Cooking

Friday Roundup: Anticipation

What I’m Knitting

I’m still plugging away on the blanket squares! I’m at the tail end of square #8, so there’s just one more to go and then the joining and finishing.

I’ve enjoyed making this blanket, but as with any larger project, I’m impatient to start something else. I’m eyeing up these beauties that have been in my stash for a while with the idea of making a girl’s top of some sort. We aren’t finding out the gender of the baby arriving in about a month, so there’s a 50/50 chance that I’ll get the right variety of model… hey, I like to live on the edge!

What I’m Cooking

My main culinary endeavor this week was a new recipe for veggie burgers! These mostly consist of mashed sweet potato, brown rice, and black beans. They turned out really tasty! Because they were oven baked, they were also just the right consistency—much easier than frying burgers like I’ve done before.

What I’m Reading

On a whim, I grabbed The Face on the Milk Carton off my bookshelf. I hadn’t read the book in probably twenty years, but I devoured it over two days. I forgot how compulsively readable this book is!

Friday Roundup: Spring!

What I’m Knitting

It’s really starting to feel like spring around here, and that always makes me want to trade in my big bulky yarns for lightweight ones. Luckily, I finished the first of my secret designs (bulky yarn on US #15 needles!) and got to switch to another in light fingering weight yarn with US #1 & #2 needles. I can’t show you much, but here’s a little sneak peek at the yarn—the most gorgeous tonal gray—and the beginning of the item:

What I’m Cooking

Spring weather calls for spring rolls, don’t you think? I adore spring rolls, and this new recipe I tried with kale and tofu (from www.minimalistbaker.com) is now one of my favorites:

Peanut butter cookies were also made and summarily devoured.

What I’m Reading

I’m still working away on The Infinite Sea. While I really like this book series, and I think it’s extremely well written, I also find it a bit intense for long blocks of reading. There are lots of kids in mortal peril, something that didn’t bother me quite as much before I had a kid of my own! But I’m enjoying the read and will hopefully be done with it by next week’s roundup.

Friday Roundup: Yummmm

What I’m Knitting

I got another square of the baby blanket done and blocked this week—that’s four down, five more to go! But the yarn for the commissioned designs that I’ve been waiting for arrived today, so the blanket will have to go on hold for a little bit.

My son helped me knit the last few rounds of the square by shoving DPNs into the WIP:

I can’t tell you much about the designs, but trust me, this yarn is goooorrrgeous. It feels like kittens distilled into yarn. Here’s a teaser pic:

What I’m Cooking

Some extremely tasty banana muffins with chunks of apple this week:

And pure vegan comfort food, quesadillas with onions, peppers, roasted corn, and olives:

What I’m Reading

I’m just starting the last book in the Star Wars cycle I’m reading! I don’t want it to end… but at least I have the new Rogue One movie to look forward to in December. (Have you seen the trailer yet? It’s awesome!)

Friday Roundup: Eye Candy

What I’m Knitting

The yarn I’m waiting for still hasn’t arrived, so I’m plugging away at more squares for my lace/cable baby blanket. I finished and blocked the second square and am nearly done with the third… but it looks pretty much exactly like the crumpled, pre-blocked mess I showed off last week, so I’ll spare you.

I do have some yarny goodness to show off, though! Way back in January, I found out that I’d been randomly selected to win a spectacular prize in the Indie Design Gift-A-Long on Ravelry. Designer Casapinka on Ravelry donated a prize pack for her gorgeous Purpleplexy Shawl that included a gradient skein pack and a single skein base color of luscious Miss Babs Yummy 2-Ply. I picked out the Gemstones gradient and Slate as the base color.

Here’s what it looked like in the package:

And since I couldn’t go another second without seeing the pretty colors properly (despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I’m never getting those little skeins squished back into their package), here they are in all their glory!

I am in looooove. Thanks so much, Casapinka!

What I’m Cooking

I made some oven-baked falafel and homemade vegan tzatziki this week. When I’ve made falafel before, it’s used canned chickpeas, but this recipe called for dried beans, soaked for at least an hour. I soaked them for two hours, but they were still as hard as rocks when I tried to process them together with the rest of the ingredients. I had to soak them for another couple of hours before I could get anywhere with them. The finished product was really tasty, though!

I threw together a quick tofu stir fry for dinner one night:

And a quiet morning with the toddler gave me the opportunity to make one of his favorite breakfasts—pancakes!

I attempted a Mickey Mouse pancake, but clearly there’s some class at parent-qualifying school I missed, because it came out pretty sad looking. The toddler scarfed it down anyway. :-)

What I’m Reading

I’m nearly done with the third book in the Thrawn trilogy and am at the point where I start to read slower/less so it will last longer. Does anyone else do that with really good multi-book series when you’re sorry to see them end?

