Susan Knitting (mostly)

More orange

2011-10-22T14:50:00.003-04:00

I promised more pictures and I had every intention of taking some good ones, but time got away from me. So I have no photos of the bride's bouquet or the boutonnieres. I'll have to wait and see if the photographer got any that are close enough to see.

This is the flower girl's basket. Why is there a butterfly on the basket (not a "fall" concept, I protested...)? The bride wanted it. The bride wanted one in the flower girl's headband...but her mother talked her out of that one. (Thank you, MOB.)

A bridesmaid's bouquet. Not the greatest photo, but I was in a hurry.... There were four of these. Vendela cream roses, orange spray roses, mango calas, seeded eucalyptus, and orange freesia.

The orchids used in the bride's bouquet. There were quite a few left over and I've been enjoying them.

And because the orange just keeps coming. Butternut squash soup with roasted red pepper puree. Recipe is from Epicurious. This is seriously good soup. Don't skip the red pepper puree...it makes the soup.

Hive hat (from the Knitting Bee in Portand, OR) and mittens I invented to go along with the hat. Very pumpkin-esque. I was sad to read that the Julia yarn by Kristin Nichols is being discontinued. So I dug out the skeins Kristin had given me during her class and made something. Even though it has no embroidery, I think Kristin would approve.

I'm so done with orange.

No more orange

2011-10-12T21:20:00.001-04:00

If I am ever asked to do the flowers for another wedding it will be on one condition: no orange. This is the second wedding I've worked on that was brown and orange. I don't like orange. Really. Don't. Like. Orange.

This one's all about fall and pumpkins, so today we went tromping through the woods to cut fall colored leaves. It's been iffy around here...fall color has been delayed. This week finally things really started to turn colors. Just in time for the wedding, which is Friday. The plan was to save a lot of money and use foliage from the family's property--only buy roses. Up until this week I was really sweating that decision.

Here are some of the arrangements...tomorrow is bouquets....Friday morning boutonnieres and flower girl headband and basket. Stay tuned because there's more orange and more pictures to follow.

More than crayons

2011-09-27T23:25:00.000-04:00

I spent the afternoon and evening coloring -- with colored pencils. Stampassion hosted Karen Lockhart for two classes focused on coloring stamped images using techniques with colored pencils. Lots of colored pencils. I learned several new things about working with them, which only proves once again, that I didn't learn everything I needed to know in kindergarten. Oh, and I might have made a few cards. All of these are from Karen's stamps.

Karen is a master and a wonderful instructor. Now I just need a whole lot more colored pencils.

Itty bitty hat

2011-09-18T21:18:00.001-04:00

Too cute for words.

Sweet City Cupcake Hat - Ravelry Link

A quilt, a cozy, a sweater, and a sock

2011-09-05T21:18:00.000-04:00

I finished the quilt. All it had lacking was the binding, but it had been that way for almost two months. Way past time to stop procrastinating and finish it. It was the mitered corners on the binding that were holding me back. Well that, and past experience with welting corners on pillow covers. With coaching from Mom, done! (Only took four hours from beginning to end. Not the speediest process.)

Quilt - finished!

I had some extra fabric and batting and an idea. I've had this idea floating around for about a year. I love coffee made in a french press. I admit to being a coffee snob...I don't like the taste of the paper filter. And the water should be the right temperature. Most coffee makers don't get it hot enough, or at least the ones my budget can afford. I am quite happy to drink all sorts of coffee made elsewhere - but if I'm making it myself, it will be in a press. I remember the lady at Williams-Sonoma trying to convince me that an insulated french press was a really good idea and worth the extra 30 bucks. It wasn't long before I figured out what she was talking about. So for the past year, my coffee pot has usually looked like this. Stylish, right?

This time, before all the work to put the sewing machine away, again, I sat down and made a pattern and a cozy for the pot. The entire process took a whopping 30 minutes. I really could accomplish a lot more if my stuff didn't have to be hauled out and put back. Really. (No not really. If I had a craft room, I'd just walk by and ignore it all...probably use the space as a dumping ground from more books and yarn.)


French Press Cozy - now very stylish

I also finished the last of the baby sweaters. This is the second one from the pattern I wrote. It came out a lot better than the first version. I got the shaping on the sleeves right. It reminded me of a Chanel jacket and one of my students dubbed it "Baby Chanel." Tres chic.

Finished sweater

And here's the sock. I can't decide whether to keep it or rip it out. This is the case of a great pattern, wrong choice of yarn. I think the lace pattern is obscured by the colors in the yarn. It actually doesn't look too horrible here, but when you put it on stretched, it just looks like crap.

Yarn is Koigu KPPM

The pattern in the book used a handpaint...but darker and with less variation in color.

Almondine, Anne Hanson, from Sock Knitting Master Class, Ann Budd, ed.

I should have paid more attention. This yarn is going to end up in a very simple (boring) sock. It's the second time I've tried to knit it. The first time the gauge was off and it was too small. Now the gauge is right and the pattern is wrong.

No cookies

2011-08-28T21:02:00.001-04:00

I was going to write a post about rain, wind, and boredom and my internal fight not to bake cookies (which is what I would normally do on a gray and rainy day), but just as I was about to write the first sentence, the power went out. That was at about 4:00 pm. Drat.

I had been slowly undoing all of my "hurricane" preparations during the day as time went by and nothing dire had happened. I turned the refrigerator back to a normal temperature. I let the water out of the bathtub. I dumped the drinking water I had stored in pots and pans on the stove. I put away the candles and matches. I plugged everything back in.

So I did what any normal person with no electricity and no backup lighting might do at 4:00 pm. I took a nap. The lights came back on at 7:00 pm and woke me up. I got up and started turning off lights...and thought I might go ahead and write. I downloaded some photos off my camera, cropped and resized them. I got through the first paragraph. The power went out again. Double drat.

I have now moved to the laptop on battery. I might be able to finish writing, even if all I have to see by is the glowing screen. Whether I ever get this posted is another matter. Back to boredom and rain.

Saturday was wash day. Not because it usually is but because the dirty dishes and the laundry were piled high and if I was going to end up with no power and no water for days -- per all the warnings from the weather services -- I wanted a clean kitchen and clean clothes to wear.

That's when the fight not to bake cookies started. A clean kitchen just begs for a cooking project. I kept thinking, "you're going to be cooped up inside all day tomorrow; it will be stormy and gray. Wouldn't it be great to have tea and cookies?" This internal dialog went on all afternoon and evening. I knew if I made a batch of cookies, I'd end up eating most of them.

I attempted to find a project to distract me. Every knitting project I have right now is a problem. The mittens are turning out too small, I lost the pattern for the socks, the sleeves on a yoked sweater are too tight. Sitting around ripping out knitting wasn't going to be enough of a distraction. In fact, that depressing activity might have driven me back to the kitchen and the butter, sugar, and flour.

I had a whole pile of jewelry projects. Not interested.

So I played with paper, stamps and colored pencils. And made tomato basil soup instead of cookies.

Here's the paper:

And here's the soup:

No cookies. But I'm thinking that the bag with the tag will be a great container for cookies at Christmas time.

Three of Four

2011-07-26T20:14:00.002-04:00

So I said I had four babies at work coming within in the next six months. Here are three of the four sweaters. Pink. Purple. Green. They are cute, even if I do say so myself.

Sweater pattern is invented by me. This was done
for the class I'm teaching at work.

Sweater pattern: Baby Kimono (Ravelry link)

Sweater pattern: Seamless Yoked Baby Sweater (Ravelry Link)

And because I had the yarn, there was a blanket too...

Pattern: Hap Blanket, from Whimsical Little Knits

There's another sweater in the works. I'm knitting the pattern along with my class to make sure that I've got the instructions right. I think after that one, I will be through with little sweaters for a while. I hope.

Spacely Quilt

2011-07-17T13:34:00.001-04:00

Continuing in the no-knitting theme here's another project I did this spring. I had liked the log cabin quilt that Anne Shayne of Mason Dixon knitting had re-interpreted in knitted form. Her inspiration came from this book. In fact, I liked it so much, I bought the book.

Log cabin has always been one of my favorite quilt blocks. I took a quilting class in Austin just on log cabin quilts, what seems like hundreds of years ago. That year I made Christmas ornaments with log cabin blocks, and from the class I have a stack of unfinished blocks still sitting in my closet. (Well, I guess I don't like them enough to actually finish them...). So when I ran into this fabric at the quilt store, I couldn't resist. Can I just say now that it's very evil to have the only quilt fabric store in Albany two doors down in the same shopping strip from the only yarn store? Impossible to just ignore the one when you're standing in the other.

At work there are four babies due, and it's likely that all of these people will have showers hosted for them. It's either a good thing or a bad thing that I've now established a reputation for doing something handmade for baby shower gifts. In the previous three cases, I've knitted a baby sweater. When I saw this fabric, I knew it had to be a baby quilt. And thanks to the book, I knew which one. For one of the expectant parents, this fabric is a perfect fit. It reminded me of the Jetsons and the companion fabrics all had computer/technology themes.

The design process didn't go very smoothly, unfortunately. One of the companion fabrics was this one:

I let the staff in the quilt store talk me into this set of fabric - which standing in the store all looked great together. They even looked great stacked up on my table cut into strips.

By the time I had pieced together the first block, I was beginning to have doubts. It didn't look very "baby" and the orange was starting to scream at me. (I'm really trying to get over my aversion to orange.) It looked like this:

After three or four blocks, I realized that I wouldn't be happy to just grab a fabric randomly, so I decided to lay it all out and figure out what strips went where. That's when I got the sinking feeling that this whole project was going to cost me a lot more time and money, because I hated how it looked. The only thing I could see was orange. And the point of the whole project was for the the little space ships to shine.

So I picked out all the seams of the assembled blocks. That was fun. And started over. Fortunately, I had enough fabric left to complete the quilt without the orange. In fact, I have enough fabric left to make another entire quilt in the orange, if I found a different backing and sashing option. Here's a completed block:

And the quilt put together.

True to form, it's not finished. I hate finishing steps. I hate them in knitting projects and I guess that extends to sewing too. I got through the step of assembling the layers and tying the knots so I could get it off the living room floor, but I haven't put the binding on it yet. It took some searching to find a fabric for the binding.

I have until September. I keep telling myself that there's no rush. I'm sure I'll still think the same thing when it's the evening before the shower and I'm sewing binding on at 10:00 pm.

Stamped Tangles or Tangled Stamps

2011-07-16T09:46:00.001-04:00

I know. I haven't written in forever, but it's summer around here. And there's lots of stuff to do. Places to go, sun and heat to absorb (thought I'd never actually say that I like sitting in the sun) and I've been doing a lot of crafty things. I just haven't been taking any pictures or writing.

I took a class from Melissa Hoopes at Stampassion this past week that was a lot of fun. It was a combination of Zentangles and stamps. And it involved colored pencils -- one of my very favorite art supplies. We started with this stamp:

Then we added Zentangles and color. These are the two from class.

Here's Melissa's version - way better than mine.

But when I got home, since I bought the stamp, I couldn't seem to stop. And by accident, I came up with a version that has less color. Maybe because it looked more "tangle-ish," I liked this one even more.

So I kept going. Sorry for the fuzzy photos. This was roughly 11:00 pm; it's hard to take decent pictures at night, without flash. (And I'm too lazy to retake them all this morning.)

So those four became a little set. Maybe I'll frame them together. They remind me of inchies. Actually, they are about 1.5 inches square, so pretty close.

I don't think I have this out of my system yet, and I have more colors in my 24 pencil set of Prismacolor pencils, so I'll just keep going.

Mr. Grumpy and more Zentangles

2011-04-28T22:55:00.002-04:00

This was my feline visitor for the month of April while his owner was moving from Austin to Albany. I called him Mr. Grumpy. He has a real name, but it doesn't do him justice, so I gave him another name. He lived in a corner of my living room (because I wouldn't let him camp out under my bed) for the first three weeks. He was convinced that if he couldn't see me, I couldn't see him.

He came with very specific instructions: He only drinks water with ice in it. He only eats warm food. He needs to be brushed every single day. He likes to sit on only this pillow (which was shipped specially from Austin to Albany for him). He needs to sit out on the balcony to watch the squirrels and the birds every day. He only likes a certain kind of food.

Guess what. He could care less about the temperature of his food -- as long as it's chicken. Water could be cold or hot as long as it was running water. If it's less than 40 degrees outside, there's no way he's setting foot on that balcony. The 30 inch square pillow shipped special delivery received the most cursory sniff before being completely ignored for an entire month. An all attempts to brush him resulted in the most extraordinary display of feline hissing and growling you have ever seen. That's why he was Mr. Grumpy.

Mr. Grumpy

So while he was glaring at me in the corner of the living room, I was drawing. Finally, only a few days before his owner came back, he decided that I was an okay person and he came and laid at my feet while I was sitting at the dining room table. Now that he's gone home, I miss him a little. But not enough to get a cat of my own. I'll just be Aunt Susan and Mr. Grumpy will come and stay occasionally.

Zentangles drawn during Mr Grumpy's stay follow.

Doodling and Zen

2011-04-03T11:47:00.001-04:00

I might have taken up another pastime. Or maybe I've taken something I've always done (doodling) to a new level. And acquired some new tools. Oh, and a book or two.

The person who owned the Stampassion store in Albany - that closed - is teaching classes about how to Zentangle. I wasn't looking for something new to do with paper and pen, but the name caught my eye. What the heck was that? I figured a two hour class couldn't hurt and I might learn something new. It's new to me, but not really new. Go take a look at Flickr; 13 thousand photos posted with Zentangle in the tag.

I'm posting my first tries....the choice of patterns in most of them are not mine. They were made in classes or are rough approximations of layouts from the Zentangle 1, 2, 3, or 4 books. (Told you there might have been some book purchases involved....) One of the things recommended is to draw one a day for practice and to date them so you can see how your approach, taste, preferences change over time. These are in chronological order.

Some of these I like and some have so much going on that I think they just look messy. But then I guess that's the learning process.

Snow, Snow. And more Snow.

2011-02-02T22:26:00.000-05:00

I'm beginning to wonder if it's going to stop. We've had another 10 inches in the last two days. More tonight, Mother Nature thoughtfully mixing it with ice for the sake of variety. And Saturday it's supposed to snow again. The piles of snow are getting so high that just finding a place to put it has started to be a big issue. I've found myself inching my way forward in a parking lot intersection, trying to peer around an immense pile of snow, hoping that there's not some monster SUV barreling down the other way. Here's the scene outside the dining room window. I think the chair's going under. This weekend's snow may just do it.

And I'm still knitting little things. There are two people at work expecting babies in early spring. So it was time to dig up some baby sweater patterns. This one is Playful Stripes from Never Not Knitting.

And here are booties that I just couldn't resist. The pattern was in Danish, but with the help of a translation table for knitting terms, a good picture on Ravelry, and vague memories of having knit booties with similar construction more than 20 years ago, I was able to figure it out.

They're little red snow boots - at least that's what I think. Your guess is as good as mine as to what the pattern really said.

Brrr....

2011-01-26T07:42:00.001-05:00

Monday morning this was the scene on my thermometer:

There's that minus sign again. It's always a shock to see it. When I made it downstairs to my car and got it started, it showed -13. It didn't get much above 0 all day. Fortunately it's warmer today. Unfortunately it's going to snow again. This year winter is just not cooperating. I should have realized how lucky I was last January. The locals recall with a wistful look in their eyes the "mild January" of 2010. I don't remember thinking it was any such thing at the time, but in comparison I'm beginning to see their point.

I did have something new to keep me warm. Last year when this pattern first came out, Frost Tapestry, I bought it immediately and knit it very soon thereafter.

However when I got to the point of putting in buttonholes and attaching buttons (after having cut the steek), I decided that it just wasn't big enough to comfortably fit around my neck. There wasn't much I could do at that point to fix it. So it sat for a full 14 months.

I actually finished it this weekend and I finally used a few of my antique buttons. I keep buying these where ever I see them in good condition. By now I have 30 or 40 buttons and no knitting or sewing in the works to use that many. These are glass with a crocheted (maybe tatted?) insert.

So Monday I wore it. When it's really cold outside, this is the choice. It's 100% alpaca, and with the two colors stranded on the back making it essentially double layers, it's warm. And wrapping fairly close around your neck in sub zero weather is a good thing. Maybe I should knit the matching hat and mittens. Just in case winter gets worse around here.

Nothing new. More snow.

2011-01-23T11:36:00.001-05:00

It's snowing again. Maybe I should say it's still snowing. The view outside my window is the same...just the snow is deeper. Now it looks like this. I'm starting to think that maybe this winter the chair will end up completely under snow.

And the monster icycles are growing. If the wind blows I can hear them creaking. This cannot be good for the gutters or the roof. But then again it's not my house. Note that this was taken in the three hours this weekend (so far) that the sun has actually come out to play. When it does come out, the blue and white is lovely.

I found a button for my hat. The button turned out to be more expensive than the yarn. Vintage, hand carved, mother of pearl.

And I knit another hat, to go with the the pink scarf.

I now have half skeins of four different shades of pink and red in Malabrigo, some solid, some handpaint. I'm tempted to find a way to put them together and knit yet another hat. We'll see. Or I might move on to start yet another small project and keeping avoiding the big ones I don't seem to be able to make myself finish. I'm blaming it on the snow.

A whole lotta hats (and a scarf)

2011-01-14T00:03:00.002-05:00

It must be the snow. Maybe it's the wind. Maybe it's the sub-freezing temperatures. The scene outside my dining room window looked like this this morning. I think we got about a foot of snow.

Or maybe it's the seduction of Malabrigo, the gratification of finishing something in only hours, the easy knitting.

But whatever the reason, over the last three weeks, I've knit six hats....and a scarf. Four out of six hats are winners. One hat came to a terrible end. The last one just looks like crap on me.

So here they are. These top three came out fine.

