Finally FO: Dashing!

Today was a sad day. My boyfriend Brian is heading back to Montana for the semester, so I hurried up and finished his very belated Christmas gift. It's something he'll use a lot there, hopefully to keep his hands warm while talking to me on the phone!


The thumbs are still mildly disastrous, but in a way I can live with. I think if/when I make these again I'll do a more traditional thumb gusset instead of this afterthought thing -- not only would I probably find that easier, but I saw pictures somewhere of Dashing done that way and I liked the look much better, too. The surprising part is how ridiculously WARM these keep you! I wore them around while waiting for Brian to show up this morning and they kept me much warmer than Fetching usually does. I think it's all that extra length. I might need to make myself a pair at some point, but for now I'm happy that Brian likes his so much. Here's a blurry shot of him modeling them somewhat reluctantly:

"Please don't put this on Facebook."
"Oh, this isn't for Facebook, it's for my knitting blog!"
*sigh*
With any luck I'll be visiting him out there next month. Accordingly, I am planning on knitting myself lots of warm woolly stuff! All I'm working on now is the cardigan, which feels strange. I thought my Ravelry was lying to me, but it's true: I only have one wip. This will not last, trust me.

In other news, I MISS KNIT NIGHT SO MUCH!! I haven't been in thousands of years, mainly due to car issues. I'm hoping I can make it out next Tuesday because I miss everyone like crazy. The good news, though, is that I don't have class on Tuesdays this semester, so I can come directly from home and maybe even bring my wonderful little sister along! I'm looking forward to that.

Speaking of my knit night pals, Marj left me a very kind present at her blog the other day. :) I'll be doing a similar list in my next post!

Finally, I have a somewhat stupid question about knitting books. Are they like other books, in that I can expect a paperback to come out someday if one is only out in hardcover now? Or do I have to suck it up and accept the expensive hardcover edition (and by "accept," I probably mean "check out from the library")? I'm just wondering because I came across some great ones last night but they were all hardcover & therefore like $30. :-\

I did get myself one crafty book, though: the Stitch & Bitch crochet book! Hopefully my beloved Aunt Andrea (a.k.a. the Crochet Crusader) will be proud of me. I'm still more or less counting on her to teach me, but maybe I can learn a few of the basics from the book. There are also a lot of really excellent patterns in there, so I'm glad I picked it up!

Oh, blog, how I neglect you!

Ok, so far my resolution to post more in 2008 might not be going so hot. Luckily there's plenty of time to rectify that!

First of all, thanks to all my Ravelry friends for the birthday messages! My 21st was lots of fun. I celebrated with my family, my boyfriend, & 2 of my closest friends at Xochimilco, a favorite Detroit Mexican restaurant. That picture on the left is of me there, about to take my first legal sips of delicious sangria!

This picture was also taken at Xochimilco:



Back in the day they used to have bulletin boards to display photos of customers' babies. They're still there, and that unbelievably cute one in the center of this, wearing the bonnet? That's yours truly, nearly 21 years ago! My family has been going to that restaurant since long before I was even dreamed of and I don't think we'll stop any time soon.

I have been getting some knitting done, but not much. I worked on Dashing (no, it's still not done, though we're in the home stretch!) in the Secretary of State office last week, waiting to renew my driver's license. I should knit in public more often! Sometimes I feel awkward about it but it's funny how happy it makes the people around you and how much they want to talk to you about it. It made the wait tolerable, anyway, which is saying a lot, as you know if you've ever had to sit on the floor of an unbelievably crowded office for a truly ridiculous amount of time.

The cardigan is slowly coming along, too. With any luck, I'll finish the first sleeve before much longer. Here it is this morning:



I made the seed stitch cuff a little shorter than recommended. I'm in love with the idea of an extra-long sleeve for extra warmth, but also very afraid I'll run out of yarn, so I'm cutting corners where I can. I love this yarn (Ironstone Harmony) and the broken needle has been scotch-taped and is holding together decently. It's not a bad project to work on, but it's a lot of stockinette and therefore a bit boring. I've been trying to work on it while watching TV, but thanks to the writers' strike (or, really, thanks to the networks' greed!) all the TV I've been watching lately is Planet Earth on DVD. If you've ever seen that show, you know that it's not one you can really knit during. It's so spectacular visually that I wind up throwing my needles aside & getting totally absorbed within the first few minutes. I'd highly recommend it, but not if you've got knitting you need to do!