Friday Roundup: Yummy Yarn and Yummy Cookies

What I’m Knitting

I’m hard at work on two of the three secret deadline projects that are due soon after the holidays. So no pics there, unfortunately. But in other yarny news, I did receive a most excellent package in the mail a few days ago:

That’s a grab bag of Madelinetosh Tosh DK from WEBS! I usually manage to restrain myself when they put these grab bags up, but this time I had a very healthy PayPal balance and couldn’t resist. You can’t specify colorways, but they try to honor requests. I asked for blues and greens, as well as multiple skeins in the same colorway for a bigger project. I think I made out very well! (That green especially is luscious. I’ll have to come up with a perfect project for that one.)

And for a bit of enabling… it looks like WEBS still has Tosh Sock grab bags available—so hop over there if you don’t want to miss out!

What I’m Cooking

The Great Cookie Extravaganza of 2015 has come and gone. I made quadruple batches of three different types of vegan cookies: peppermint brownies, sugar cookies, and healthy-ish jam thumbprint cookies. Then I packaged them up in individual boxes and gave one to each family who attended my parents’ annual Christmas party. It was exhausting, but they went over really well!

After all that baking, I didn’t have much energy for cooking for the rest of the week. I did manage to get this udon/miso stir fry whipped up on one of the days, which was very tasty and fulfilled my cookbook challenge requirement for the week:

And for my weekly meal-for-a-crowd, I tried a new recipe: pot pie with biscuits cooked right on top in place of a crust. It was delicious, but next time I’ll make twice as many biscuits and cover the whole top.

What I’m Reading:

I started a book by an author I’ve heard a lot about but haven’t read anything by this week. I’m liking it so far!

Friday Roundup: Vacation Edition!

What I’m Knitting

I’m on vacation! (A working vacation, but still.) My husband and son and I are out in the Seattle, WA area for the wedding of a family friend. Ordinarily, many hours on a plane means I’d have plenty of knitting progress to show off… but as any parent knows, taking an almost-one-year-old on a 5 hr + flight does not make for a lot of knitting time. He did really well, but there was a lot of wrangling!

I did, however, manage to stop by a really cool yarn store yesterday when we were wandering around the Pike Place Market area. So Much Yarn is cute and friendly, with an excellent selection of yummy stuff and a great view of the Sound. I was with a group of non-knitters, so I kept my browsing short, but I managed to snag this gorgeous skein of Wonderland Yarns March Hare in Curiouser.

I saw this yarn at TNNA last year and have been dying to try it out! I’m hoping I can get a little vest for my son out of it! (Apologies for the crappy phone snap. Trust me. It’s stunning.)

What I’m Cooking

Not much at the moment, as you can imagine… but I am eating some seriously yummy stuff in restaurants around here. I eat mostly vegan, as anyone who regularly reads this blog knows, and it’s so refreshing to see so many vegan options everywhere!

I did manage to bake some very tasty banana blueberry muffins before we left, however:

What I’m Reading:

I didn’t take my current book with me on the trip, because it’s A) a library book and B) huge. Instead, I’m re-reading a book from one of my favorite authors, Jennifer Crusie. It’s like comfort food in book form:

Rhinebeck 2013 Wrap-Up

Rhinebeck was amazing this year. The weather was even better than last year (about 10 degrees cooler, which made it perfect sweater weather). I bought some great stuff, ate some excellent meals, and had a ton of fun.

My husband took a photography class with Gale Zucker (aka She Shoots Sheep Shots) and had a great time taking pictures all weekend. So he gets the credit for all these photos.

The gorgeous fall colors

Crowds waiting to get in on Sunday-there were at least twice this many on Saturday!

One of the many barns stuffed with vendors, yarn, and people

Woolly friends

Me enjoying a cider donut (it was delicious!!!)

The colossal line for Miss Babs’s booth–it was like this all weekend!

And, of course, I couldn’t have a Rhinebeck post without showing you my purchases, hehe.

First up, a huge skein of Dirty Water Dyeworks Johanna, which will probably become a vest or short-sleeved sweater:

These six skeins of O-Wool Balance Bulky are going to become a cabled shawl/wrap:

And finally, my husband picked out these two skeins of Green Mountain Spinnery Mountain Mohair, for gloves he’s going to knit himself:

Not pictured: a Barbara Walker stitch treasury that I’ve had trouble finding in stores, maple cotton candy, a huge bag of local apples.

I think we did pretty well this year!

Hoosier Hills Fiber Festival

I can’t believe I forgot to post about this! A little over a week ago, my husband and I found ourselves in Franklin, Indiana on one of the days of their annual Hoosier Hills Fiber Festival. We went in on a whim (hey, I’m always up for some yarny shopping), and we really enjoyed it!