Catacomb Hat - Malbrigo

Waffle Stitch Hat - Malabrigo

This one was an attempt at a different shape, hoping that some hat would actually look good on my pin head. This one comes close. And I'll probably make another of these. It's missing the band and a button, or buckle, or broach. But I want to find something wacky, over-the-top from a vintage store. So its adornment will have to wait until I have time for rummaging.

A Better Bucket Hat - Punta Yarns Merisoft Handpaint

This one is a very sad tale about what happens when you are impatient. And you don't knit a swatch and wash it. Before washing, it was just a smoodge too big, but still wearable. I soaked it and laid it out to dry. Now it was slide-down-over-your-eyes too big. I should have ripped the whole thing out and started over. But instead I had the brilliant idea to felt it. I can get it on my head...but once wool felts it loses most of its elasticity. Ruined. I am contemplating uses for felted fabric. Stay tuned.

Amanda Hat - Felted - Araucania Aysen

This is the way the hat is supposed to look. I knit it again in a different yarn.

Amanda Hat - Malabrigo

This is the scarf that was supposed to go with the first version of the hat, now unwearable.

Just Enough Ruffles Scarf - Malabrigo

And this is one of the most complicated hats I've ever knit. A beret, tam, saucer. Round thing. Again, an attempt to find a hat shape that looks good. Unfortunately it wouldn't be this hat. I love the pattern, love the yarn. It needs a home on the head of a pixie, with a perfect haircut and a cute nose, and who doesn't wear glasses. Unfortunately that wouldn't be me.

Fenimore Cabled Tam - Shelter

Triangles times three

2011-01-09T16:24:00.001-05:00

Summer ended. Fall came and went. Winter blew in. The first snow fell. There was Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years. I went to Austin three times (wow, three times in five months...). I drove to Rochester and back, twice. I made 48 pairs of earrings. I turned another year older. I lost 30 pounds - on purpose. Nothing written.

I'm not turning over any new leaves, nor I have I made a New Year's resolution related to writing. I just finally have time and some knitting. A combination of events that seemed to be pretty rare during the last five months.

Somewhere in those months, I made three triangles (and a hat and cowl, but that's another post). I'm not sure what the attraction was. Maybe short projects? Easy projects? Ones for which I already had the yarn? Justifiable procrastination from the the two cardigans I have on the needles right now? Anyway, I knit the Baktus Scarf (with a yarn over row), the Twin Leaf Shawl, and the Aestlight Shawl. Sorry for the washed out photos; the light is weird at this time of year and I haven't figured it out.

Over Christmas, spent in Austin, I did acquire a lot of yarn. It must have been the combination of knitting friends and easily accessible yarn stores. Well that and the fact that Hill Country Weavers is one of the few brick-and-mortar stores in the country selling Shelter. My dining room table looks like this:

Didn't I say sometime in August that I had a great new desk which was going to allow me to actually eat at my dining room table? So much for that idea.

What a table can do

2010-08-08T15:19:00.001-04:00

When you only have one work surface -- and that's theoretically where you eat too -- then usually something has to be displaced. Normally, around my apartment, the displaced thing is me. Meaning that the table is full of projects and I'm eating in my chair in the living room. Which was depressing. I equate being bored or lonely with eating in the recliner in front of the television. Maybe it's just a stereotype that plays in my head. But it was such an incredible pain in the butt to clean off the table, put away half-finished projects only to pull them out again days later, that the recliner/TV combo usually won out.

So one day a couple of months ago, I had this idea. Most of my space planning ideas result in making a huge mess, moving a lot of furniture, and then leaving things all over for months at time while the details get taken care of. This time wasn't much different. Started in April; finished in July. A workspace.

This is possibly the coolest organizational thing I've ever come up with. 107 inches of counter top. And all of it almost unobstructed by supports. Not having my own fix-it guy nearby, I asked a friend's husband to make it for me. I knew he was something of a perfectionist, but until we got involved with this project, I didn't realize how far that went.

One look at the space and he had decided that buying lumber wasn't good enough. Because it wouldn't be thick enough to support the expanse without a lot of legs under the table. So he had the lumber milled. Like go to a saw mill and talk to the guys....find a log....have the board cut. Two inches thick. I think I could stand on this thing and it wouldn't bend. (Although I don't plan to try. That would be tempting fate.) Then there was the issue of stain. I would have been happy with paint and a sealer. Although I could see the point: if you're hand picking wood, having it milled, letting it dry for four weeks, and then sanding it, you might want to see the wood. It looks black in the photo - but it's really stained to EXACTLY match (close enough was not acceptable) the two IKEA cabinets I bought to be the supports. The stain of course was custom mixed.

In honor of the new work surface, I've been bending wire and stringing beads. Here are the results:

So, you might ask, is eating at the dining room table all I'd hoped it would be? I don't know yet. It's still covered with knitting, a paper filing project, and magazines.

Trial and Error

2010-07-11T20:17:00.002-04:00

My living room and dining rooms are once again looking like a yarn shop exploded inside. There are many projects languishing on the floor, a chair or two, several baskets, the table, the sofa. Right now all of the big projects are tossed aside for some mittens.

Several weeks ago I went to Brattleboro, Vermont to take a class in Latvian Fingerless Mitts with Beth Brown-Reinsel. Beth is a great instructor and knows her topic well. A bonus was that two or three people in the class had real Latvian mittens with them. I never caught whether they had traveled to Latvia or someone from their family had. It was very nice to see the real thing up close. Like a dummy, I didn't take any pictures of those examples. I should have. One pair was knit at 12 stitches to the inch; really beautiful work.

I was happy with the class. I was not happy with the yarn I had taken to use for the sample. It was too thick and I didn't like the color choices I'd made. I ripped a lot of it out before I remembered to take a photo -- this is the cuff.

I had the right yarn, but it was much thinner and the class example had been knit for a DK or worsted weight yarn...so I gritted my teeth and followed along.

I learned that Latvians are serious about mittens. Like crazy serious. Like knitting a hundred pairs before you get married serious. These are definitely not just items of clothing to keep your hands warm. In 2006, when the Nato summit was held in Latvia, they knit 4,500 pairs of mittens to give to all the delegates and staff of the summit. Think I'm exaggerating? Go see the photos of all the mittens...yup somebody took a picture of every one of those mittens. Scroll down the page a little and you can click on links to see the men's and women's mittens from each of the four regions in Latvia.

I wanted to come up with my own version. I knew it wasn't going to be very authentic because the colors I had were all wrong. But it was a design challenge. I had the book, Latvian Mittens, by Lizbeth Upitis, but I'd never knit anything out of it - not even a swatch. Armed with the charts in that book and the 4,500 photos of mittens, I thought surely I could come up with something I liked.

Here's the first attempt at a cuff. The edge came out all wrong - too much ruffle and something about the multiple colors just didn't work. And I really hated the big circles.

So I went back to the photos. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which ones I did like and analyzing what drew me to those. Here's what I came up with in the end. The cuff isn't very traditional. I had to make some compromises because I was having a hard time fitting the pattern repeats into the number of stitches I had to work with.

Now I just have to stick with it long enough to actually finish them. The fun part is done. And I hear other projects laying around here calling my name.

Simplicity

2010-07-04T17:44:00.002-04:00

I've been out tromping around old houses again. This time at Hancock Shaker Museum in Massachusetts.

The museum is definitely worth the visit -- and I learned all sorts of things I didn't know about the Shakers. I have actually read a little about them, and I'd seen the film by Ken Burns (which the museum staff say is good, but has some inaccuracies in it), but still there was a lot more to hear and read about. And nothing compares to seeing the incredible beauty of their handwork. The essence of simplicity, form following function.

The museum has many of the work spaces preserved, the dairy, the kitchens, the weaving loft, the woodworking areas, the laundry, basket making, blacksmith, cider mill. The weaving loft (over the dairy - an interesting choice) made me want to jump the rope and get closer. But I managed to restrain myself. Just barely.

The round barn is the iconic structure of the site. I stood scratching my head at the drawings of how it was used. A three story barn, the second story had the door to drive in wagons with hay, via a ramp built to the second level. Animals came in on the first story, and hay could be piled up almost three stories high. The barn actually has wooden floors through most of it -- rather than dirt -- and they were scrubbed every morning.

In fact making things easy to clean seemed to be a driving design factor - beds had wheels so they could be moved. Chairs where hung on the walls so that floors could be easily swept and mopped, cabinets and chests went all the way to the floor and the ceiling so that dirt wouldn't accumulate under them or dust settle on top, even the window design for many of the buildings made it possible to remove both the upper and lower windows so that they could be washed without climbing ladders. About 150 years before anybody else thought to do the same.

I also had the impression that they didn't use color - maybe from the Burns film, but it's not true. In fact, the ochre they seemed to prefer for some spaces is positively mind bending.

And all of their meeting rooms, completely unadorned in any way, were painted in some part, an intense Prussian blue, that turned greener over the years as the linseed oil used as the binder yellowed.

What you wouldn't know about, until you actually stand in the buildings, is their skill in design for natural light. I've visited enough places built in about the same time frame (early to mid-1800's) to realize that they were masters at building so that natural light would come into every room. And when you're there taking pictures with only the sunshine streaming through the windows and thinking about all that hand work being done with only natural light, you can understand the reasoning. And then you think about the long winters and the many gray, rainy days and you really get the point.

A special scarf

2010-06-19T12:41:00.003-04:00

It doesn't look like anything spectacular, and I've certainly knit much more complicated things. But this one goes on the list of very special knitting projects. Because it's made from this:

My first usable handspun yarn. I've made multiple attempts to spin yarn - too thick, too thin. But this one, if it wasn't "just right," was at least close enough to warrant knitting it into something wearable, rather than holding on to the yarn just because I invested so much time in its creation. I found a shop, an hour's drive away from me, that rents spinning wheels- The Spinning Room in Altamont. I had the wheel for the month of April and started off with ambitious plans. In the end, I finished with 300 yards of yarn, made from Blue Faced Leicester wool.

I've wanted a wheel for years, but now I'm rethinking that wish. If I could only manage 300 yards in a month - really 600 yards of spinning, since it's a two-ply yarn - then maybe it's not the hobby for me.

There's just too much incredible yarn out there, and so little time to knit with it.

A visitor and some stripes

2010-03-28T14:14:00.002-04:00

When I got up this morning (late) and opened the curtains to the balcony, I found this little guy/gal sitting on the railing. She swiveled her head to look at me but didn't move (I'm calling it a "her" because it has to be something and I get to decide. It's my balcony owl). And she hasn't budged for the last several hours - other than to make sure, every once and a while, that I am still here. It's about 40 degrees outside today, but the wind is blowing at 20 to 25 miles per hour, so maybe she decided this is good place to spend the day. She doesn't appear to be hurt and I think she's pretty young.

Today I'm inside working on finishing a sweater. One that I hope will fit. I signed up for a class at Trumpet Hill, the local store in Albany, for EZ's Adult Surprise Jacket (ASJ). I'd point you to a picture somewhere on the internet, but the pattern at Schoolhouse Press has photos of baby and children's sweaters (Scroll waaay down the page - the website doesn't show a pattern per page so you can't link to it directly.) And other versions out there in blog land don't quite do it justice.

Class started with homework: a gauge swatch and a sweater that fits the way you want the ASJ to fit. I thought I would use stash yarn for this project, so I did a couple of swatches in stripes for trials. The first two are Cascade, using Fibonacci sequences to create the stripes.

The third is Julia yarn - the yarn that would have been my preference. From the last swatch I decided that I preferred the low-contrast colors. However, when I priced out what it was going to cost to make this sweater in Julia, I had to change plans. 180 dollars in yarn was not in my budget. I ended up with Lamb's Pride. It has some mohair in it to give it a little fuzz, like the Julia, but no comparison on color choices. I had to go with the colors at hand. And I also decided I wanted the stripes to be a little more random. (Random-ish, that is. I can't go with random for real. There are people who cast on for this sweater having a pile of yarn beside them and change colors whenever they feel like it. That's random.) So having tired of knitting gauge swatches to figure out stripes I just cut up a bunch of yarn and kept switching string around until I can up with something I thought would work.

I've been working on it for about three weeks and I finally have it at a point where you can actually see the shape of the sweater. I am hoping I'll be happy with it when it's finished, but right now I'm having doubts.

It's purple; it's pink. It's really bright. I think I might be crazy if I actually put this on and wear it somewhere.

It's a conspiracy

2010-03-10T22:02:00.001-05:00

Today an Austin co-worker mentioned that the first of these had been sighted...spring has arrived in Austin.

This is a picture from several years ago...no I'm not in Austin.

But I really, really wish I were.

I think the universe is conspiring to make me homesick. It started about two weeks ago, when it was gray, gloomy, and raining. I was going to a new Italian restaurant in my neighborhood continuing my quest to find really good, brick-oven, wood-fired, thin-crust pizza. You'd think with all the Italian influences in this part of the country that these would be a dime a dozen. They aren't. The best I've found so far is 45 minutes south of Albany in Hudson, Baba Louie's. Sorry, I digress... It turned out that the wait time in this new place was going to be an hour and a half. No way.

So I went to Chipotle's. It's new in the area, maybe there's only one. At least it's the first I've seen. I ordered soft tacos -- something of an experience to be served by a very Irish looking teen in a Chipotle restaurant -- but it's upstate New York. What should I have expected? (Don't take me wrong here, I have absolutely nothing against Irish looking teens...that's just not the demographic of a typical Chipotle employee in Austin, Texas.) As I was sitting there, in a place that seemed so familiar, this wave of depression just crashed over me. It was all I could do not to cry in my tacos. Needless to say I finished them and left. Quickly. I won't be going back there, no matter how much I miss Mexican food.

Sometimes we sit around at lunch at work and just make ourselves sick listing all the Tex-Mex food we miss. All the restaurants - Baby Acapulo's, Trudy's, Chuys, El Mercado, Maria's Taco Express - to name a few. After that experience, I'm restricting the eating of Tex-Mex to Austin.

Then tonight I was in Border's leafing through cookbooks and magazines, drinking coffee. A magazine that I often pick up, but rarely buy, is Artful Blogging. There on almost the last page, was this photo. A picture, taken very early one morning (because there are no cars parked on South Congress), of my favorite restaurant in Austin, Vespaio. The one with the really good, brick-oven, wood-fired, thin-crust pizza. A restaurant directly across the street from Hill Country Weavers, one of the best yarn stores, anywhere. The photo was taken by Malka Dubrawsky, stichindye.blogspot.com whose work is extraordinary, but whose photo hit me. Hard. I have to go home.

And by the way, I did make it to that new restaurant in my neighborhood. The pizza was awful.

Ambi-craftiness

2010-03-06T09:17:00.002-05:00

If one craft is giving you fits, move on to another. These are hobbies after all. Why should I let them frustrate me?

So I've been doing other things. Two weeks ago, while it looked like this outside my window:

I worked on these. Now that I think about it, last year in February I did the same. So here are some examples from the lastest jewelry tools mess I've made on my dining room table:

My favorite is probably the one in the middle. What sparked this switch to beading wire from yarn was a day spent with a friend visiting all the local bead shops. We'd never been to any. So we hit three in one day. The blown, clear glass turquoise beads are from Bumble Beads in Albany. My alternate hobby kick didn't stop with jewelry.

There was an afternoon in the kitchen, trying out another recipe from the The Baker's Apprentice. This time, cranberry walnut bread (mine has raisins instead.). It turned out really well and is a great breakfast bread.

But wait! (I feel like the Ronco knife guy...) There's more! I saw this book while entertaining myself at the book store.

And the cover quilt really grabbed my eye. Not only that, but it looked easy and seemed to be made out of fairly big pieces of fabric. (You always have to check the instructions on that "big pieces" part - there could be insanity in there, like making those solid strips from multiple little blocks of fabric...). So after begging "wild" prints from my mother and combining with other pieces I found to complete the set, I'm cutting out strips--lots o' strips of solid fabric.

Even though I was pushing myself to work with colors that I don't normally use (and to not freak out about all the different patterns) I still ended up with turquoise in there.

The sweater from hell

2010-02-06T17:10:00.000-05:00

Meet my most hated piece of knitting. I hate this thing so much I almost took scissors to it. The only thing stopping me was the thought of having to (eventually) clean up a ton of little pieces of yarn.

I've worked on this sweater on and off for six months. I wanted to knit a sweater that fit. That didn't pull up in the front, that wasn't too long in the sleeves, that was long enough in the body and that had enough space through the armholes so that a shirt or turtleneck underneath wouldn't bind up. I was enthusiastic. I've taken years and years of knitting classes; I've done all sorts of complicated projects. I've knit three full sweaters that had the right porportions. I was ready. I had yarn. I had a big swatch. I had a plan.

I measured a sweater that came close to fitting right. I figured out what size all the pieces had to be. I matched up the gauge with basic sweater instructions for that gauge. I re-read through all the shaping and fitting instructions I had. I rechecked all my body measurements.

The sleeves came out an inch and half too long. Took them apart at the seams, cut out a row and unraveled an inch and half at the bottom, reknit the cuff. Body was too short - well really, it wasn't but I had changed my mind about the finishing I was going to do on the bottom, so what I had wasn't long enough. Picked out all the seams and took off the bottom band, added 2 inches to the bottom. It wasn't easy to get the sleeve caps fitted in to the armhole, but with some "smooging" I managed. Then I started in on the front bands and collar. I wanted a small shawl collar. I had instructions about how to do it with short rows. I tried four times. Four times. (What in the hell was I thinking? After the second time, I should have quit.) The fifth time I gave up and knit a straight band. Even then I had to do the buttonholes twice.

All along I've been trying this on - thinking that the fitting problems were getting fixed, sleeves, length, collar. When I finally finished the band and put it on one last time...I had to face it. The thing is just too big. It's an inch too deep in the armholes, which makes the sleeve caps too loose and almost puckered. The body is too wide by another inch and a half or two at the bustline. This was part of my collar problem, I think -- there was just too much fabric across the upper portion of the sweater -- the armholes gaped and the set in sleeves sagged down my shoulder.