There are a few other reasons for my slow knitting progress of late, and the main one is that I can't seem to stop reading. I've always been a big reader but I go through phases with it, as I do with most things. The last few months saw a brief lull, but in the last few weeks I've just been devouring books. Currently I'm in love with Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, which is about her family's year of eating locally & raising the majority of their own food. I may review it here when I'm done, since this blog is at least sort of about food as well as knitting. If nothing else, I'll be trying some of the recipes! This book has convinced me that I need to try all kinds of crazy things, including cheese-making. :)

On the baking front, no new cookies to report just yet. My step-mom gave me a huge platter of cookies & brownies on my birthday, so I'm waiting for those to disappear before I make any more. I did make banana bread the other night, though, and that was delicious. I'm a big banana bread fan and let me tell you, this recipe cannot be beat! It's really good with both chocolate chips and walnuts, though I haven't made it that way in a while. Next time!

I did get some cool food-related birthday presents, too. A friend's mom put together an awesome gift basket of obscure ingredients + a book called 100 Great Breads, so I have some interesting experiments ahead of me!

That's all for now and hopefully it won't take me another week to post again.

The glorious queue.

I'm not gonna lie: my knitting life is a little boring right now. The only project I have going is the second glove for Dashing, which I may or may not have only cast on a few hours ago. Yes, it was supposedly a Christmas gift, but the thing is that my boyfriend got dragged on a family vacation (because going to school in Montana for most of the year apparently doesn't constitute being away from here often enough?) and won't be back until January 1st. I knew I wasn't going to finish his gift before he left, so I suggested we just exchange 1 gift before he left and leave any others until after he got home. Gives me more time, plus maybe he'll get me something pretty on his trip! (If you're curious, the gifts we did exchange were a 2008 Slingshot organizer and a massive street atlas of Metro Detroit. Ah, romance!)

So, let's talk about my queue and all the awesome selfish knitting I'm going to be doing now that the holidays are over! Ok, I do have some gifts left -- gotta finish up Dashing, there are a few tiny secret knitted gifts I'd like to send out soonish, and I never made those cool mittens for my buddy Jacob. I'll get to those when I get to them, though. (I think he knew better than to expect them from me remotely on time. I still owe him a cheesecake from his birthday last July...)

Anyway, how much do you love having a queue on Ravelry? It's wonderful! I have friends on there who queue literally hundreds of items, meaning that when I check my friend activity page I get introduced to all kinds of new patterns daily. Me, though, I keep my queue reasonable; right now I've got 7 items in it. They're all things I fully intend to knit within the next few months, rather than things I'd like to knit at some point in my life (those millions of patterns go into a huge file on my computer). And I am obsessively thinking about the first item on there all the time lately:

• The 18 Seconds to Sunrise Hat (Ravelry link/Pattern) A weird name for a cute hat! I need a hat, guys. I have a couple: one I stole from my boyfriend and one my friend Sara passed on to me. Oh, and I found a bizarre old Russian-looking fur one when cleaning my room yesterday (no idea where that came from... fur is gross, so I promise you I didn't buy it - probably someone left it at my house a million years ago). They're ok but they're not so me and they're really not even that warm.
  
  The reason I have so few hats is that I did not understand that I was capable of looking ok in hats until I visited Brian in Montana last October and it was like 20 degrees out all the time and I was kind of secretly staying in his dorm room on the all-boys floor (scandalous, I know! But hotels there only rent to you if you're over 21 and we aren't, which is totally not my fault). So on the first day or so he plopped one of his hats on my head and I started to protest about how stupid it looked, but then I thought, "Hey, this is warm! And easier than sneaking to a girls' floor to wash my hair!" And later I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and that was that: hats are my new best friends.
  
  Ok, so I've understood that I can wear hats for a couple months now, but surely you can understand why I haven't bought any. Cute hats in stores provoke the universal knitters' response from me: "Oh, I'll just make it!" Nevermind that it may involve plenty of techniques I don't know and that I don't have the yarn or the needles for it and that my ears are cold right now! I could make make myself a hat, and so I must. I've bookmarked roughly a kajillion hat patterns, but this one calls out to me the most. I don't really know why, but it's just wildly appealing to me. I spend an appalling amount of time fantasizing about it: the potential yarns and colors, the amazing way it will look when it's done. Oh man, I can't wait!