The festival was much more extensive than I thought it would be. There were three barns of vendors–LYSes, dyers, spinners, wood crafters, etc. This lacemaking vendor, promoting local lacemaking classes, was one of my favorites:

I got to feel up some bison yarn for the first time:

My husband loves historical gadgets, so this antique sock machine was right up his alley:

Easily my favorite booth at the whole festival was a whole wall of hand-dyed yarn from a local dyer, A Good Yarn. It was the first booth I saw when I came in, and I probably spent more time there than at any of the others combined. I didn’t get a great picture of the booth, but you can see some of her gorgeous skeins in the background of this shot:

And, of course, I couldn’t leave her booth without purchasing something. I made away with two skeins of sportweight superwash in this luminous blue color:

Lucky for me she didn’t carry DK or worsted-weight yarn, or I would have really been in trouble!

My husband did a more extensive blog post (with more pictures, and quite frankly more witticisms than I could ever muster) here, if you’re interested in checking it out: Fiber, Fiber Everywhere OR The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Hoosiers. :-)

A Very Good Week!

I’m still plodding along on my Bevin re-knit, but I wanted to show off all the neat stuff I’ve managed to acquire this week!

First up, brand-spanking-new business cards. I’ve been wanting to update my cards for a while, but it wasn’t until I found out I’d be attending a big, big knitting event next month (more on that later!) that I took the plunge.

They came in this adorable little case!

As you can see, I decided to make the back side of each card a close-up shot of one of my designs, and then put all the business-y info on the other side. My logo was due for a bit of a refresh, so I went ahead and did that at the same time. I think the cards turned out really well! I used Moo.com like I did for the mini cards I had made last year. Once again, I’m very happy with the results!

Next up: a Ravelry t-shirt!

I’ve wanted some Ravelry gear for ages. After all, if it wasn’t for Ravelry, I wouldn’t be a pattern designer. So when I saw they had shirts back in stock, I jumped at the chance. I got the unisex medium size, and it fits me very well (other than being a little long, which I can live with). And the fabric is soooooft. I want to cuddle with myself when I wear it.

And finally, the yarny portion of my acquisitions this week. I found a new to me local-ish yarn store, Village Yarn Shop in Zionsville, IN. Besides having a friendly and welcoming atmosphere, they had a seriously drool-worthy wall o’ Malabrigo.

I tried to restrict myself to this skein of Malabrigo Rios, for another upcoming sample re-knit:

But then I spotted this AMAZING color of Malabrigo Sock and couldn’t leave without it:

The colorway is Impressionist Sky. Apt, isn’t it?

So all in all, it’s been a pretty good week. :-)

Tough Decisions

(This is one of a series of design posts. The earlier posts can be found here.)

Remember I said we had a failed photoshoot for the gray sweater? Well, I was going through the pictures we got and realized something. Something not so fun.

I think I want to rip out and re-knit 30-50% of the sweater.

This is a really tough decision, particularly because it has nothing to do with the fit of the sweater. The fit is perfect, actually. See below:

What’s not so perfect (and even easier to see in these pictures than in life!) is the really terrible pooling of the hand-dyed yarn at the waist and below. This is particularly irritating because the upper body was knit with the exact same skein, but the smaller width below the armholes didn’t agree with the length of the color changes. What’s worse, I was working on this sweater mostly in the evenings in front of the TV and didn’t notice until the whole body was finished.

It’s also easy to see that the second skein I used for the sleeves and front pocket, while appearing virtually identical in the skein, included lots of dark bits not found anywhere in the first skein.

To tell you the truth, this is the kind of thing I’d ignore completely if I were knitting the sweater only for myself. The fit is perfect! The sweater is snuggly and cozy, just like I wanted! Who cares about some color differences?

But since I’m planning to sell the pattern, I know I won’t be happy with anything less than great pictures. And that is going to require ripping, rewinding, and alternating skeins.

Sigh.

Another factor is the season. This sweater is definitely more of a fall/winter piece. By the time I get it re-knit (sport-weight yarn, remember), we’ll be well into the spring/summer knitting season. So I think this is going into the WIP bin for a few months. I’ll probably revisit it in July and get everything ready for test-knitting during August, which will put me on track for a fall 2013 pattern release.

But it’s not all doom and gloom on the pattern-writing front! I started a new vest design with more Rhinebeck yarn, these two beautiful skeins of Cephalopod Traveller:

Learning from my mistakes, I’ve been alternating skeins the whole way. I’m pretty sure I’ll run out of yarn before I reach the end, but I found a Raveler willing to sell me a skein of this colorway and it’s already on the way, so no worries there. The vest is really, really cute so far. A great cure for the meh of the gray sweater.