To fix this thing I would have to un-sew all of it, completely rip out the sleeves and start over, then pull out half of the two fronts and back all the way down to the waistline so that I could get the shaping right in the upper half of the sweater. No way. No freakin' way. I took a picture of it and put it away. Maybe someday the yarn will come in handy for another project. But not a sweater for me. I moved on.

Here's the next project.

Yarn is, from top to bottom: Julia - Nashua, 1824 - Mission Falls, and Thistle - Louisa Harding. All knitted to gauge (after multiple tries with varying needle sizes). The button is carved bone and was bought at Colorful Stitches in Lenox, Massachusets. The intended recipient is mulling over the choices. I am hopeful. After all, it's not for me. I think that improves the chances of success by more than 100%.

Yeast - the other half of baking

2010-01-07T21:55:00.004-05:00

Inspired by this blog: Pinch My Salt and the Bread Baker's Challenge, I asked for Reinhart's book for my birthday, back in August. A. teased me about acquiring a project that involved things I really shouldn't eat in any quantity, but she sent the book, which was very nice of her.

My relationship with yeast goes way back into my teenage years. Mom used to make a yeast bread every Christmas that was called the "Santa Lucia Crown." In later years, we called it the Christmas bagel. It didn't exactly come out the consistency that one would expect for a holiday bread. Mom quit making it, but there were a couple of years that I tried my hand at it -- improvising, changing ingredients -- in an attempt to make it less dry. I still have the recipe book, "Betty Crocker's Festive Fixins with a Foreign Flair." (LOVE the title.) That one with the candles on it is the "bagel." I've carried the little booklet around with me for 30 years. There was a period of time when I made pannetone instead of the Christmas bagel. Some years this was a success - other years it was a slightly different flavored version of the same bagel consistency.

In the late 70's and early 80's--during what I call my "earth mother" days--I baked many whole grain, leaden loaves that more appropriately belonged on the floor holding a door open. They were that dense. We ate them because white sandwich bread or spongy loaves of Italian bread were pretty much the only alternatives. Large quantities of butter and honey can cover up a lot of dry mealy bread. (We tried to ignore the fact that we were defeating the purpose of making whole grain bread by telling ourselves that honey was good for you too...)

So when I saw the Bread Baker's Challenge, I wasn't gripped with the desire to join in, but then I kept seeing pictures of really great bread, like this one, and this one, and I started to rethink. Wouldn't this make a great winter project? All that time I'm stuck in the house because it's just too darn cold to go outside? And an excuse to turn on the oven - even more reason this was the right winter project.

The four-day holiday of New Year's yielded this beauty from my oven. (No, that's not burnt stuff all over it; I added black olives and herbs.) I don't think I can ever buy focaccia again. Neither store- nor bakery-made could ever compete with this. The smell while it's baking is reason enough, but then you get a chance to taste it. Hands down, the best thing I've ever made involving yeast.

It has a chunk pulled out of it because I just couldn't wait to cut it into squares...I think I might be making a lot of bread this winter.

Christmas Knitting - More Winners and Losers

2010-01-05T22:03:00.001-05:00

Here's another project that I was really hoping would come out beautifully. I love this design and the pattern. Again, I even had exactly the yarn that had been specified.

It's Frost Tapestry that came out in the winter issue of Twist Collective. I was really taken by the cowl neck idea and the matching hat. And the project itself came out great -- no issues with instructions or gauge. However, the length of the piece is not wide enough for someone who is more than a size 8. And you must have a very long neck for it to not be all scrunched up. Unfortunately I didn't figure out the short part before I cut the steek. I could have reknitted the whole thing and simply added a repeat (okay, maybe not, maybe I would still have just thrown it into a corner in disgust), but it's knit in the round and cut to open. (Note to self, even one-size-fits-all scarves have size issues; measure things first.) I even changed the end pieces thinking that I could add loops for button holes and not overlap it, thus gaining an inch. Still not really long enough to be comfortable for a cowl on more than a very thin neck.

The request was for a scarf with a slot - or one that didn't have long tails that could get caught in a zipper. So this is what I knit as a replacement. It's an adaptation of the Petals Scarf pattern. Garter stitch changed to one by one ribbing and no points. Not nearly as pretty, but warm, and meets the requirements.

I'm thinking maybe I should just give up on Christmas knitting. Last year I knit an entire sweater that didn't fit the person it was intended for. This year I knit two of everything. Or at least it felt that way. If the trend continued, I don't want to think about what next year's catastrophe might be.

Christmas Knitting - the Winners and Losers

2010-01-03T22:33:00.008-05:00

I haven't posted anything about knitting since Thanksgiving because I was working on Christmas presents. This year I took on some challenging knitting - not large things but projects that turned out to be somewhat complicated. Some of it worked, some had to be abandoned.

I had a request for a hat with earflaps. They are very popular right now, so I should have been able to find lots of patterns. I found a few, but many of them I felt just didn't look good. Either too chunky (designed to be knit quickly) or pretty unflattering (earflaps in the wrong place, weird shapes at the top). I had this brilliant idea to knit the real thing...the Bolivian version with all the colors. A true Ch'ullu hat. The hats in those pictures are knit at 18 to 22 stitches to the inch! (For non-knitters, normal knitting is usually about 6 stitches to the inch). Tiny, tiny needles, hundreds of thousands of stitches. Certainly not something that could be finished in a couple of weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Well, at least not by me.

Then I came across this pattern, only 9 stitches to the inch. I even had the type of yarn needed. It was kismet; free pattern + yarn from stash. Perfect. I should have stopped right there. Perfect never happens. And it didn't this time either.

Here's my version more or less at the point I abandoned the effort. It's supposed to have a couple of inches of lining to make it warmer and to protect all the stranded work on the inside. The yarn is Shetland, so I wanted something softer to line it with. I tried a couple of different things, none came out the right gauge. And the lining made the hat too small. It wasn't going to fit the person I was knitting it for. After all that pattern work, I hated to give up but time was running short. I still hope I can rescue this hat, but for now it's in time out.

By accident just one week before Christmas, I picked up the Holiday Gifts issue of Interweave Knits and there was the pattern I was looking for all the time. I couldn't leave well enough along; I didn't like the design. I wanted something with fair isle bands. So I hauled out my copy of Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting and spent several hours working it out. I had to pick three patterns that all fit within the same stitch count and that lined up vertically so that the repeats wouldn't look strange.

It is fully lined, so I pushed to finish it in enough time to wash and get it dry. I knew it was going to take more than a day. Here's the result.

And here's an action shot.

I do think it's not fair that while you're trying to take a picture of a hat you get used as a snowball target.

Winter Blues

2010-01-03T22:07:00.008-05:00

It's been snowing around here since New Year's Eve. This time it was bitter cold, blustery, gray and overcast. Not something I wanted to go out in, unless I was forced. I had been watching the weather forecasts, so I had stocked up on the basics. No need to venture out in search of food. And after stepping out in the windy 15 degrees on Saturday and the even lower temps on Sunday to clear snow from my car, I decided retreat was the better part of valor. I entertained myself knitting, reading, and baking.

When I took the photo of these lemon blueberry scones...

the blue plate and white table runner reminded me of a picture I took several weeks ago after the first big snow. It snowed a good six inches, but unlike this time, the sun shone on the morning after. This is the sort of winter scene that makes you think snow is lovely--fluffy white, cerulean blue.

The blueberries for the scones come from a stash in my freezer. I bought them in Massachusetts last September, the day they were picked. And in no small quantity. A full box, like this:

That's 20 pounds of blueberries. I don't have nearly 20 pounds left and I did give a couple of pounds away right after I bought them. When I was packaging them to freeze, I kept thinking I was crazy. But I've enjoyed every one - great in a bowl of plain yogurt when you wake up too late, or turned off the alarm and went back to sleep -- something that keeps happening to me in the winter -- and need a quick breakfast. The burst of blueberry in your mouth is a pleasant reminder of summer when it's six degrees outside.

The knitting mess

2009-11-26T17:09:00.006-05:00

This was the scene on my sofa not too many days ago.

I had to pick up all the projects laying around the apartment because maintenance staff was coming in to change filters in the HVAC and batteries in smoke detectors. At least that's what they said -- and seems to be what they did. (I really do think air conditioning filters should be changed much more often, but it's a mystery to me how to get to the filter. I've studied the machine carefully. The access panel is cleverly hidden, believe me. It's probably just like the plate screwed to the front of my hot water heater to keep me from adjusting the temperature.) However, I'm not a total idiot. They really do this twice a year just to make sure you haven't trashed the place out. I have no idea if large quantities of yarn covering every surface would qualify for "trashed," but I needed to pick it all up and think about these projects anyway.

There are seven projects piled in there. There are three others floating around the dining room; it was just too depressing to add them to the pile. I think I've found my limit. Ten is too many.

The most aggravating one is a sweater for me which is 95% finished. I've knit the front placket and collar twice. I have now come to the conclusion that I must perform surgery on the bottom of the sweater to lengthen it. So in addition to giving the shawl collar a third try, I'll have to remove the bottom band first, add about an inch, and then I can pick up the stitches for the front. Since some of these are for Christmas, it's looking like the sweater is going to be a January project.

In the last week I have made a little progress. I can say that I've finished two: A baby sweater due for a shower last week and a pair of socks that have been on the needles for two years.

I'm dedicating many hours of the long Thanksgiving weekend to working on these. Unfortunately I won't be able to post photos here. The rest is Christmas stuff. I am fortified with pumpkin pie, soup, and lots of BBC mini-series checked out from the library. I'm off to finish something. Really I am. Right after I take a nap.

Let there be soup

2009-11-21T14:07:00.014-05:00

Wow, six weeks. No writing. I'm a slacker.

Fall has come and gone. The leaves were glorious, but now the trees are naked waiting for that first blanket of snow. The light in the afternoon doesn't have the golden glow of autumn anymore, it's the fuzzy blue gray of winter. Which makes it really hard to take pictures of anything.

I said I was going to try and notice the fall season this year. I tried -- really I did. But again I have almost no pictures to show for it. These are it: one shot of the Catskills from the Thomas Cole house, Cedar Grove, and a shot of Canadian geese paddling around in the pond of the apartment complex. (I say Canadian, but I have no clue -- that's just what everybody around here calls them. They could be from Alaska or Greenland for all I know.)

It takes some getting used to hearing geese. I always feel like I'm in a foreign country when I hear them honking across the sky. Such a strange sound for me, even after two fall seasons in the northeast.

I started to tell you about soup and got sidetracked; back to soup. A friend and I organized a soup swap at the first of November. (The link is to the page I created with collected instructions for those we invited.) I ran across mention of the idea on a food blog. I cannot, of course, remember which one at the moment. Clicking around as one does when you come across an interesting idea, I found multiple websites about soup swaps. The whole concept beats cookie swaps hands down. Lots less sugar; lots more useful.

Deciding what soup I was going to make six quarts of was the hardest part. It had to freeze well -- this knocked out all my favorites in one fell swoop. Soups with potatoes, cream, cheese, milk don't freeze very well. So I did what I always do when faced with a cooking project: research. This time I went to the library to find soup cookbooks and found quite a few. Of course careful perusal of four cookbooks left me with about 20 recipes I really wanted to try. Way too many to choose from. I ended up making a recipe from a book I already owned, White Bean Soup from The Fig's Table by Todd English and Sally Sampson. And I'll have you know that I bought this book 10 years ago before he became a celebrity chef and starting selling things on HSN.

So I've been eating soup. 15 bean soup, gumbo, chicken noodle soup, butternut squash and apple soup. I still have chicken tortilla and vegetable beef in the freezer. And I think, instead of cooking turkey over Thanksgiving, I'm going to make soup. Well pumpkin pie and soup. Let's not get our priorities mixed up.

A new appreciation for soap

2009-10-02T22:01:00.021-04:00

Today we spent the day at Historic Deerfield in Massachusetts. We got a chance to tour six of the houses, and spent time in the museum with the textiles collection and more furniture than I could possibly absorb visually. The houses were built from early 1700's through mid 1800's and had all sorts of interesting features, but I was particularly taken by the doors.

We learned all sorts of things about life in that period of time. No screens on the windows -- if you were wealthy you had glass, otherwise there were only shutters - or an animal hide. No refrigeration. No heating other than what came from a fireplace...no cast iron stoves. The height of ceilings and doors was kept low not because people were shorter (although they were) but lower ceilings conserved heat. Candles were very expensive so people burned fish oil. People spent so much time breathing in smoke and fumes that many had serious respiratory conditions...which is one of the reasons they slept mostly sitting up.

I learned about possets, porringers, caudles, and "punch." (Which is certainly not what is served these days at lady's luncheons.) Found out that salt was never served in a shaker. And that shakers usually contained other sorts of ground spices. Serving pieces usually had lids to keep bugs out, forks weren't used, spoons were set on the table turned bowl down (which is why all the decorations on sterling spoons are on the backside). Five cubes of sugar in a tiny cup of tea was common practice. Which is why sugar bowls were so big...you had to have a lot of space to hold sugar cubes for five or six guests. Treenware is wooden, from "trees." (I always wondered if the name could be that simple...). And there was replacement for pewter that didn't have the lead, called Britannia metal but it wasn't available until the late 1700's.

From the age of 14 a young girl spent a good amount of her time filling her dower chest. She produced linens, clothing, ornaments, paintings, dishes, etc. The moment she married, the chest and all its contents became the property of her husband. Women couldn't own land, houses, not even furniture. If her husband died, the property passed on to her son, if there wasn't a son, it was passed to a son-in-law or to a brother or uncle.

Church attendance in this community was pretty much an all day affair on Sundays. Two to three hours in the morning and another several hours in the late afternoon--if the reverend felt that the previous week's sins warranted the extra time. If you nodded off in church, a deacon came to stand beside your pew and pound a staff on the floor loudly to wake you up.

Windsor chairs were always painted. They were made with many different kinds of wood so they were painted to unify the color....black, yellow, green, or red. Houses were usually not painted. It was a sign of wealth if you could paint an interior room and even more if you painted some part of the exterior. Most household items were imported from Europe: rugs, sterling, pewter, porcelain, silk, linen, even wovens in wool. Having any of these items in your house was a sign of wealth. Rugs in particular were very rare.

They didn't keep washstands and pitchers in sleeping rooms -- for that matter, there wasn't such a thing as a room designated as a bedroom until much later. Rooms were usually all purpose: eating, cooking, sleeping all happened in the same space.

At most people washed their hair four times a year - spring, summer, fall, and winter. With lye soap. Which made your scalp turn red and burn for days thereafter. I had a hard time believing that one, but I did a little reading online and although there seemed to have been finer soaps made in the early 18th century, they would not have been available in America until almost the beginning of the 19th century.

I came away with a new appreciation for modern conveniences and as we were driving home we asked ourselves, what will people think of our primitive living conditions in 300 years?

And at the very end of the day, I found out that my fascination with the door frames certainly wasn't unique. The museum store had a poster for sale, "Doorways of Deerfield." Needless to say I didn't buy it.

Colors and Signs of Fall

2009-09-19T09:17:00.009-04:00

When I saw the sumac turning slightly red at the end of August, I cringed. Fall already? No! There wasn't any summer this year. But it's barely 50 degrees right now and the low tonight is forecast at 38. So it's here and I have to stop being in denial. I might even have to pull out a long sleeved t-shirt. And no, that's not sumac in the photo, it's just what I caught outside my door this morning.

So there are the first signs of fall and here's another--caramelized apples a la francaise--tarte tartin. I picked up a bag of the very first, local, new harvest ones I found. They were just labeled "early apples" but they were great. When I got tired of eating them out of hand, the rest became this upside down pie.

And if you knit, the most sure sign of fall is knitting something toasty. This time it's mittens, seriously warm mittens, mittens that will cheer you up in the gray cold winter.

I have a copy of Kristin's latest book, COLOR by Kristin, and thanks to the generosity of Westminster Fibers during the class I attended in August, I had four colors of Julia yarn, so I picked easy and four-color, et voila. I did play around with the color some, considered making the background of the mitten the caramel color, but in the end, decided to follow Kristin's lead, roughly.

This is the first time I've ever knit with this yarn and I think I'm a convert. It is really great for color work. The softness of it makes stitches blend nicely. What wasn't so easy was working out the tension so that the stranding didn't tighten the mittens down to doll size. It is the first time I've ever done any stranded color work on something so small. A simple band or two for a hat is the most I've ever attempted. You do have to think about it. But the beauty of this pattern is that it's not complicated, so you can focus on how you're knitting, because what you're knitting isn't too hard.

Now I just have to finish the second one. And grow longer fingers. I swear it fits...but when I look at this in the photo it shows how short my fingers are.

Last year fall was a blur because I was focused on THE WEDDING. This year I think I might try to enjoy it: walk in the cold air, pick some apples, go to one of the many fall craft fairs, take a "leaf peeper" drive, and wear some mittens.

A wicked good vacation

2009-09-09T21:10:00.019-04:00

Two friends from work and I went sailing for a week on a "tall ship" - a schooner. We drove from Albany and left with lots of extra time. The phrase "missing the boat" has a whole new meaning when we truly could miss the boat if we didn't plan for summer vacation traffic jams or road work. Of course none of those things happened to us so we had a lot of extra time. We made sure we had a lobster roll for lunch just as soon as we got to the first town in Maine so our list of "must do's" had it's first check on it.

We'd driven for six and a half hours and hadn't seen the ocean yet. We stopped in Portland to see what the guidebook called "the most photographed lighthouse in Maine," the Portland Head Light. How could we miss that? The sun was shining and even from the parking lot we could hear the waves and the gulls flying overhead. And the smell of ocean air. It was the point at which we knew we'd made it.