• The Hot Lava Shrug (Ravelry link/Pattern) This might be one of the first things I ever queued on Ravelry (I reorder the thing so much that I can't tell anymore). As soon as I saw it, I knew it had to be one of my first post-holiday projects. Again, the potential! The colors I could use! The buttons or brooches or various other items I could use to fasten it! Endless daydreaming fodder, I'm telling you.


• The Stewie Griffin Doll (Ravelry link/Pattern) Believe it or not, this will actually be a gift for my mother. She is beyond obsessed with Family Guy and I think she will like this more than anything else I could possibly knit for her. This was going to be her Xmas gift but I quickly realized I wouldn't have the time, so now I'm doing it for her birthday in March. I think she'll be completely surprised by it and I seriously can't wait to see her reaction!


• The Unbelievably Adorable Hearts (Ravelry link/Pattern) There are no words for how freaking cute these are! Lynn at ColorJoy linked to them recently and I was overcome by an urge to make thousands of them. I mean, can you imagine a cuter or quicker Valentine's Day project? That "holiday" tends to make me want to throw up a little, but I don't care because these are just too good! I wanted to link the pattern in case any other knitters would have the same reaction. If you're one of the non-knitters to whom I would give something like this...just pretend like you never saw it.

So, anyway, there are some of the queued patterns fueling my knitting daydreams at the moment. Sorry if that was long & nonsensical -- I woke up with an unbelievable amount of pressure in my sinuses and am on so much cold medicine that earlier I was having brilliant thoughts like, "Nine times three can't be 27! It just doesn't make sense!" Math has never been my strong suit, but...what I'm saying is that I miiiight be a little out of it today.

Any patterns you're presently obsessed with or itching to try out?

Almost Christmas!

Oh look, again it's been a while! I can't say I've been knitting much, even with Christmas so close. The penguin is almost done, and my brother's hat was done but it seemed too small so I ripped back to before the decreases and haven't really don't anything on it since...

I'm not feeling too stressed, though. I realized that I won't be exchanging gifts with a number of my friends until a few days after the actual holiday, anyway. I'm not going to give my boyfriend his fingerless gloves until after the new year, since he's going away the day after Christmas and not getting back until then, so that gives me plenty of time to finish them. (This is really good because I haven't even started on the second one! Mainly it's because he's been around me lots of the time, and also because I was using those same needles on some secret presents for a few days there.)

So not a lot of knitting in this post, but I definitely have a recipe recommendation: Cream Cheese Chocolate Cupcakes! I made these last week and they were almost seemed too easy in light of how delicious they were. I gave most of them to my friend Jacob & his family and they were a big hit.

I don't know if I'll post again before (or on) the actual day, but in case I don't here's a big MERRY CHRISTMAS to those of you who celebrate it!!

Gifts & Food.

Yikes, again it's been a while since I posted! I have to admit I didn't knit a whole ton this week - first I had finals, then some of my friends came home from school for break, plus there was a snowstorm. So I had hanging out & sledding that needed to get done! But Brian's gift is halfway finished, at least:

The thumb is a little funky (I haaaate doing thumbs!) but I'm overall pretty pleased. I am slightly nervous that they'll be too small for him, but we'll see...

Today I started & finished one ridiculously cute little gift, but it has to stay a secret until after the holidays!

A few days ago I finished my brother's hat, but it seemed too small so I ended up ripping back to before the decreases & picking up again there. I haven't worked on it in a while because ribbing = tedious.

I have been baking a little and cooking a lot, though. Last week my grandma gave me a copy of The New Laurel's Kitchen: A Handbook for Vegetarian Cookery and Nutrition. I am obsessed with this cookbook, guys. I don't even really know why -- so far the recipes aren't really that great, but something about the awesome hippie vibe of the book just puts me in a good mood every time I look at it. And the use of the word "Cookery" in the title! Seriously, what a great word. From it I've made Cranberry Squash (not bad) and "Everybody's Muffins," the very name of which makes me laugh. Those had a good flavor (in a super-healthy whole wheat kind of way) but definitely didn't rise enough & were therefore much too dense. I am a failure as a bread baker, dudes. Nothing that needs to rise ever rises under my watch, no matter what I do or how high my hopes of delicious, rewarding homemade bread are (very high, for the record). I also suck at kneading. One day I will accept these facts and just move next door to a lovely bakery or something, but for now I will probably keep trying...

