll probably just poop on top now. Sigh...

Striped Hat.

My most recent knitting project – Striped Hat.

Now that I have proven color change capabilities to myself I want to try cables.

Tech + Handmade.

While I was on my trip I finished two knitting projects. These are the first two projects I have ever completed. One was a baby blanket. It took a long time, and halfway through it caused me to almost swear off knitting forever. But I persevered. And then I forgot to take a picture of it before I gave it away. My bad.

I also upgraded my cell phone and I didn't want to just throw my new fancy phone in my bag to make friends with my keys and other scratchy things like I did with my last phone. So, I knitted a cell phone case. It's small, so it only took two days, but it was the first time I had sewn a seam, or a button, or velcro. I'm pretty proud of it. Plus, I didn't spend $25 on a plastic case. I spent $5 on materials for a handmade one.

My mom and I stopped by a Michael's while we were out one day so I could pick up some velcro and a decorative button. Did you know that Michael's doesn't have buttons? Not really. They have some bags of kitschy, novelty buttons, but they don't have a button section. What kind of craft store doesn't have a button section?! It worked out for the best though because my mom said that she thought she had my grandmother's old jar of buttons. And she did.

I remember being a little kid and dumping out the big jar of buttons and playing with them at the dining room table. Organizing them, inspecting them, dumping them into and out of the jar. It's amazing what will entertain a child. I'm very happy now that I get to carry around one of my grandma's buttons all the time. I get to take that memory with me wherever I go.

Easiest. Bread. Ever.

I found this recipe in my Encyclopedia of Bread and Bread Baking book a little while back. It has got to be hands down the easiest, fastest, most filling loaf of bread ever. The book gives a little history about the loaf. It was published in Britain during World War II. I can understand why, it's hearty and easy and doesn't use a lot of ingredients. So, here it goes; a true no-knead bread.

(The book recipe makes 3 loaves, so I reduced this quite a bit)

5 cups whole wheat flour

2 1/2-2/3/4 cup warm water

1 tsp. dry active yeast

1 tsp. Brown sugar

1 tsp. salt

Mix yeast with 2/3 cup warm water. Add sugar after a couple minutes and let sit for 10 minutes.

Sift flour and salt in a large bowl, make a well in the center.

Add yeast mixture and remaining water to flour.

Mix until it forms a slimy ball (I find that my dough is often too floury, so add water as needed). Tim did not make the bread. He served only as moral support.

Then, get this, dump it into the pan. Cover it with oiled plastic wrap.

Work on your knitting, or whatever for 30 min. Side note: I realize this is far to large to be a baby scarf. And, Mike pointed out that you probably don't want to wrap something around a small child's neck anyway. So, the scarf is for me. I screwed up anyway (I'm turning it into a pattern though, can't you see?) and it's my first attempt. But, after that I'll make a baby hat, or blanket, or something else appropriate and appropriately sized.

Then, put it in the oven at 400 degrees for 40 minutes.

That's it. And this is a really yummy, filling loaf of bread. One slice feels like a meal.

I knit!

I had more guests in town last weekend, so I fell off the blog wagon. I'm back now to an uneventful life filled with watching young plants, baking bread and knitting. That's right! Knitting! My best friend since the 3^rd grade came out to visit me and she taught me how to knit. It may be a bit of the blind leading the blind as she has only been knitting for a year and she taught herself. But, she made a lovely red scarf for my Birth-mas (We are really bad about giving gifts on time) and it looks like she knows what she is doing to me.

So, I am going to start my first knitting project, which will most likely be a scarf for a six month old child. I'm set to have a niece or nephew born this summer who lives in Colorado, and I figure this should work out well for next winter. My goal in knitting talents is to be able to make myself a cozy, oversized cardigan with big buttons. This make take years, but it's my goal.

While my friend was here we made pizza too. It was the first time I had ever made my own pizza dough before. For some reason it just seemed so hard, even though pizza is an “easy meal”. I'm glad I did it though, because it really was easy, and it's a great way to use up leftover bits of vegetables and onions and scraps of cheese. Pizza is going in the repertoire.

In other news, the radish pasta we made from the first harvest was amazingly delicious. I still have a bunch left over for salads, and think I might try to make radish butter with one of the next harvests. Doesn't that sound amazing? The broccoli starters are still standing. I'm not sure how. We have had crazy amounts of rain the last week or so, even for the Northwest, and the wind has been horrific and it's been really, really cold. I had to break out my dead-of-winter-sweaters again. It was sad. The forecast right now still looks a little sketchy, but I have a faith that Spring will come to Oregon this year. I'm just not sure when.