From there we went on to Rockland where the J&E Riggin was waiting for us and about 20 other people. We made it for the Captain's call at 6:00 pm. We were still reeling from "cabin shock" (It's hard to imagine a 24 inch wide bed, under a beam, down a hatch, backwards, until you've experienced it.), but we were able to listen enough to get the gist of our first evening's orientation.

Captain Jon filled us in on the basic plan; gave us an idea of what days and evenings would be like; when breakfast, lunch, and dinner were to be served; and then we got the detailed explanation of how a marine toilet works - uh I mean the "head." At this point I wasn't so sure I'd made the right vacation choice! But we were all in it together, we were committed, and amongst the three of us there was one seasoned boater who assured us it wasn't that bad. (I was reserving judgment.)

From there we went back into Rockland to find dinner. Fortified with local ale and seafood we returned at 9:00 pm and were tucked away by 10:00 pm, an hour so early for me that I was awake at 5:00 am the next morning. Which is actually an hour after the crew started working.

The wood stove is fired up shortly after 4:00 am so that it will be hot enough to produce coffee at 6:30 and breakfast at 8:00. I meant to get a picture of that stove -- I still have a hard time believing that there's a cast iron, wood burning stove on a wooden ship, but it is there and Captain Annie is a master at making it produce wonderful food. Food so great I forgot to take a picture of it. I was too busy eating.

We had spectacular weather--the best of the entire summer; we got to see a lot of the Maine coast. At the end of the trip Captain Jon gave us a copy of a map he had painted with our trip drawn in. It's different every time, since they go where the wind goes. I transferred the route roughly to a digital map:

We helped with hoisting and furling sails, weighing the anchor, and dish washing, but even with that activity there was lots of time for just hanging out on deck soaking up the sun, reading, knitting, and drinking in the ocean air and the incredible scenery. Seeing the coast from the water is a whole different experience from standing on land looking out.

Our trip coincided with Windjammer Weekend in Camden, so we got to see many other schooners coming into the harbor. There were 21 docked by the time they all came in. Quite an impressive sight. I took pictures of them, instead of the Riggin -- it's rather hard to a take a picture of the boat you're sailing in while it's moving! This is the Louis B. French and the Isaac H. Evans as they came into Camden.

I have two favorite photos from the trip. This one was taken on that first morning, 5:00 am when the fog was still hanging over the water.

And this one, taken one of the days midweek almost at noon on a very calm day -- the whites and blues in contrast were spectacular. Not a cloud in the sky.

The rest of the pictures are posted here.

Can you tell that I'm planning my next trip already?

Back in Mass

2009-08-09T00:48:00.011-04:00

A friend and I went back to Massachusetts today, intending to go to the Prendergast exhibit at the Williams College Museum of Art. We didn't quite get there.

We followed the Mohawk Trail (Highway 2) east across New York, over part of the Berkshires, and into Massachusetts, stopping at multiple places along the way. The highway roughly parallels a footpath the Indians used to travel from Connecticut to the Hudson Valley. It crosses both the Hoosic and Deerfield rivers so many times we lost count. We got stuck in the art galleries and the glassblowing studio in Shelburne Falls. That's when we decided that since it wasn't raining, it seemed a shame to spend a Saturday inside. Something of a rationalization, but the summer is too short around here. And the exhibit is going to be there a couple more weeks.

We took a walk over the Bridge of Flowers, went to Greenfield for lunch, stopped at the Apex Orchards for peaches, plums and apricots, found an antique store to spend an hour or so in, and then wandered to historic Deerfield. The museum houses in Deerfield merit an entire day -- eleven houses along a mile of road that you can see inside if you go with a tour. Since we had arrived so late, we decided to wander through the burial grounds and save the house tours for another full day.

The mosquitos and gnats almost drove us away, but I did get a couple of pictures of head stones. Having lived in the midwest most of my life -- where European settlers didn't arrive until the 1800's -- for me the northeast is "old." Granted not old like China, the Middle East or Europe, but still a lot older than Austin, Texas. This one was one of the oldest head stones in the burial ground. 1695. 314 years ago.

I would have assumed that the minimal carvings on the stones were for lack of money or time or skilled carvers had I not picked up a brochure about the burial ground while we were perusing the museum store. My only experiences with sculpture and carvings in graveyards was the time my mother and I spent most of a day in the cemetery of Recoleta in Buenos Aires. That one is tied to the Catholic Church and the iconography is very different. Deerfield was founded by Puritans who had prohibitions against idolatry. The skull with angel's wings (which I certainly didn't figure out on my own -- many of them looked like flying heads to me!) was considered to be an acceptable reminder of mortality and the resurrection.

So that's the history lesson for the day. Back to knitting next week.

Color Immersion

2009-08-06T23:13:00.016-04:00

Last weekend I had the chance to join a knitting class - the first since I've moved to the northeast. And since it had been close to 15 months ago that I'd been to any fiber-related class, I sort of jumped off the deep end and went to Kristin Nicholas' first weekend stitching on the farm. (Kristin has pictures of the group posted on her blog.)

The sun actually shone for an entire day (a rarity this summer in the northeast), and I spent two days laughing, talking, knitting, embroidering, and eating. In the company of like-minded individuals. Heaven.

There were sheep

There were dogs, Phoebe and Nessy..this is one of them, I don't know which. I couldn't seem to keep the names straight. They came along with us on the hayride. That forced them to sit still enough that I could get a shot.

There were cats. I kept trying to catch the kitten, as Kristin says, the "kitten in the garden" shot. Here's my best catch. Julia, Kristin's daughter, made sure I knew that this one, Hannah, is not looking for a home.

We worked on techniques--steeks, edgings, embroidery, two-handed knitting, and I learned some new tricks. (It always amazes me that even after doing this for 20 years, there are still things to learn about technique), but the real draw for me was the color.

Kristin's house surrounds you with inspiration--there's color, pattern, and texture wherever you look. She's poured many hours of work painting, making and collecting into the decoration. Even the fridge in her studio serves as a textile design board. It makes me hate the buyer's beige walls I live in even more.

Kristin spent a morning talking about where she sees color and how she uses it. From the incredible nature that surrounds her, from her travels, from textiles she's collected, from pottery, from paintings. It's funny because I think about color like this when I'm working on something for print/web publication, but I don't think that way about knitting. Kristin works from a photo or idea directly to a swatch. So during the weekend I tried to take pictures of colors or textures that I thought were interesting...without thinking about whether I would ever wear these colors. More of an exercise in "seeing" rather than knitting.

Here's what I came up with:

The challenge for me would be to turn some of these into a swatch. First because I'd have to actually own yarn in some of these colors! And second because the only thing that occurs to me off the top of my head is stripes. Kristin takes the colors and uses them in pattern maybe more often than stripes or blocks.

I didn't pull the colors out of this one -- blues and greens, but the view from the hilltop at the end of our hayride was wonderful.

Many thanks to Kristin who shared with us her art, to the Farmer who shared with us his home, and to Julia who shared with us her mom.

Adirondack fun

2009-07-18T19:15:00.009-04:00

Today three of us got up at the crack of dawn (6:00 am) on a Saturday so we could drive to the Adirondack Museum and spend the day. I'd been there last year and had only managed to see about a third of it in an afternoon. This time I knew I wanted the whole day.

The view from the museum, overlooking Blue Mountain Lake...spectacular. In a fleeting moment the sun shone and I happened to be standing at the lookout.

Oh, and that island you can see in the middle of the lake? It's a privately owned island. Nice little piece of real estate there.

I saw exhibits I hadn't seen the first time around: travel, logging, boating, road building, and mapping of the region. I learned the difference between a canoe and an Adirondack guideboat and saw some great examples of both. I found out what a buckboard wagon really is. The buckboard was a suspension system that helped soften the jolting ride you'd get from the wooden wheels. That would be the jolting you'd get if you went over a road looking like this:

This is quaintly referred to as a corderoy road, a common road building practice in the region in the late 1800's. The sign with the exhibit noted that it was an improvement over a swamp!

Yet another suspension system was in this wonderful stagecoach

I was surprised to discover that these things road suspended by leather straps. Amazing.

There was also some great Adirondack furniture--I'd seen it before but I went to relook. All of these pieces were built at the turn of the century or before. I love the roots on the table.

And because no road trip into the Adirondacks is complete without some crazy, kitschy sign (there seems to be one around every bend in the road), I leave you with this one. Quintessential Adirondack style:

A-berrying

2009-07-12T08:35:00.007-04:00

A friend emailed to say "I give up! My lack of stamina outweighs my greed...there are so many raspberries growing wild out here and I'm way over the novelty of picking them. Come take all you want." So we did. They are tiny and crawling through the bushes to get to them isn't that much fun. The picking is further complicated by the fact that they are growing amongst some serious blackberry brambles. Big ones. Ones with serous thorns. Which I fully plan to brave later in August when they are ripe.

The smell of these in the hot sun is wonderful. Since they were so tiny and already oozing juice, they went straight into the kettle for jam.

Yum!

Actual knitting

2009-07-04T15:00:00.005-04:00

I carried all these projects with me to Austin thinking that I would make progress and finish something already started. Why do I do that? I know perfectly well that I'm going to end up in one of the yarn stores buying something that I can't live without and I'll cast on for that new project immediately. Done.

I visited the Knitting Nest with Susan and happened upon this hank of Malabrigo Lace. I had never been before -- very nice store. Then when I was at Hill Country, Ysolda Teague's book was sitting on the table next to the register. I'd seen mention of a shawl in that book while browsing around Ravelry. Perfect combination. This is the Ishbel shawl. My version. I only had one hank, 470 yards, so I knit the small size, but used the repeats of lace pattern from the larger size.

I've never knit with Malabrigo Lace before. It's absolutely spectacular. Incredibly soft. Beautiful slight variations in color. And it's not turquoise.

Ugly and I forgot the Pretty

2009-07-03T17:10:00.010-04:00

I made it back to Albany after two and a half weeks in the heat of Austin. The lowest temperature while I was there was 99 degrees. Heat records were broken. I found out that you loose heat acclimation very fast. When it comes to heat, I don't think I'm a Texan anymore. It wiped me out.

While I was there I worked in the Austin offices,visited all the places I miss, and ate a lot of Tex-Mex food. A LOT. I hit most of my favorite restaurants: Kerby Lane, The Steeping Room, Baby Acapulo, Chuy's, El Mercado, Ironworks, Vespaio, Mandola's, Central Market, Eastside Cafe. I missed the bar-b-que in Lockhart, but there just wasn't time. I was a little busy with a few other projects. Mmmm, maybe more than a few.

I think L. was relieved when I left. There was way more "honey-do" than he planned for. He hung a light/ceiling fan in the living room. This required crawling up in the attic, in the summer, in Austin. See notes above about heat. He replaced a light fixture in the hallway, the choice of which required trips to five lighting stores (five if you count Lowes and Home Depot.) The installation might have been easy, but of course the fixture didn't quite fit and required an unplanned trip to Home Depot to buy an adapter. We planted a small garden in the front yard. This required getting up at 7:00 am on a Sunday morning. See notes about heat above. It also required some serious digging, plus making an unplanned trip to Home Depot to buy more dirt. He helped paint the hallway...a little. This one was 90% my job. I might add that the infernal hallway has SEVEN doorways that you have to carefully paint around (no way was I going to spend the time taping off that many door frames). The big project was replacing the kitchen floor.

I have a photo of the floor in progress. Don't look if you're faint of heart. It was gross. Very gross. Ancient, very cheap, peel-n-stick tile. That I put down myself. That was the irony. If I'd shelled out the money ten years ago and installed better tile, I wouldn't have had to replace it. But I didn't. And it fell apart. The whole time I was scraping adhesive off the floor, I was thinking about that.

Choice of the replacement tile took multiple trips to Lowe's and Home Depot. You are catching the theme here, right? I think I spent more time in home improvement stores over the two weeks than I did in all those restaurants I went to. I wish I had remembered to take a picture of the finished floor. It looked very pretty when all was said and done.

Turqoise and friends

2009-05-31T18:51:00.006-04:00

I'm determined to figure out a way to use the turquoise yarn I have...after the afghan I still have 1200 yards. Not quite enough for a large, long cardigan, which is what I want. I tried a design with this yarn once before and was reasonably happy with the swatch, but it's the same colors as everything else I'm surrounded with at the moment. Blah. That's why I decided to redirect the turquoise into the afghan. Unfortunately I'm still left with a big pile of it.

This morning while drinking that first cup of coffee, I had this idea to combine it with all the other colors of Cascade 220 that I have. This may have been a mistake. Evidently not nearly enough caffeine was in my system.

Enthusiastically at 11:00 am, I pulled out the Kristin Knits book - a serious dose of color therapy was needed. This shouldn't take long. All I needed was a swatch, an idea, a direction. It could be a little pick-up-put-down project while I cleaned, did laundry, and packed to go to Austin.

At 2:00 pm, three swatches knit and frogged, I thought maybe I should give up. But darn it, after all the trial and error, I really ought to stick with it. Three hours wasted...maybe another hour and I could declare victory.

After seven hours, I have a swatch. No clean laundry, an empty suitcase, and a sink full of dirty dishes, but a swatch.

Turquoise overload

2009-05-30T14:37:00.009-04:00

I might be in a rut, color-wise that is. My living rooms is covered with balls of yarn from projects. I glanced around this morning thinking that I really should clean the mess up and realized that everything I've worked on through the last couple of months is turquoise.

There was the old-lady afghan:

Then I used some sock yarn to make a scarf because I decided that I'd never wear the color as socks. And I really like the yarn, Sophie's Toes Sock Yarn. This is a slightly modified version of the Simple Yet Effective scarf pattern from Laura Chao. I added a border on the bottom two edges of YO, K2tg to create an eyelet edge that matched the eyelet edge at the top, then I crocheted a border.

Last weekend I made it to one of the New England sheep festivals, the one in Massachusetts. The weather was beautiful; there were lots of things to see. I finally got a chance to watch the sheep dog trials. I've been to several other festivals and never caught that part of the event. I have a new appreciation for what it takes to herd sheep. Not an easy task. I also learned that it would be a very bad idea to have a border collie as a pet. That is definitely a dog who needs a job. They sit beside the shepherd almost as if they were spring loaded in a slingshot. Barely able to restrain themselves from running, they wait for the the "Away" or "Come by" command from the shepherd. (Commands I couldn't figure out while I was standing there..I had to look them up. Away is to send them counterclockwise, and Come By is clockwise.) They streak across the pasture to go "fetch" sheep, low to the ground, at an amazing speed, only to drop to a dead stop at the call of "Lie Down". Here's the only picture I took while I was there. I was way too busy looking at wool.

I managed to not buy a lot of yarn. This is the only yarn I bought (Although I have to admit to buying patterns, and strangely enough, some really great porcelain, raku-fired, beads.) It's 40% angora, 60% merino, hand-dyed from Acker's Acres Angoras. There was a full rainbow of colors, reds, yellows, pinks, purples, and greens in deep, intense shades. But what did I come home with? Yup, turquoise.

I really need to knit something orange or red, but I was contemplating another small scarf project because I happen to have the match between yarn and pattern, without spending money. A happy circumstance that doesn't occur very often. I don't think this can count a a significant change in color.

It's an addiction

2009-05-21T23:05:00.010-04:00

Since January I've done a lot of bending wire and stringing beads. Sort of. Mostly I spend a lot of time playing with them. Arranging, rearranging, thinking about color, size, color schemes, textures. I can't seem to stop.

Periodically I get worried about the obsession and I put away all the jewelry stuff so I can get my dining room table back (another sign of becoming old is eating in the chair in front of the television). But a couple of days later, I see something that inspires another idea and I haul it all out of the closet again.

In early February I went to the Gem and Mineral Show in town. I think that might have been the tipping point. Lots of cool beads came home with me. Then in March I got together with some friends who wanted to learn the basics for making wire wraps and loops. Passing along the information I've gotten from all the classes I've taken was fun. Then in April I met a knitting friend in Boston and we found a really great bead store in Cambridge Square. Impossible to pass up that opportunity, I mean, when was I going to be in Boston again any time soon? In May, K and I found a crazy strand of old glass beads, that when separated, became three different necklaces

Here's the result of all that collecting:

And right now I'm taking a silversmithing class, taught as "community education" at the local high school. I'm not sure if I like my project or not. In this picture it looks like a fish eye. It's not finished...nothing is soldered together and the bezel for the stone isn't finished. Although I'm not sure about the project, I'm definitely enjoying the process. I really, really wish I could hammer things in my apartment. I can hear too much from my neighbors not to know that any hammering I did would pass right through.

Given my obsession with the whole craft, that might be a good thing

It's official

2009-05-16T13:05:00.007-04:00

I'm an old lady. Despite the fact that one of the large "zero" birthdays had come and gone several years ago, I wasn't mentally there yet. I'm there. Here's proof.

It's a recliner. It's a rocker. And if that weren't bad enough, I made the afghan. In ripple stitch no less. I have a doily on a side table. A lamp because I can't see if I don't have the extra light. The only things missing are the remote controls. They're around. I just couldn't bear to include them in the picture.

I had a perfectly good chair. Except that its rise from the floor is calculated for elves. I have hoisted myself out of that chair for the last time. It's for sale. I want it out of here. I don't need the reminder that I find it incredibly difficult to lever myself out of a chair that is 10 inches off the ground. (Okay so it's 14 in the front and 10 in the back...I measured.)

Before the melt

2009-02-12T22:09:00.006-05:00

In mid-January, when temperatures didn't get much above 20 during the day and dipped close to zero at night, I'd get up every morning to a new crop of icicles on my dining room window. The first one I saw was big--at least I thought so as an uninitiated Texan. So I took a picture.

Big deal, the nor'easteners will say. That's tiny. Then a couple of mornings later, there was a shower curtain of icicles outside the window. "Hey, cool," I thought. And I snapped another picture.