I also ate brussels sprouts for the first time in my whole life last week! Yeah, my parents had such bad childhood memories of being forced to eat them that they never even tried making me do it. In fact, they're the only food all the tough "I'll eat anything" manly men in my family say they can't stand. But this recipe looked really appealing, so I bought some & gave it a shot. I was nervous about it but they were actually delicious! For the record, I used a bit of pecorino romano (purchased on accident when I'd been looking for parmesan, ugh!) & a lot of mozzarella. Parmesan would've been better but they were still tasty & I'll definitely be using that recipe again soon.

On the less healthy side, I made oatmeal chocolate chip peanut butter cookies last week. They were excellent, if I do say so myself! Or half of them were, anyway. The other half went in the cookie jar right after I tossed some stale mint Milanos. They became infused with the flavor of mint in a way that can only be described as revolting, and so half the cookies were wasted. Lesson learned!

And now I'm thinking that, even though it's late, I probably need to whip up a batch of these because don't they look heavenly? Yes, yes they do!

One gift (mostly) down, approximately 8 zillion to go!

Wow, have I really not posted since Tuesday?! Quite a bit has happened since then!

On Thursday, I finally checked out Neighborhood Knits. It's only a few minutes away from my school and I think it's good for both my bank account and my GPA that I didn't discover it until now. (This semester I had a nearly two-hour break on Thursdays, during which I usually caught up on reading & homework, but I'm sure I don't need to tell you that my desire to buy yarn could trump my desire to do either of those things any day.) Anyway, it was a lovely little shop with a good selection and everyone was very friendly, so I think I'll be going back quite a bit in the future. For now I have a gorgeous skein of Cascade 220 Heathers, with which I've started on my boyfriend's Xmas gift, Dashing. I meant to get a brown or green yarn but in the end I couldn't resist this kind of reddish orange-ish brownish gorgeousness. Ok, it's mostly reddish, but it reminds of foxes and autumn and other good things, and I'm pretty sure Brian will dig it, too, which is probably what matters most. As always, the photo doesn't quite do the color justice:


That's the first glove and it's grown significantly since that picture was taken yesterday afternoon. I am in love with this cable pattern, guys! For some reason I'm having real trouble doing it (yesterday was the first time I ever threw my knitting at the wall!) but it's coming out so beautifully that I don't care.

I knit a lot this weekend, and I'm making progress on all my gifts. Happily, I've just about finished the headband:

The ends still need to be sewn together (they're just safety-pinned there) but I might block it first. It looks fine on the head, but when it's off it rolls up like crazy. I wouldn't mind if it was just for me, but since it's for someone else I think I might put in the effort of blocking...maybe. Initially it actually was going to be for me, but over the course of knitting it I decided it needed to go to my friend Sara. For one thing, she looks far better in shades of red than I do, and for another she lives up in Marquette, where people really need warm winter stuff! (Not that we don't need it down here in the Lower Peninsula, too...) Also I think she'll appreciate a handmade gift and, well, she's one of my best friends in the world, so she deserves one too. :)

I'm a little embarrassed that it took me so long to finish such a simple project, but what can I say? I got bored with it & kept putting it aside. It happens.

Also, I'm finally coming to terms with the fact that I can't knit for everyone on my list in the amount of time left until Christmas, so I've come up with a nice alternative partly handmade gift that can fill that gap: embroidered stuff! I love embroidery & haven't done a new project in months, so I'm excited. Today I went out & got a few cheap, plain shirts. When my t-shirt stabilizer comes from Sublime Stitching I'll be able to go to town on them and hopefully make some really special and well-loved gifts.

I know lots of knitters complain about friends who don't appreciate all the effort that goes into handmade gifts, but I'm starting to fear I have the opposite problem. My friends are all the type who really love handmade stuff and I don't want any of them to be disappointed if I give them something that doesn't have a personal touch. Here's hoping I can get all those "personal touches" done in time!