The very next day, there was enough sun to warrant opening my bedroom window on the other side of the apartment, and this crinkly, three-footer was hanging off the gutter.

So now I was on a roll...I was documenting icicle growth. Around town I started seeing really big ones, but I never had the camera with me. One morning, I happened to look behind me as I walked out to the car. There it was on the corner of my window, the mother of all icicles.

Since it hangs from the gutter to below the bump out, I can say with no exaggeration that this one was longer than 8 feet. Very scary. I was glad it wasn't hanging over my path to the parking lot. I didn't have time to stop that day and take a picture, so I found myself hoping it wouldn't warm up and it would still be there the next morning. It hung around for almost a week, until night before last, when it fell off with a huge crack and thunk....at 3:00am.

All work and no play

2009-02-09T22:54:00.012-05:00

Makes for very boring blog posts. Since last I appeared here, I've moved. No, not where I live but where I work. And this would have been relatively painless, except that it's been my job for the last 18 months to plan for this move. Help design the work spaces, act as client advocate with the building interior designer and the furniture designer and the architects. "Client advocate" is a euphemism for go between, interpreter, supplicant on bended knee, person who catches inconsistencies... So the last couple of weeks have been pretty stressful. I'm sitting here at 11:00 pm having just gotten home, munching on a cold kosher wiener dipped in garlic hummus (Don't think about it...your digestive tract won't thank you.) because I haven't been to the grocery store in more than a week.

Here are scenes from my life lately. The drawings, the keys (oh god, the keys...sixteen keys in every workstation, more than 200 workstations. 150 pieces of storage equipment with two keys each. You do the math. My head hurts.) What I don't have a picture of is the piles of fabric samples, carpet samples, finish chips, draft drawings, and design boards.

And then I do have a few pictures of the finished spaces. Pardon the overly exposed photos. One of the more than 200 items that are not finished in the building are blinds. That's actually minor in comparison to missing data ports, missing power, doors that don't close, access badges that don't work, no water in some break rooms, light control systems that would give the local disco a run for its money, and HVAC that turns conference rooms and data centers into saunas. (By the way, that data center sauna thing is a very big deal.)

Despite all of these missing items, we moved anyway. What's a little construction when you're among friends, right? And when you've lived with those same friends, elbow to elbow, scrunched in 48 inches of desktop and no storage for an entire year, heck all these things are simply minor inconveniences. Except for the lack of coffee, things would be perfect.

Baby, it's cold outside

2009-01-17T14:06:00.013-05:00

Yesterday morning as I stepped outside my front door, I took a deep breath of air which brought on a paroxym (always wanted to use that word in a sentence...) of coughing that made me go back inside and get a drink of water. I've been sick, but just breathing hadn't been an issue.

When I got into my car and turned the key, it made a chug or two before catching. I noticed the thermometer display: 9. Then I did a double take. That's -9. I didn't even know my car had a minus sign. No wonder I had a fit of coughing. A big dose of sub-zero air sucked into my lungs.

Today the weather on the TV showed -10 in my area. I decided staying inside was the smart thing to do. Besides, the pile of dirty laundry was about to take over the hallway.

Sometimes staying inside is dangerous from a dietetic point of view...for lunch there was soup

Potato and Leek Soup (from this recipe on Epicurious)

And for afternoon tea, Fudgy Chocolate Walnut Cookies

Taking these pictures reminded me that I never posted about my fall baking extravaganza...because it was a secret.

A's future mother-in-law had this idea to make a cookbook of family recipes as a wedding gift. She'd seen an example at another family wedding recently and thought it was nice. I volunteered to help...not the smartest thing I've ever done. My perfectionism kicked into overdrive and not only did I compile 26 dessert recipes, lay them out in the pagination software used by the publishing site (blurb.com) but I made almost all of them and photographed them to put in the book. Each recipe also included a photo of the person who "donated" it.

During September I made a LOT of desserts. My co-workers cheerfully consumed the results of every weekend baking spree.

There were cookies and bars, cakes, pies, quick breads

And my favorite wierdest recipe ever, Chocolate Cracker Brittle. I almost didn't make this one because the ingredients are so strange. Since sharing this with others, several people remember their grandmothers making something similar. My guess is that it was a "back of box" recipe from the late 50s or early 60s. Recipe follows.

Ingredients:
Keebler Original Club Crackers
1/2 pound butter
1 cup sugar
12 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips

Steps:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Use cookie sheet with sides. Cover cookie sheet with the club crackers, cut pieces if necessary to fill sheet. Set aside

Melt butter on top of stove and mix in sugar. Heat, stirring constantly. Boil hard for 2 minutes. Pour over crackers, spreading as evenly as possible.

Bake 10-12 minutes. Remove from oven and springle immediately with chocolate chips. After chips melt, spread evenly.

Chill in refrigerator at least 1 hour or overnight. Break into pieces like peanut brittle.

It was pretty, until now

2009-01-11T11:37:00.005-05:00

I've been trying for weeks to catch these guys with snow and enough light to actually get a photo out my window. This one's a little blurry, but you get the idea. There are about six cardinals that hang out in some vines outside my balcony. All summer I had the urge to go and pull down the vines because they are choking the light away from the trees. Come to find out they have seeds that the cardinals really like.

Guess my laziness paid off. The snow is pretty if you're standing here trying to get pictures of cardinals. It's not so pretty if this is your afternoon project:

My car's in there somewhere.

Christmas Knitting

2009-01-08T21:29:00.009-05:00

This was my big Christmas knitting project. There were others, but this one was the whopper. The pattern is very loosely from More Big Girl Knits, Bountiful Bohus. Yarn was mill-end cones of Shetland held double. I thought I had the gauge. Famous last words.

I made so many changes to the pattern that it really only follows the rough idea and the patterning in the yoke.

Stuff I changed:

Took out the shaping in the body. I didn't have the intended wearer near me so I didn't want to risk getting the shaping in the wrong place; this required recalculating.
Knit it flat instead of in the round -- didn't see the point of steeks for such a small amount of patterning.
Did full length sleeves without the bell shape; this required recalculating -- a lot of reworking of the decreases from wrist to elbow.
Shortened the ribbing at the bottom but lengthened the total body.
Increased the depth of the yoke a little; which required recalculating.

By the time all was said and done, washed, blocked, buttons chosen and attached, it didn't turn out to be the right size. More than four inches too small in the chest size. Obviously my gauge wasn't dead on. More like dead in the water. The sweater was intended as a gift for my older daughter who lives in a climate where you could wear a heavy Shetland wool sweater.

Fortunately I have another kid to give it to and it fit. More or less. But she lives in Texas. The day I took the picture of this, the temperature was 82 degrees. In January.

Spoke too soon

2008-11-30T15:35:00.004-05:00

Umm, that comment I made yesterday about no snow? The universe was listening.

Here's the scene from my balcony:

Hibernation

2008-11-29T23:29:00.009-05:00

There's a lot to be said for opting out of a holiday...if you're in the right frame of mind. Thanksgiving came and went. I didn't eat turkey or stuffing or sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce or green bean casserole (not that I would have eaten that stuff had I been presented with the opportunity, ugh.) I did eat pie. It was great pie. I didn't have to drive anywhere. I got to sleep in my own bed. I read, watched movies, took a walk. Oh, and I answered about 20 telephone calls. Mostly about recipes for pie, or ingredients for pie, or baking pies. Both my kids made their own pies this year. Long distance cooking support can be a challenge. Hope they came out okay in the end, guys.

And I knit. A lot. In fact I knit so much over the last two days that I had to cool it today. My wrists and (strangely) my elbows can't take that much knitting. However since the xxx I am knitting is a present for xxx I can't say anything about it. And since it's bigger than a breadbox, it's going to take a while.

I have spent some of my Thanksgiving holiday on something I can show...Christmas cards. I figure since I'm mailing them soon and they are all different, I can post a few. This year's theme is winter/snow. It could have been appropriate, but it hasn't really snowed around here yet. This morning, early, I actually saw a few flakes fall, but it lasted maybe a half an hour.

I'm going back to Austin for the Christmas and New Year's holidays. According to the locals, there's a 50/50 chance I won't see any significant snow before I leave. Maybe a flurry or two, but not much sticking on the ground. They keep telling me this is a good thing. There will be more than enough to go around in January and February.

Signs of Winter

2008-11-19T21:35:00.008-05:00

Winter arrived this week. Low temperatures have been in the mid 20's (F) and for this Texan, that's pretty darn cold. I looked around and realized that I've been in Albany more than seven months. Where did the time go? Fall was beautiful and I didn't take a single picture. I was too busy with wedding preparations. I remember thinking every morning during September and October that I really should stop and take a picture of a leaf or two, a tree blazing in yellow, orange or red. But I didn't. All the color is gone and I think winter's really here. For now, until the snow comes, the signs of winter are somewhat homely. Lace-up, leather, waterproof shoes and thick socks.

I haven't had a pair of shoes like this in probably more than 30 years. In Austin, I wore flip-flops year round. Maybe I put on a thick sock in January a couple times, but I never would have considered spending serious money on this kind of shoe. A clog or a slide is as close as I've had in years and years. But the cold, torrential rains that soaked the heels of my socks a couple of weeks ago was an early warning. Find warmer, dryer shoes.

Oatmeal. Getting out from under that down comforter and stepping into the 67 degrees of my apartment (the coldest I can stand it without a coat) requires something warmer than yogurt and fruit.

Apple butter. (Maybe this is really a sign of fall, but I throw it in anyway.)

I finally had time to take advantage of local, organic apples and made apple butter. I used to make it every year when I lived in Argentina. The recipe is from the first edition of the Vegetarian Epicure, one of the cookbooks I had with me. There wasn't any such thing as fruit butters in Argentina and I made it to remind me of flavors from home. In New York, apples are a BIG DEAL. And I must confess that apple cider donuts are seriously good eating. This butter is made from Macoun apples, a regional variety recommended for sauces by the vendor at the Troy Farmer's Market.

Coats, hats, scarves. I've hauled them all out of the closet and hung them on a hall tree by the front door. Today the wind really whistled through the wimpy hats.

If I weren't deep into Christmas knitting, I would stop and make myself a really thick hat. But I'll have to survive until after Christmas.

I swear I'm going to dedicate January and February to making something just for me - warm and wooly. And then I'll actually be able to post something about knitting for a change.

Paper and no string

2008-07-22T18:00:00.003-04:00

I'm knitting, I swear I am, but it's sort of boring to see. I'm still working on the Cece sweater, but I had to undo the half-finished sweater and start over again. It was too big. So I'm about four inches away from where I was before I ripped it out. Yawn. To alieveate the boredom I've been playing with paper. Since I've invested some time and, ahem, money in this activity, I thought I'd share a card or two, or three or five. This is the most recent one.

And the inside:

This activity stacks up there with jewelry making. It can result in a finished product in less than two or three weeks, so it makes a great diversionary activity.

Following are some others I've made in the last month or so. I can't claim a lot of originality here; they are adaptations of ones I've seen in magazines. But I am learning. The one above is completely out of my head. I wouldn't have come up with it if I hadn't had the practice of the others

This activity can however, make a serious mess of your dining room table.

Knitting might be a little neater. Or at least it could be if you didn't have 10 projects started just hanging around waiting for time or inspiration.

More cheap art

2008-07-21T18:00:00.002-04:00

It's a very gray, thunder-n-lightin' kind of day outside. If I were in Austin, I'd think it was fall--late September or October. But it's mid-July in Albany. My latest art project was conceived with the idea that I could cheer up the dreary kitchen. Something that's going to be more important as the year advances and there's even less light around here.

These are labels from fruit crates...sometimes you find them in good shape. I came across these in what is becoming one of my favorite places around here, the antique (upscale junk might be more accurate) barn in Coxsackie. Just the name of the town makes me grin. Coxsackie, pronounced just the way it's spelled. Where the heck does that name come from? They happen to be square, so a cheap frame for a 12 x 12 scrapbook page protects them from water. Total cost for the whole project was about $25.oo. Not bad for a little Florida sunshine everyday.

Oh, and lest you think that my sink looks that shiny all time, rest easy. I cleaned it up to take the picture.

Meet Cleo

2008-07-20T10:47:00.002-04:00

No, she's not my cat. I don't have one right now which is why I've become the resident cat sitter. If anyone at work has to travel, I'm the designated caretaker. I've taken care of five other cats over the last four months. Cleo is only one who doesn't like me. At all. Not a bit. In fact, actively dislikes me.

I spent last weekend with Cleo. We declared an uneasy truce eventually, after I allowed her to put cat hair all over my bag (Yep, despite the fact that she hates me, my bag is evidently fair game.) I painted the bathroom of a friend and co-worker while she was traveling and while I was catsitting Cleo. Had lots of fun painting. It's been 4 months since I've had a paintbrush in hand and I think I was going into withdrawal.

Cleo of course did not approve of this activity. She did manage to step in a tray of paint. And no I wasn't foolish enough to leave a tray of paint on the floor with a cat around. That tray was on the kitchen counter. Any other cat steers clear; they hate the smell I think. Not Cleo. Since she wasn't going to let me get close enough to get the paint off her paws, I had to follow her around the house with a damp paper towel in hand wiping up paw prints, shoo-ing her away from the upholstery while she walked across the tile and wood floors. Thank goodness the place wasn't carpeted.

I miss my cats in Austin. I started thinking back and realized that I've had one or more cats in my life in an almost unbroken string for more than 30 years. Not having one with me now is hard. The only benefit I can see is that everything I own is not covered in cat hair. Except my bag.

A mess o' greens

2008-06-10T20:04:00.004-04:00

I don't usually write about food (Okay there was that whole thing with cake, but that was a momentary lapse). But this is about to change. You're reading the first vegetable installment. I'm sure there will be others through the summer. Three of us from work bought two shares in a local CSA, Fox Creek Farm, this summer. It's an attempt to improve what I eat. The first delivery: leaves. Many leaves. Spinach, arugula, lettuce, mesclun. Then a root and a bulb: green onions and radishes.

Can you guess what I had for dinner?

Dressed with the bare essentials--oil and vinegar, fresh ground pepper, a little salt--it was great. Now if only I could convince myself that Diet Dr. Pepper is not a requirement for essential mental functions, I would really be making strides.

It's the little things

2008-06-09T18:46:00.005-04:00

Sometimes it takes only a tiny thing to make things better. In this case, a library card. I finally was able to combine my schedule with the open hours of the local branch of the Southern Adirondack Library System and suddenly things are looking up a little.

It's a nice "leisure reading" library, a good selection of fiction, audio books,and DVDs. Almost no reference and non-fiction (well, at least nothing like the collection of Austin Public...), but then I mostly use the library for fiction reading, so I'm not really complaining, just whining maybe. The building is beautiful, new, and I was able to actually sit down in a chair that was not caked with 20 years of grunge. I could look outside at a water fountain (kid you not, there's a waterfall in the back courtyard of the library, complete with a bronze sculpture of a book-reading frog).

First thing I did was rent a BBC DVD. Anything would have done really, but this series has me hooked. Great scenery, great sets, incredible crumbling Scottish castle and characters who wear kilts and aran sweaters (albeit holey, unraveling ones).

I just discovered that this series ran for seven years, so I have a long way to go. Which is good. Makes the decision of what to check out next easy.

The last good thing lately is that I have new yarn to play with and am knitting. This time it's something for A. and it's moving along pretty fast. Chic Knit's CeCe sweater that's been knit by quite a few. (Ravelry counts 170 projects...who knows how many others un-counted.) The yarn is Silkience, Ella Rae. I think the color is called Tangerine...this picture came out a little pink.

It's good to have needles in hand again.

Paper and Glue or Cheap Art

2008-05-29T21:01:00.006-04:00

Last weekend, while I should have been out enjoying the sun, I was inside trying to finish projects.

Here's one that turned out pretty well in my humble opinion. On a whim, I bought a set of coordinated scrapbook paper at Archivers. K. and I were perusing options for A's birthday present and as a joke, she dared me to by these. She knew I was going with turquoise as a color for the place in Albany. I took her up on the dare. Didn't know what I was going to do with them at the time, but the colors were perfect.

I added foam core and spray mount to the mix, et voila, instant art:

I am inordinately proud of the fact that these are aligned one to the other, equidistant, and level. This almost superhuman feat required a cloth tape measure, a steel tape, duct tape, a level, a pencil, post-it notes, and 3M velcro sticky thingies. Needless to say it took way more time to hang them than it did to glue the squares to the foam core.

Here's the adjoining wall, yarn, books, pottery, and my knitting chair.

The knitting on the footstool is there for decoration. I haven't touched a stitch in weeks and weeks. I keep carrying around the same project. I've now traveled back and forth from Austin to Albany twice with the same project. A scarf (not pictured here) that has put on close to 4,000 miles. No progress. And that's as close to knitting content as this blog has gotten in months.

Gone to Texas (and back)

2008-05-28T20:19:00.005-04:00

Last week I made a short trip back to the homeland for the littlest kid's graduation (she'd hate that I called her the littlest...). Here she is, diploma in hand.

My trip added one more case of the "it takes two days" theory of travel between Austin and Albany. Once again I was stuck in Chicago.

What really makes me very mad (if I allow myself to think about it) is that the whole thing could have been avoided if the airline had agreed to just let me stay another day. I was supposed to go from Austin to Dulles -- but the plane that was supposed to take me to Dulles had never made it to Austin. It was stuck in Chicago. (I have now personally confirmed what many keep telling me, that Chicago is a black hole. All flights are swallowed in its massive yawl and never come out again. I'm a slow learner). So the airline had the blindingly brilliant idea to put me on a flight to Chicago to make a connection to Albany. Does this make any sense to you? Didn't think so. Even the most dimwitted of the human race (and possibly the entire animal kingdom) could see that actually flying to Chicago, from whence all air traffic problems emmanate, would be a sure fire way to get stuck in Chicago. And that is exactly what happened.

Upon arrival in Chicago, only minutes after the doors of my connecting flight closed, I found that this was not the airline's problem. Therefore, the cost of the hotel was on me. I had expected this. It's never their problem. That's the first lesson you learn.

My stay in the windy city was just peachy. And I had to laugh at the hotel keys. One of the most unusual labels I've seen.

I'm tryin' but it ain't easy

2008-05-12T20:11:00.005-04:00

Today as I was walking out of the Walmart, this portly older guy in a white shirt and suspenders yells at me, "Go back to Texas!" I stopped in my tracks and looked at him. He laughed it off, saying "Hey I gotta get payback for all those years I lived in Texas and they kept sayin' 'Go back to New York!'" Right now I can think of all sorts of smart replies, but at the time, all I could come up with was, "Sorry, I can't do that." So the next time you curse somebody, either under your breath or out loud, for being lost or just different, try to imagine yourself in that situation. What would you hope the other guy would do?

I have been honked at, waved at, gestured at, tailgated (which apparently has nothing to do with the license plate on my car. New Yorkers are very democratic in their decision of who to tailgate. Anybody and everybody qualifies.) and now yelled at. The honking, waving, and gesturing has way more to do with the fact that I'm still trying to figure out how to get around in this insane place, than the state represented on the license plate of my car.

There are no damn street signs. There is no numbering system. There are no numbers on the non-existent street signs. There are almost no numbers on the buildings. The other day I was trying to find this place where I was going to get my hair cut. It had an address. THERE WAS NO SIGN. I finally accidentally spotted a painted 2nd story window that had the name of the place. That was after I was already 15 minutes late.

The day before I drove all over trying to find the only yarn store in Albany. No sign. Oh, there was a sign over the door of the shop...but no signs visible from the street. And no numbers. I swear if I manage to survive the next couple of months without being in an accident because I was trying to find some place, I will count myself very, very lucky.

The other infuriating driving hurdle is that many, many city streets are actually highways (you'd never know that to look at them). So it's a crap shoot as to whether you're going to encounter a street name or a highway number. I currently have the loan of a friend's GPS system and even that thing alternates between calling roads by a street name or a number, depending from which direction you're approaching the street. Baffling. I know Albany (and all the other towns surrounding it) are old, but jeez, don't each of them have a damn city planner or public works department? Signage is so basic...and so critical. The only things that are well-labeled around here are the exits on the very expensive toll roads.

I'm sure I will eventually adapt...but I guess today wasn't a good day. I have found two things to brighten this dreary, chilly place. Pasta and pastries. Two of the most important food groups (well they come a close second to chocolate).

This is the real thing...just like we used to by able to buy on the corner pasta shop in Buenos Aires.

I haven't seen or tasted anything like it in 20 years. (Lest you say "eeeuw" at the yellow stuff, that's semolina sprinkled over the raviolis to keep them from sticking to the paper or to each other.) The first bite and every one thereafter was heaven. These were purchased at Cardona's...a lovely establishment located very close to a tattoo parlor and the storefront of a spirit medium in the outskirts of downtown Albany. When I walked in (despite the less than savory surroundings), I knew I had found one of my favorite places. I had to restrain myself from buying everything in the place.

And last, but not least, I found an Italian bakery and pastry shop. Saturday before Mother's Day I was feeling particularly deprived of my favorite Austin haunts, so I decided I needed sugar. And large quantities of white flour. Only a good bakery would do. After 30 minutes on the Internet (don't ya just love the web?) I found one.

I won't tell you what was in that box, because then I will have to admit to having eaten the whole thing.

North To Alaska

2008-05-06T17:32:00.003-04:00

Susan,

You're unpacking. I'm packing. Warm things like hats, scarves and sweaters.

Why?

This is why.

To get in the mood:

Ugh-ly

2008-05-05T23:13:00.005-04:00

The 70's are alive and well in my apartment. I really wish I could photograph the color of the tub surround. I can't. There's no natural light and the compact florescent bulbs I put in the ugly light fixture don't help. Remember avocado green? Yep. That's it. This is as close as I can come to rendering the color. I include the other things so you have a point of comparison. Well for comparison and so you know that I gave up. I did not attempt to "work" with that color. I seem to remember some knitting teacher trying to tell me there are no ugly colors. I beg to differ. This one qualifies and deserves only to be hidden and used for shock effect on unsuspecting visitors.

Imagine stepping into that every morning to take a shower. Eeeuuwww. I'm learning to shower with my eyes closed.

But wait! There's more!

The kitchen cabinets (if you can call them that) have a Spanish (maybe its French?) colonial door knocker for handles. The most stupid, noisy, inconvenient things you've ever seen.

But wait! There's even more!

Somebody CHANGED the door knobs to be these lovelies. How do I know? There's a black plastic strip of stuff glued over the top of two other holes. Dying to see this? I present the candidate for the ugliest kitchen door handle ever.

Isn't the crusty glue just the best part?

Moved. I think.

2008-05-04T22:33:00.009-04:00

This was the scene a couple of weeks ago. I had every intention of taking pictures along the road...certainly a picture of the "big rig" we drove 1,900 miles from Austin to Albany. But I didn't. Maybe it's better that way. It's an experience I'm not sure I want to remember. The only thing that really stands out in my mind was that roads in Illinois were awful and they set the speed limit for any vehicle towing a trailer at 55 mph.

So this one is it. Kinglsy playing king-on-the-mountain with the boxes. Note that the boxes say "yarn/books." I had a lot of boxes that said that. Almost too many.

It took two days to get one of the two closets in the apartment organized. In the end I used almost every single square inch. And this isn't where the "working yarn" is (I'll show where that is later). I have to get up on a step ladder to get to it, but it's there.

So this is the clothes, linen, coat, sewing, jewelry making, scrapbooking, and yarn closet. Thank God for The Container Store.

More later.

It takes two days

2008-02-24T20:15:00.006-05:00

I've come to the conclusion that it just takes two days to cross the country when the weather is bad. On my way to Albany, I ended up in Hartford, Connecticut, stayed the night and then drove the 75 miles to Albany. On the way back, I sat at the gate in Albany for 2 and a half hours while the City of Albany plowed the runway, not once, but twice. This double effort came about because it seems they don't know how long a runway is supposed to be. The first try came 40 feet short. By the time we finally made it to Chicago, my flight to Austin had long since left without me. So I got to spend the night and take an early flight the next day.

This was my home away from home for two weeks. Can you tell that it's snowing? Maybe not. Take my word for it. Not much accumulation on the ground, but this shot was at about 8:00am. By 5:30pm, when I was supposed to be leaving there was lots, lots more on the ground.

Traveling is slow; knitting is even slower. Doesn't this look like I'm advancing?

It's an optical illusion. At the point you see here, I realized that I had forgotten to switch to larger needles after the border. The gauge was off by one half stitch per inch. Over more than 250 stitches, that's a difference of about five inches. So I had to take it all out and start over again. The sweater sits here.

I had all the best intentions. I even had a lot of time in the evening. I just didn't have any brains.

Cold bush, warm heart

2008-02-14T07:57:00.004-05:00

Yeah, I know. It's supposed to be cold hands, warm heart. But my hands are toasty warm right now and the bushes were sparkling in the sun this morning.

There was more snow and ice last night. And of course I spoke too soon yesterday. I did learn something the hard way. You have to get the snow off the top of your car. If you step on the brakes on a slight downhill slope, all the snow goes from the top of your car to the windshield you have carefully cleared of ice and snow. This causes great distress to your windshield wipers. Oh and the driver doesn't have it so good either. Very difficult to see. So Susan, thanks for that broom tip. I'm getting one today.

I made Valentine's cards this year. You'll have to take my word for how well they turned out. I forgot to take a picture of the finished product. But with raw materials like this, how could they have turned out badly?

Happy Valentines Day to all.

Stuff you learn

2008-02-13T08:49:00.004-05:00

Sometimes it's good to not learn things the hard way. I've been trying to collect northeastern driving wisdom by asking around, rather than having to acquire information via the school of hard knocks.

One little tidbit passed along by the future son-in-law was to bring the ice scraper in with you to work or the house, rather than leaving it in the car. Why? Because if the doors to your car are iced over what are you going to use to get into the car? Duh.

Last night there was a winter storm warning or watch (I really need to learn the difference between these two....) and six inches of snow was predicted. Six inches in Austin would bring the city to its knees. In Albany, the locals said "Don't worry." I did anyway. That ice scraper came in the hotel with me.

I watched it snow out the window last night, the first snow I've actually seen coming down in all my trips to Albany this winter. It was pretty.... It may not be so pretty tonight when it melts some and then freezes into ice as is forecasted. But then, I plan to be a smart Texan and stay the hell off the road this evening. And I didn't have to learn that the hard way either.

An insanely expensive scarf

2008-02-04T20:48:00.000-05:00

I sat down this evening to read through the latest Patternworks catalog and came across this scarf:

"Pretty," I said to myself. Just stockinette that's curling over on itself, but nice colors. I glanced at the yarn specified, Yak Down. Huh? Okay, this must be a kit, a little bit of each color.

Not so. They want you to buy nine skeins of this yarn to make this scarf.

At $32.00 a skein, that's 288.00 in yarn, probably another 6.00 or 7.00 in shipping and then taxes. This is a $300.00 scarf! If I ever knit a scarf that costs 300 bucks, I want it to look crazy luxurious, not like something a novice whipped out of leftover yarn.

Oh, but no worries. The pattern is free.

The sweater project that grew

2008-02-04T20:08:00.000-05:00

I wanted a simple sweater. Something in wool to throw on over a t-shirt, wear with jeans. No fashion statement required. No complicated construction. No charts.

I bought enough Cascade 220 in a single color to knit "the perfect sweater." By the time I had wound one skein into a ball to knit a gauge swatch, I had convinced myself that I didn't want a pullover...only a cardigan would do. But no worries, I had a great pattern macerating in my pile of future projects. The Neckdown Cardigan for Women, from Knitting Pure and Simple. I took up needles and yarn and started the swatch. I was able to get the gauge, a sure sign of future success (or at least a good omen). Six inches into the cardigan, I decided that the fabric was too loosely knit. There was no way the weight of an entire sweater would hang off of that holey fabric. Still determined to knit a cardigan, I knit several swatches to determine the "fabric" and from there figure out what the gauge might be. About this time, I had easily invested close to 10 hours in decisions, false starts, and swatches. In order to continue with that pattern, I would have to recalculate everything. Hmmm, maybe I could still stick to the "simple" idea and use the Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns.

But now, it seemed more like a design and not a pattern. I had more decisions to make. V-neck? Crew neck? Collar? Borders? Ribbing? And then suddenly a sweater entirely of turquoise didn't seem like such a good idea anymore. After all, here I was making all these other decisions, maybe I should add some additional colors. Then should it be Fair Isle? Intarsia? Stripes? Slip stitches?

I hauled out all the pattern books and magazines. By now weeks had passed and not a single sweater stitch had been cast. I'd had all these opportunities to wear wool sweaters, and no sweater.

Next week I'm off to Albany again and I really want to take this project with me. Two weeks of evening knitting time...great chance to make significant progress. But still no design. Two separate trips to Hill Country added another five colors of Cascade to the stash. Six different ideas/attempts and I finally have a swatch.

A measly little border to go at the bottom of the sweater and the sleeves. You'd think I was designing the Sistine Chapel for all the effort expended.

Christmas wire work and a hat

2008-02-03T20:10:00.000-05:00

I keep forgetting to post about Christmas jewelery projects, and since knitting lately is limited to hats, I thought I'd catch up.

There's a theme here...one strand of faceted amethyst became a lot of things:

and

Unfortunately the color didn't come out very well in these photos.There were some others, carnelian for A. and restringing of some of Mom's pieces. I made the links in the turquoise piece below from wire that was already twisted.

And then, somewhere in there I took two classes in working with wire to create the setting for a cabochon or just an unusually shaped stone that has no hole.

On the knitting front, I made another hat from the same pattern as a previous post, Canadian Winter Hat. During my last trip to Albany, I learned why all those patterns for Nordic knitting are thick, like worsted weight yarn knit on size 1 needles. There's this little problem, called wind. If you have holes in your knitting, the wind whistles right through. I was so sure I was prepared. I had wool hats, wool mittens, wool scarves. One gust of 15 mile an hour wind, on a day when it was only 20 degrees F outside and you figure it out fast. My wimpy little hat was no match for Mother Nature.

Doesn't matter if it's wool or acrylic...it's got holes. So this hat is knit from Brooks Farm, Riata - wool, mohair, and silk, held double and it's thick! I have to return to the hinterlands next week, so we'll see if it stands up to the wind test.

I've been eyeing this book for two years. Every time I picked it up, I would talk myself out of it. Why the heck would I need patterns for mittens worn in Maine and the northern altantic coast of Canada? I always admired the designs, but just couldn't justify the purchase.

I think I've experienced the justification.

hat, mittens, socks and box*

2008-01-25T11:27:00.000-05:00

Sweaters. I dream of the stamina to finish a sweater. I've always hated projects that linger -- I want them to be DONE.

So I've been concentrating on hats. I made one for my FIL using the Stitch and Bitch Page a Day calendar. The yarn is Malabrigo, and it was a lovely yarn to knit with. After finishing it and the Mistake Rib scarf that matches, I had to send it quick or it would have stayed here, along the first one I made for him.

But there's more. With two balls of Rowan Plaid, I made another Canadian Winter Hat and the matching mitts. For me. They are my first pair of mittens! It's been so cold here, I almost wore them to bed.

And I finished theses socks that have been hanging around too long. I kind of made up the pattern using Vogues Ultimate Sock Book. It's okay, but not perfect. I did learn more about "designing" a sock. The yarn is Lorna's Laces Shepard Sock, in the Irving Park colorway.

I started another pair of socks -- and finished one in three days! It's Cookie A's BFF sock. I'm using Madelinetosh sock yarn that's been in my stash for a while. The colorway is Vintage Apron, and I love this yarn -- squishy is a good way.

And I also finished this felted box from the Mason-Dixon book. The Lambs Pride Bulky has been in my stash for a while. It looks a bit lopsided here.

Oh, that's better.

* Too much Dr. Suess.

Why I didn't write in December

2008-01-16T21:29:00.000-05:00

It's finished. All the way. With buttons. Blocked. Dry.

The Tangled Yoke Cardigan, by Eunny Jang, from the Fall 2007 Interweave Knits.This qualifies as the most complicated thing I've knit to date....even the Starmore Na Craga sweater wasn't as complicated (tedious, yes, but not complicated)

I started this December 8th and finished January 15th.

K. saw the pattern while she was browsing magazines in a book store. She called me and said, "you want to knit me something for Christmas?" I glanced at the pattern in my copy of the mag and saw that the needle size was listed as size 5 and 4. I didn't even notice the gauge. I said, "Okay, that's pretty." Silly me.

Turns out that the gauge for this sweater is 6 stitches and 9 rows to the inch. That's the gauge I knit for socks! (This comparison of course did not hit me until I had done FOUR gauge swatches on different needle sizes and only been able to approximate the gauge with a 2.5mm needle [1.5 US]). I still cannot imagine what contortions one must go through to get that gauge to come off a size 5 US needle. But at this point I was committed.

I actually might have finished this by Christmas if I hadn't had to knit the cable pattern almost twice. The first time it puckered so badly that I knew no amount of blocking or steaming was going to make it lay flat. So I ripped it out and knit the first couple of rows in a larger needle size. I knit half of one of the sleeves twice because I was making modifications to make them narrower and I guessed wrong. I knit the neckband twice because after it was finished, I couldn't stand the way it turned into a "rolly" looking thing when it was folded over, so I ripped back and added a turning row to make it lay flat. I knit the buttonhole side of the front band .5 more times because I didn't understand the instructions for making the holes. And then, I knit BOTH button bands twice. After I had it blocked and dry, it was obvious that I had picked up too many stitches.

I think I'm amazed that it only took me 5 weeks.

Good hat, bad hat

2008-01-13T20:48:00.000-05:00

Susan,

So that's Tito...you're lucky he didn't decide to take off with the hat. And just to show you that I like that hat so much...I made one. You said it came out of the "purl" book and I didn't remember it all. But when I opened the book, I realized why the pattern never caught my eye enough to even remember it faintly. This is one of the model photos:

Doesn't that kid look like she wants to just bite the photographer? Very flattering photo of the hat and the model, both. How did you get past that image and figure out that the hat was very nice? I never would have knit it if I hadn't seen it in person. I may make another one, it fits so well.

This is from yarn that we bought (I say we...did you buy some? I can't remember) at Kid-n-Ewe. I doubled the yarn to get the gauge and ran out of it before I could finish the other mitten. But, miraculously I still had the label (I must be living right) and it had an email address. I wrote to the people and amazingly they still have some of this yarn. It's on its way. So that's one of the "good" hats.

Here's another one. This one's knit from Kristin Nicholas' new book, Kristin Knits. I keep up with her blog, Getting Stitched on the Farm. She sells the books from her website, so I ordered it from her. When it came, it was signed! Very nice touch. I love the colors -- love to look at them on the pages, but I'm still not so sure about wearing them. When I put this hat on, I look like a Christmas elf. So maybe this wasn't such a good color choice. The embroidery was easy; I wasn't sure about that part either, but in the end it only took a half an hour and it carried me back to many, many years ago when I spent a summer (or two?) learning embroidery stitches. I was never motivated enough or disciplined enough to embroider anything worth keeping, but I did remember how to do the chain stitch and french knots. Funny how some things stick with you.

Here's the scarf to go with. It's sort of an adaptation of an idea in the book. I didn't have enough of the green yarns to do the pattern, so I winged it.

And now for the bad hat. This is what happens to you when you are possessed by the thought that you could knit a complicated hat in just a few days before you have to mail off a box to New York with the hat in it.

I've always admired this pattern, and have had it bookmarked as a someday project for quite a while.

The whole project was an exercise in denial

I didn't have time to order the yarn he used and I knew I had to make the hat bigger. So I convinced myself that if I stepped up the weight of the yarn and resulting gauge, everything would come out right. First mistake.

I flitted off to HCW to find yarn. I had chosen Katmandu in a DK weight when I was reading the labels and comparing gauges. However when I chose colors, I picked up the worsted weight and DK weight. Susan caught that I had a mix of weights before I bought the yarn AND I SWITCHED IT ALL to worsted weight to match. Second mistake.

I cast on immediately and was surprised that I couldn't come close to the gauge I wanted. I kept reducing needle size. I ended up knitting the thickest Fair Isle hat ever made. It wasn't until I was three quarters of the way through this thing that I re-looked at the label. Worsted? Hadn't I figured out that the DK would work? What the #@%*? Third mistake.

I finished the hat. Fourth mistake.

Here it is in all it's glory. It took THREE DAYS for this hat to dry. It's sitting on a flour canister and it's not stretched AT ALL. Think about that. Besides being the thickest thing I've ever knit, I think maybe it's the ugliest. The size of the yarn makes the pattern all blurry and the colors don't really work to create the same "pop" that the original had. So that's five strikes against it.

In the end, I had yarn left over and I knit another hat to send. I sent them both (Incredibly, I was still in denial even after giving up and knitting another hat) just in case it might fit. It didn't. I hope the recipient believes me when I begged to get it sent back. The yarn deserves better than this. It could be something beautiful...just not this hat.

Cat and Hat

2008-01-09T18:55:00.000-05:00

Susan

I understand completely about the boxes. A few years ago, I bought a bunch of those "vintage" hat boxes that were appearing in every craft store. I keep my yarn stash in them. Not the best choice for this purpose, as you can't see inside them. When I go looking for something, I have to open each one. This can take a while. But I love the way that they look in the closet, and other places.

I'd take a picture, but as we've discussed before, I'm a lousy photographer. For example, this picture.

In real life the hat does not resemble a lopsided birthday cake. It's soft and lovely, and although I made it for my FIL, it fits me like a charm. The yarn is Rowan Plaid, and the pattern is the Canadian-Winter hat from Sally Melville's The Purl Stitch.

The cat? That's Tito. His humans live behind us, but he likes our backyard a lot. He's very friendly, and has a pretty cute cat butt -- don'cha think?

Box Confessions

2007-12-13T23:23:00.000-05:00

I love boxes. Empty boxes, wooden boxes, shoe boxes, trinket boxes, boxes filled with long forgotten mementos, hat boxes, music boxes, decorated boxes, plain boxes. My family doesn't really understand the obsession; I guess I don't either. It just is. Maybe it's a hidden wish for order, a desperate hope that things would just fit into categories. Oh heck, it's probably all related to a delusional belief that I can control my environment, contain things. I don't know, and most of the time I don't care, and all my family's ribbing about my bizarre love of boxes just slides right off me.

One Christmas more than 20 years ago, my kids (in colusion with the husband, I'm sure) gave me what they thought was a joke gift....nesting boxes. I remember I kept opening each one, thinking that I would get to something and when the last one was open, there were just the boxes. I still have them. I'll never use them for anything, but I cherish them. Every once in a while I rediscover them while cleaning out some shelf in my closet. And they still make me smile 20 years later.

Even when I was a kid, I collected boxes. If anyone ever needed a box for something, they knew where to look. I used to sit and figure out how I could put them one inside the other so that they would take up less space and then I stored them under my bed. I remember A. dragging me away from a display of snuff boxes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Given the chance and infinite space, I will save every decent box I come across. It was probably the hardest part of the laundry room and garage clean up project--letting go of empty boxes. What if I needed one of them later?

Flipping through a Christmas magazine, while avoiding studying for my Illustrator test, I saw instructions for how to make a simple box with lid out of scrapbook paper and it didn't take more than 5 minutes before I had found paper and started folding. Then I ran out of paper. After a trip to Michael's, I now have goodie boxes. Just waiting to be filled with something yummy, something worthy of their simplicity.

I have to admit to making extra boxes just to finish the top of the pyramid. I know; it's a disease.

Countdown

2007-12-12T21:34:00.000-05:00

Everybody's counting down to something at this time of year: so many more days 'til Christmas. X many more days until school's out for winter vacation, x many more days to finish knitting something or cleaning something or planning something.

Well I'm down to 3 days and 22 hours until I finish with my semester-long Adobe Illustrator class. I enrolled in the class because I need to know how to use this *bleep* software for my job and truthfully I've always wanted to learn it. Signing up for a full four months of torture, in retrospect, might not have been the very best idea. I thought Photoshop was bad. Illustrator is equally difficult to learn and use.

Here's what I've spent 20 hours on this week. The final project:

Those who are expert Illustrator weenies will laugh in my face. It probably would have taken an expert maybe an hour to do this. For me, it seemed like forever. And lest you snigger at my composition and choice of icons to represent Austin, probably the least "cowboy" town in Texas, those were required elements. A guitar, a bat, and a picture of South Congress would have been my choice. (Maybe I would have thrown in the Capital building and the UT tower just for grins.)

I would be celebrating the completion of this project and the end of the semester if only it really were the end. I still have to take a final exam. On topics like graphic styles, appearance settings, blending modes, gradients, 3-D mesh objects, pattern brushes and symbol libraries. Sheesh.

I can show you one thing I've made lately -- the only one that I kept for myself. Everything else became a Christmas present and is secreted away somewhere or already boxed, wrapped, and mailed.

I think I'm calling it my Christmas present to myself. It's purdy.

Bandits have nothing on me

2007-12-05T12:45:00.000-05:00

Susan,

Did you forget something, on purpose maybe? It's okay. It's found a home. You know that I'm a sucker for one or two skeins of really pretty yarn. I even like the orange bag.

I'm also a sucker for fabric. We've discussed this before. I recently bought this great book, Sew What Skirts, which explains how to make skirt patterns That Fit. What a concept. Then I went to Craft-o-Rama, and came home with this stuff.

I've been knitting too. I'm almost done with a top down hat for The Husband. I always make his hats too big, so this is an experiment.

I finished these Merino Lace socks from IK's Favorite Socks. That's Koigu. I love them.

I'm nearly done with my third scarf from Knitting New Scarves. This one is Twisted. The Husband says it looks like a helix. Oh, and the yarn? It's from the White Elephant Exchange. I probably have enough for some fingerless gloves, or maybe even some with fingers...

I also started another pair of socks. I'm making this one up using the stitch dictionary in Vogue's Ultimate Sock Book. I'm calling it Flame On sock. The yarn is from my stash, Lorna's Laces Shepard Sock, Irving Park colorway.

It is a glorious day here, so I was taking pictures outside, but had to quit because of NCI (Neighbor Cat Interrupt). That's Mina. Even visiting cats like yarn.

Gettin' smarter the second time

2007-12-02T00:14:00.000-05:00

I spent last week in Albany. I kept watching the weather forecasts and up until the day I flew in it was supposed to be really cold. (Well, at least cold for a Texan, like less than 40 degrees Farenheit most of the time). I bought a real coat. One that's supposed to keep you warm. I bought an undershirt, a fleece vest, and some wool socks (it's a bummer that my handknit ones won't fit in my current old-lady-orthopedic-support shoes). I dumped a big pile of handknit hats and scarves in my suitcase. I took a bigger suitcase than I would have normally just to accomodate all this stuff. You guys know where is is going, right?

It. Was. Not. Cold. Sure, it was cool. Had I been standing outside at midnight, I might have needed that down coat. But since I wasn't wandering the streets at midnight, I spent most of my time wishing I had my lighter jacket. And in a typical turn of events, now that I'm no longer there, snow is expected.

I've been working on Christmas jewelry lately, so I won't be showing you any. Maybe in January, if I remember. Over Thanksgiving I worked on Christmas cards. Last year I made individual cards, sort of variations on a theme, but each laid out differently. This year I got smarter. All the pieces are cut the same....it's the paper that's different. Much, much simpler. And way more fun.

Fun with tools...corner punches to round the corners, circle punches, stamps, brads to attach the circles, and markers.

And there has been knitting. See this guy?

I bought some yarn made from his fleece while I was at Kid-n-Ewe and it was so spectacular, I couldn't wait. I sat down the same evening and started knitting

I finished the next day. The yarn is incredibly soft and even though I'm not a big fan of brown, this is a luscious warm color with lots of red tones. And it's cool that the color is natural, not dyed. So thank you Stonewall Jaxon.

By George, I think she's got it!

2007-11-19T00:18:00.000-05:00

Susan,

If you feel like you should start knitting due to recent fiber acquisition, then I'm way behind. Cuz I think more yarn jumped into my bag than into yours. I tried the links for your proposed designs and they didn't work. So the designs will be unfolding mysteries. And I can't believe you're going to knit that pleated thing... I read through the instructions when I was thumbing through the book. Made my brain hurt.

I spent the weekend spinning! And I think I finally have the hang of it. Now if only I had a spinning wheel. I made the acquaintance of this "superbly cute" spinning wheel (that's Schact's marketing pitch, not mine).

and actually managed to produce reasonable yarn. Third time charm, I guess. This is the third spinning class I've taken. Although I sort of don't count the first one. I took the class from Carol Rhoades, who more than knows her stuff (maybe that's why she writes and edits for SpinOff magazine), but I had a wonky wheel. It wasn't Carol's; I had it on loan. I soaked up some great theoretical knowledge and a lot of information about how to treat fiber, but the spinning resulted in a big nada. The second class I took, I actually was able produce some yarn. It sits as "trophy" yarn near my desk and has reminded me practically every day that I still really want to learn how to spin.

This weekend I lucked into an opening at a Spinning 101 class at Hill Country, taught by Deb Sayers. The wheels worked, the class was small, Deb has a very laid back "keep trying 'til you get it" philosophy and it was great. The stars were in alignment; stuff finally clicked. My feet managed to make the wheel go clockwise, I finally took the time to really work on the fiber loosening it, pulling it into smaller pieces, and that danged "drafting triangle" thing they tell you about so much actually appeared in may hands. I made yarn! And it doesn't suck!

Yarn, Yarn and more Yarn

2007-11-15T21:04:00.000-05:00

Susan,

Love the pins. I have a really nice red shawl that would look great with the third one.

When the Yarn Harlot was here, she signed my copy of her book with this: "Obsession is normal." It's nice to have such reassurances because I'm obsessed with the new book, Knitting New Scarves by Lynne Barr. The designs just seem perfect for my knitting skills. Some are mindless, others need a lot of concentration. And since I have a lot of single skeins of yarn -- a great fit, right?

But I keep buying single skeins of yarn. Like these purchased just yesterday from Gauge Knits, Austin's new LYS. They are two skeins of Peace Fleece.

I hope to combine them with the left over Peace Fleece that I got in Maine.

Then there are these two balls from Kid 'N Ewe. I was thinking of this design. I knew that they are different colorways, but I didn't realize how different until I balled them up. I thought I could use them interchangeably, but they don't look like that now. You were there. Are you surprised too?

Also from Kid 'N Ewe, this one skein that is 400 yards worth of a really nice sportweight.

I'm thinking of using it for this design.

And this from Brooks Farm, wool and silk. This is the only one I bought with a particular scarf in mind, Drifting Pleats.

And finally, just because. More sock yarn.

I'd better start knitting.

2007-11-06T23:08:00.000-05:00

Susan,

All I can say about mohair is that you are not alone. Most members of my family feel the same way you do--my kids, my mother, my grandmother, my husband. In fact I may be the one who's alone, cuz I love the stuff.

And from where is that picture? Paris? London? I want to go there!

It's that time of year again. Time to plan activities for the knitting guild's Christmas tea...and to come up with door prizes and contest prizes. Since I've spent the last six months doing little knitting and a lot of jewelry, I thought it might be a good idea to turn that jewelry stuff into something applicable to knitting: fibulas (that's Latin for a safety pins...I swear)

I recently bought "the book" (Bead on a Wire, by Sharilyn Miller, called "the book" at Nomadic Notions, my local bead store) and have been bending lots of wire lately. I've restricted myself to copper until I felt like I could approach sterling silver and not make a total mess of it. I think I'm getting there. I took inspiration from projects in that book and from Ruth Stewart, who creates jewelry in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada. Feast your eyes on her gorgeous knitted and crocheted fine silver wire jewelry. I look at some of those pieces and my eyes cross, the mind boggles, and my mouth drops open. (Uh, not a pretty picture...)

Here are my attempts:

It's time to order some sterling wire, take a deep breath, and give it a try.

Uncharted Depths

2007-11-03T11:44:00.000-04:00

Susan,

Did I ever tell you that Sally Melville taught me how to knit?

About six years ago I found her book The Knit Stitch at the library, and learned to knit. I worked though that book, then The Purl Stitch. I learned to knit socks. I made hundreds of dishcloths. I felted a few things on purpose. I became a pretty confidant knitter -- the master of small projects and whimsies. But knitting charts baffled me. They made me feel stupid, so I avoided them. Who needs to read those things? I can knit what I want, and not have to read charts.

By the time Scarf Style came out, I knew that I was wrong. I wanted to knit lace, and follow patterns with more complex stitches. I decided to make the Backyard Leaves scarf in Scarf Style. I enlarged the chart about 150% and taped the pieces together. I used crayons to color-code the stitches. I bought the yarn, and learned how to read that chart.

It was hard. I probably knit the thing ten times with all the ripping. But I did get it, and the finished scarf was beautiful. So beautiful that I gave it away.

Annie Modesitt designed that scarf; she taught me to read charts. Along the way, she also taught me how to read my knitting, understand how the patterns come together, and how to become a better knitter. Charts don't scare me anymore.

Last month at Hill Country Weavers I met Annie in person. I learned how use that Scunci steamer I've had for a while, make invisible seams and weave in ends invisibly, in the Fabulous Finishing class. I learned how to make a bead pop around to the right side of the knitting when it really wants to be on the back, and how to add beads to a project without stringing them on first, in Knitting with Beads. And I learned to love cables, and make them without the extra needle!

I also got to watch her knit -- she is really fast. I heard a couple of her stories a couple of times. I got most of her jokes. And I watched her pull herself together after a student threw down her knitting, insulted her, and walked out of class. Like all good teachers, she took it personally -- only teachers that don't care let criticisms pass without notice.

I've always respected her designs. To say they are different is not really it -- they aren't rehashed ideas, but often entirely new. They are challenging, and encourage knitters to try new things with confidence. In one class, a student wore an adaption of her corset design. When Annie realized it, she was obviously delighted, both that the student wore it, and with her additions. I then realized how much respect she has for other knitter's talents.

So, Annie has taught me a lot, about beads, finishing, cables, charts, designers, life. I wish she had discussed why mohair still gives me the willies.

The great garage clean up, part one

2007-10-27T16:10:00.000-04:00

I started. In six hours (and the obligatory trip to the Container Store and Goodwill), I was able to clean up perhaps one eighth of the garage. The easiest eighth. To show for all this effort I have one bookcase:

It wasn't actually the filling up and arranging of the bookcase that took so long. That was minor. First I had to be able to stand in front of it. The sorting of crap in front of the shelves resulted in six Hefty bags of trash, a car trunk full of stuff to donate, a large pile of empty boxes to break down and recycle the cardboard, and a pile of stuff to take to the Habitat for Humanity Re-store. Oh and a box of chemicals, cans, stuff that I have to get to the hazardous waste disposal place. When I figure out where that it is and when it's open.

I can't decide if I'm encouraged or discouraged. This means I have another 56 hours of work at least. Considering that the remaining portions of the garage contain large percentages of crap about which L. has "opinions" I think I can probably double that number. Okay, I'm discouraged.

There has been knitting of late. This is the first of things I'm knitting for myself, in wool, since next year I'll be living in a much colder climate.

It's a narrower version of the Lady Eleanor Stole, by Kathleen Power Johnson, published in Scarf Style. Lots and lots of people have knitted this. Run a search on Flickr for Lady Eleanor and you get a thousand hits. And that's just the people who've posted pictures. I love the colors, but the yarn may end up being a little scratchy for a neck scarf. I'll reserve judgement for after it's washed.

Reflections

2007-10-22T22:57:00.000-04:00

Not philosophical, but watery. I've been to the Outer Banks in North Carolina and was lucky enough to be there during an unusual warm spell for the second half of October. The locals were bemoaning the heat and lack of rain and the tourists were celebrating the last few days of summery weather. I spent a chunk of my time trying to catch a representative "beach" picture.

There were the sanderlings, who are particularly hard to catch without a really good zoom lens, because you can never get close enough to get a good shot

In the end I had to settle for only the evidence of their passing

There were the waves that moved too fast for my finger and the recycle time on the shutter of my camera. Out of 20 shots, this is the only one that came close. This picture's taken on Ocracoke Island...

There were the dunes, that were mercifully stationary, but still a challenge to come up with an interesting angle that didn't require you to scale a slippery wall of sand. I really wanted one with the fences and the fantastic shadows that they create on the rippling sand, but I'll have to settle for this one.

Here's the one I really like, taken almost by accident in a moment that lasted all of about three minutes at about 8:00am one morning when I had gone out to see if I could find a shell or two at low tide.

Chaos vs. Order

2007-10-08T23:46:00.000-04:00

It all started in the dentist's office about a month ago. I was leafing through a Home and Garden sort of magazine about just places and designers in Austin. I came across a list of "home" services and saw mention of a personal organizer. I've always figured the only places these people worked was really big cities like New York or Los Angeles. There was a website listed and it intrigued me enough to jot down the URL: http://www.livingorder.com/.

About a week ago, while clearing off my desk, I found the URL again. Funny how the universe works. I'm trying to figure out how to clean up my multiple disaster areas before I move and there was the solution. They offer an information resource and motivational sort of website in addition to their consulting services: http://www.theclutterdiet.com/ (love the name--I'm hoping this is a dieting exercise at which I can actually succeed). I thought I'd give it a try. It's not much a month and if it gets me moving enough to actually do something, then I figured it would be worth the monthly fee.

Now that I think about it, I don't know why I was surprised to find that there are a lot of blogs about tackling the mess, clearing out the junk, and getting organized. Lots of people out there who are passionate about organization (possibly a few who fall into the obsessed category, but I'm not throwing stones, having several obsessions of my own). If you're interested, start with the links from the blog of the head of Living Order, Lori Marrero.

I have three nightmares that have to be cleaned up. More on those below....but "ta-da" here's my first success. You may not think this is attractive at all, but to me the space in the photo below is heaven. In the 34 years since I moved away from my parents home, I've had a laundry room once. And that one was a room with a washing machine, a big sink, no dryer and some space with clothes lines to dry stuff when it rained. And it rained a lot. In fact, you had to walk in the rain to get to the laundry room.

But not this one, it's just off the garage. Even though there's no air conditioning (the only thing that's keeping me from just moving in here, since it's the only room in the house that doesn't have clutter issues), it's my new favorite place in the house. Look, I have a counter to fold clothes! I was so inspired, I labeled bins. And I made the people at the Container Store really, really happy. I don't know what I did for their monthly Elfa sales figures, but I'm certain I made a significant contribution.

Just so you can appreciate the incredible transformation of this space, here's the before pic:

And the "after" taken from the same angle:

It took a full two days to do this. I emptied the entire 7ft x 15ft room into the backyard, ripped old cabinetry off the walls, patched holes in the wall, and painted. That was Saturday, starting at 6:00 am and finishing about 11:00 pm with a break in there to go to Knitting Guild meeting. (There's the only mention you'll see of knitting in this post...not much of it going on these days). On Sunday, I drug L. with me to the Container Store, talked him into installing the support rails and the counter top and then worked on figuring out how to put it back, tossing the junk as I went along. I finished on Sunday at 1:00 am. In the end I only had three big garbage bags of trash, but I had six boxes of stuff to donate. It was definitely a great "diet" exercise.

If only I didn't have these two spaces to still face. The garage, twice the size with four times as much crap:

And this (don't look if you're squeemish, this will make you turn green around the gills, as my Mom always says), L's office. Actually, to be truthful, I'm not sure which space is worse, now that I see the pictures. I'm going to need some more thinking time before I can gear up for either one of these.

Touring on the Duck

2007-10-02T00:56:00.000-04:00

I've been to Albany and back. Some knitting was accomplished on the plane and at the hotel in the evenings, but not much to show for the effort yet...so I'll regale you with pictures from the Duck Tour. This lovely means of locomotion--as it was pointed out to us multiple times--is certified by the Coast Guard as a hydra-terra amphibious vehicle.

We toured the downtown area on land and water. The pictures that follow were taken later after walking back to see some of the areas again. It wasn't easy to get a picture of anything from a moving duck.

First and foremost, the capitol building. It took 32 years to build and cost a staggering 25 million dollars at the time....in today's dollars close to half a billion.

I was fascinated by the stonework done by Italian, English, and Scottish stone masons. Our guide mentioned that they carved famous faces into the columns, but in the end they were allowed to add the faces of relatives and friends. There are some funny faces here.

Here's city hall

and the New York State Department of Education, an immense, impressive building that was originally built to house both education and agriculture, but now just holds education. I should mention that Albany has close to 100,000 state workers living there. The state is the largest employer in the city.

The corinthian columns are spectacular.

I missed taking a picture of my favorite building, originally the administration offices of the railroad, but now houses the administration of the State University of New York. You can see a picture here.

We saw a little of the residential area around Washington Park, home of 200,000+ tulip bulbs that get planted now and bloom in spring.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the bizarre "Egg" that houses Albany's center for the performing arts. This shapely testament to the ability of man to turn concrete into strange things is anchored on the Empire State Plaza by a stem that goes down under the plaza for six stories and supports the structure.

Last, this is the most important building in Albany...at least to me. My future office is supposed to be here. Somehow I don't think this is going to be ready for habitation in the next three or four months.

I have a feeling I'm going to be perched on a lawn chair, balancing a laptop attached to a very long extension cord, huddled inside a down coat wishing I were back in Texas.

Last Days of SOS

2007-09-19T12:45:00.000-04:00

Susan,

I'm so sad to hear about your impending move. But excited for you too! Moving, while very stressful, is also invigorating! A new place to explore, new digs, new yarn stores. It's scary and wonderful and exhausting and a lot of adjectives I can't think of now.

It is the last couple of days of the Summer of Socks Knit Along. So here is my last pair of socks.

Yes, I know that they don't match. Thanks.

The green one is knit from the toe up, on size zero circulars. The yarn is Madelinetosh Highland Sock, Spruce colorway. The other is knit from the cuff down, on size zero DPNs. The yarn is Koigu. Both are from Hill Country Weavers.

The pattern is Charade from I May Be Knitting A Ranch House. I really like this pattern.

Here's a close up of the Herringbone Rib Pattern. Compared to the Koigu, the Madelinetosh is a bit stringy, but in this pattern stitch, it really doesn't matter.

This is the first time I've tried a toe up sock on circulars. While I think it is successful, I'm not sold on the technique. Cuff down just seems so logical, while toe up seems reverse engineered.

So the experiment went well, but now I have Second Sock Syndrome Squared.

Catching Up

2007-09-16T14:35:00.000-04:00

It's been a month since I've written anything. Life has interfered with writing. A short summary of the events would go something like this:

K. wrecked her car--running it into a light pole in the Walmart parking lot. (I still don't understand how the heck one does this, but it's totally consistent with K's personality to be someone who figured this out.) Fortunately this little incident resulted in no injury to K but did result in the total loss of a perfectly good car. Bye bye car. But K. still needed a car and I had no money to buy another one, nor did the insurance settlement provide much (surprise, surprise).

A. (big sister) offered to buy a new car with the insurance money as the down payment. I was thrilled with the solution because that meant I didn't have to make many, many more years of car payments. However, there was a little wrinkle to this arrangement. A's old car, now to be given over to K, was 1,400 miles away.

I flew to Rochester, New York via Jet Blue, a surprisingly pleasant flight, visited a day or two and drove the old car to Sherman, Texas. In a happy coincidence, my relatives have arranged themselves to make it possible for me to drive from Rochester to Chicago and stay with my sister-in-law, to drive from Chicago to Tulsa and stay with my parents, and then drive to Sherman. All I can say about that trip is that I don't really want to repeat it and there are A LOT of corn fields between Chicago and Tulsa.

While in Rochester, A and I got spend a lot of time on the phone trying to figure out how to get the documentation we needed to transfer the car's title back to Texas, having only completed the transfer of the title to New York a mere 60 days earlier. We also spent some time on wedding stuff. Draft invitations

And favor boxes

I helped K move into her new college senior "diggs." This was a job I was hoping to avoid and in truth I didn't do any hauling of boxes, I just did a lot of shopping for household necessities. That weekend was also K's birthday, so she got an old car and a pair of earrings I made.

This would have been enough to make the summer more than memorable, but when I got back to Austin, I discovered that life wasn't through with complications. I had just caught up on missing sleep when my employer told me that they're transferring me to New York. Of course I have the option of quitting and staying in Texas, but since eating and having a roof over my head is sort of important to me, I guess I'm moving. Not cheerfully, but moving nevertheless. I'm sure the next months will be full of the moving saga, if I can find time to write.

There was a weekend in there that I had to wait to confirm all the "moving" rumors that were flying around work, so I knit. Several members of the guild have knit this scarf out of odds and ends and the results were beautiful.

My version is okay, but not quite as successful, mostly because I didn't realize that they had probably knit the larger version and they all knit it out of larger gauge yarn. I ended up with a small neck scarf...not exactly what I was going for.

This last week has been spent with very little sleep--my brain just doesn't want to turn off and no amount of writing down lists of things I need to do or figure out has helped. Even finally making the decision to move hadn't helped; my brain still ran about 90 miles an hour 20 hours a day. Until last night. About 9:00pm, I grabbed a book, sat in bed with my feet propped up and didn't wake up until noon today. I guess there are limits. At some point you're just so exhausted that your body finally tells your brain to shut up.

I could end my winding story about the second half of my summer here, but it wouldn't be complete without the very latest. I've been having a lot of pain in the ball of my right foot. I finally forced myself to admit that this wasn't getting any better despite trying to wear shoes with some support, so I went to the podiatrist. I have a nerve in my foot which has turned itself into a neuroma. This may or may not correct itself after a shot of cortesone into my foot (that was fun), physical therapy, and orthotics and different shoes. I'm thinking very positive about this course of action because the alternative is surgery.

I look forward to having a very few pairs of ugly shoes for the rest of my life. I guess this helps with the closet cleaning I'm going to have to do before moving.

I could hope that this is the end of complications for a while; I've had more than enough excitement lately, but then I shouldn't be foolish. I know better.

Another Day, Another Knitter

2007-09-15T15:42:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I took a new knitter to Hill Country Weavers for the first time. We went in the back door, and wandered a bit around the children's section, with the pastels and washable stuff. She picked up yarns like Plush, and asked if it would be easy to knit with. I showed her my favorite straight bamboo needles, ones that are great for beginners. She was having a good time, but I could tell that she wasn't impressed. Then we walked through the door into the main rooms. She stopped just beyond the Silk Garden to take it all in. To see the Habu and the Noro and the Be Sweet. The silks and alpacas and mohairs and the stuff hanging from the rafters. I wouldn't say her mouth was open, but I could see that she wanted to touch everything. Like that scene in The Miracle Worker when Helen Keller finally gets it. So we went around more slowly, and she asked a lot of questions about the yarn. She noticed that the silks were brighter than the wools, and she could tell the difference between Noro's long color repeats and variegated yarns. She wondered why merinos were softer than other wools and that alpacas were even softer. She asked why the qiviut came in such small balls.

After a good wander, she bought a set of size nine needles, and a skein of Malabrigo in a bright red and purple. The colorway reminded me of these boots we saw in a window in Paris.

I'd forgotten that a yarn shop is often a place to discover new things. So take a new knitter to the best yarn shop you know, and stand back and watch.

Playing Cards

2007-09-01T12:43:00.000-04:00

My dad was a good card player. After a hand in bridge, he could recall who played what card, and when. In Canasta he knew that you needed a card even before you did. But his favorite game was gin rummy. I think it was the Ta Da aspect of the game that he relished most -- that to win you had to save the right cards, and discard the wrong ones, and reveal your expertise by exclaiming, "Gin" and showing all your cards.

That's what this post feels like -- that I've been holding a bunch of cards, and finally, have enough of the right combinations to show them, so Ta Da!

First, socks. I have been knitting socks for the summer of socks knit along. But not as many as I'd planned. There is my second pair of Monkey socks. The yarn is Claudia's Handpaint in Circus Dancer.

Then there is this pair of self-stripping socks. I thought I was so over self-stripping, but then I saw a sample of this at Hill Country, and was hooked. The yarn is Life Style from Zitron. Yes, I know that they don't match. Fran warned me that they wouldn't. They make me very happy.

And finally, there is my dish rag tag box. It arrived yesterday, Friday August 31, and contained this (plus two balls of cotton yarn). I love the stitch markers and I'm sipping the tea right now. Thanks Rebecca.

I finished my dishcloth, loaded the box with this, and mailed it this morning when the PO opened. Here's my contribution. It's winging its way to Lesley in Alabama.

I'm the penultimate member of team Lucky 13, so the box has been to nine states before arriving here. I think it looks pretty good for all that traveling. Don't you?

That's it. GIN.

Having your cake

2007-08-17T09:14:00.000-04:00

and eating it too.

Along with studying up on the wedding planning process, I've been baking cakes. A. wants chocolate. The groom wants a plain yellow cake. Neither one of them likes fondant. And the traditional Swiss Meringue Buttercream icing used on a lot of wedding cakes is just too buttery. Have you seen a recipe for this frosting? It has sugar and egg whites, sure. It's fiddly cuz you have to make a sugar syrup and cook it to softball stage, then incorporate it into beaten egg whites at just the right time. All that work ends up with an icing that tastes like sweetened butter. I guess we're just too accustomed to American confectioner's sugar-based frostings to appreciate the taste of this. If I wanted pure butter flavors, I'd eat a piece of toast.

So I've been experimenting. The idea is to have multiple cakes, to make everyone happy. Maybe one with tiers, so there's a wedding-ish cake to cut.

I've baked four cakes in the last three weeks. Two of them were so bad that I actually dumped them in a plastic bag and threw them away. I've never done that before. It sort of kills you...all that work and all that butter, sugar, and eggs. Down the drain. But then again, I've always held that if you're going to consume extraordinary amounts of calories and carbs, it had better be worth it. These definitely weren't worth it.

But this one is a "keeper." It's the Devil's Food cake recipe from Baking Illustrated with a Sour Cream Chocolate Icing from The Perfect Cake. No foray into cake baking could be done without reading a lot of cookbooks, right? That's half the fun. Did I mention that I like to read recipes?

Along the way, I read a book about making wedding cakes. I did bake a cake from there, but the best information from that book was recommendations for serious pans and magicake strips.

A trip to the local cake aficionados store of Austin, the All in One Bake Shop, and I had 8 inch pans that were 2 inches high and made from a very heavy shiny aluminum and pan cozies. I've been convinced. I don't think I'll ever bake another cake without them. The strip gets soaked in water and then wrapped around the pan. It keeps the edges from baking faster than the center so that the cake rises evenly. No more domes. So even though I didn't like that recipe much (it wasn't one that I threw away) I learned something valuable. I also learned that if you're baking a chocolate cake, you can dust the inside of the pan with cocoa powder instead of flour. It keeps the outside of the chocolate cake from getting all white (or grey-ish). Amazingly that works too. I was sure it was going to stick in the pan, but it didn't.

I'm not through baking cakes yet, but I'm happy I finally created one that was edible! I'm calling it an early birthday cake.

Yummmm.

Where I've been spending my summer vacation

2007-08-14T19:55:00.000-04:00

Well not really a vacation. But certainly a lot of time. I have this kid; she's the oldest and in early July she dropped the wedding bombshell. I'm happy; really I am. Read my lips...really.

Whenever I am faced with a planning challenge, I do a lot of research. Maybe it's an ingrained habit from years of higher education...you have a project; then figure it out. Need help? Find a book.

I have read every book on wedding planning, wedding etiquette, wedding flowers, types of weddings, wedding cakes, and wedding style that was available in the public library. I think the librarians know me by now. I'm the crazy lady with all the wedding books requested from all the branch libraries. I'm the one with the popular wedding books on hold. I'm the one who comes by every couple of days.

In my research insanity, I even sat and carefully combed through six years of Martha Stewart Weddings. It's an illness; I know.

The wedding isn't going to be in Texas. It's in North Carolina, so not only have I spent hours reading about weddings, I have also spent hours and hours doing tourism research on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Ask me, just ask me. If I can't answer your Outer Banks travel question, I bet I can tell you a website that will have the answer.

I'm sure you'll be hearing more about this event. I'll try to restrain myself...but stuff is bound to crop up from time to time.

Lately, the raging debate, burning up the internet wires between here and New York is a question of color. I think it's decided. At least it's been the same color for more than a week. This is the longest a color choice has lasted so far, so I'm thinking we have a decision.

Behold, I give you orange

Getting old

2007-08-12T16:22:00.000-04:00

Susan,

Should I recognize that building? If so, then this is only one further article of proof that old age is advancing slowly toward me. Is it a church? A museum? Did I say I had been there? I dunno.

Here's another proof that time is creeping along.

Yes, I now have not one, but two pairs of glasses. I can't see the computer screen. And I can't change the angle of the monitor so that I can look out of the right section of my trifocals, because if I do then I would have to change my chair height. If I change the chair height then I start having problems with my shoulders and wrists. No can do. So the solution is a pair of glasses that only fix the focus for the distance to the computer screen.

Yet another birthday is looming too. That could be having an affect on my temperment. Or it could just be the heat.

I've been knitting a little, here and there. The result is the February Sweater from EZ's Knitter's Almanac.

It's made out of the same cotton/acrylic blend in Tucson as the other sweater. I still probably have enough yarn to make two more baby things, but I may stop here. This sweater has been knit a lot lately. Two of my favorites are from Brooklyntweed, here, and Saartje Knits, here (scroll down a little). I had this idea to make it like a daisy and then put daisy flower buttons on it. But after I had already knit the yoke, I found out the baby is a boy, so daisies as buttons seemed a little much. Turned out that finding ANY button to match was a challenge. The yellow is very "buttery" and most of the kid or baby sort of buttons are more lemon yellow in color. I ended up with the mother goose from Beatrix Potter. Which would be just fine, except that I seem to still not get whatever it takes to make buttonholes be spaced evenly. These aren't. Despite the fact that I counted carefully the rows between holes. Evidently not carefully enough!

I do like this pattern, not too hard, not too easy. Some patterning to keep you interested, but not so much that you can't talk and knit at the same time.

And here are the latest installments in the summer of jewelry...more wire work, fewer beads.

For the Birds

2007-08-08T11:14:00.000-04:00

Susan,

Like two-thirds of the knitting population, I got an e-mail from Knitty this week about their 2008 calendar. They are looking for photos of Knitty projects.

It's no secret that I make a lot of Knitty projects. And that I'm a lousy photographer. And that I'm not very photogenic, what ever that means. But I'm thinking of submitting this photo of me in my Clapotis in Dublin.

It has that kind of "Mary Tyler Moore, just about to twirl around an throw her hat in the air" thing going, don'cha think?

In case you were wondering, there are no knitting photos from our trip to NoCal. Why? Two simple words, "I forgot." But there is this photo. Do you recognize it?