AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

Knitting on the road

I was going to bring something other than Ripple and Weave on the road to Pittsburgh (I know we flew, but it still felt like being on the road), but sanity regained the upper hand and I brought the sock in disgrace (and a backup project). 

Every morning and evening after I was done with my studying and the important work of the day, I worked on the sock.  I love the twisted stitches and how everything just comes together beautifully.  The colors are perfect for the season, and it is past time to send these socks onto their happy home.

I left the 3-needle bindoff for home.  With the first sock I lost a lot of stitches, because I still had them on the needles (and tried to turn the sock inside out with the needles still in).  This time I plan to put the stitches on waste yarn before turning the sock inside out. 

So, with the socks nearly done, I started my "on the road" project: the Ribwarmer from the Fall 2006 Vogue Knitting.  I had bought the yarn about a year ago, and hadn't done it.  So far, it is turning out to be a pretty quick knit with an easy to memorize cable pattern.  I'm up to the left side now (it is worked in one piece from right side, right shoulder, back, etc.).  I'm enjoying working on something that just leaves people scratching their heads, wondering what it is going to be.

Level 4A

Only bloggers would do  this --->

Last week was a whirlwind.  I went to Pittsburgh to see my brother-in-law get married.  Along the way there were good times, games, the World Series, and more food than any one being could possibly eat.

I could write for days about this, but there is too much.  I'll sum up.

Level 4A
Where we parked the car before the wedding reception on Saturday.  My MIL et al told me to remember where we were and I took the camera in my pocket, walked back and snapped a picture.  It worked too.  I remembered it (without the picture being necessary). 

The wedding and reception were beautiful.  The opening cocktail hour (which is always more than an hour) featured masks to mark what table you were at for the reception, food I didn't eat, coffee I definitely drank, and an accordionist who played a remarkably good selection of music.

The reception involved cakes (wedding and grooms) as well as a cookie table.  One of the neatest things about a cookie table, a western Pennsylvania tradition, was seeing all of the different kinds of cookies and the effort made by the members of the two families.  While it could probably be all done by one very enthusiastic individual, it was put together by a combination of members of the two families.  A great way to get to know the other people!

The grandmother of the bride in addition to making hundreds of delicious cookies also made these roses to decorate the cookie table.  They are made by rolling gumdrops out with extra granulated sugar (so they don't stick) and shaping them into roses with toothpicks.  There were boxes available to take cookies home with you, so we added a couple of gumdrop roses to our pile.

And of course the Grooms cake.  I didn't eat any of it (though I meant to snag a piece after it was cut), but had to take a picture.  I mean, really!  Steelers cake!

The wedding cake was an elegant buttercream and lemon affair, simple but delicious.

Flying  
These are the pictures of the plane and in the plane on the way there and back.  Probably not exciting to many, but definitely exciting to me (we flew JetBlue and were going nearly 666 mph with the jetstream behind us).

Of course, I did more than fly and wedding.  I have finished (well, fine almost finished - I need to 3needle bindoff and weave in ends) my Sock Savior socks, which I hope to mail out this weekend at the latest.  My MIL has requested that I knit her a baby blanket to be given to a cousin (this is now my default designation, because it is a very large family).  I'm going to be using the Hoover Blanket pattern and need to find an appropriate yarn this weekend.

Last picture?

One step back

Go Red Sox!

I was working on my sock savior sock (it's sock #2) during the big game when I noticed that I didn't have the pattern row I thought I did...

I had already finished the heel flap and turning the heel and just had an aw crud moment.  Within minutes I had ripped the entire sock out.  It was just too daunting to try and fix in the poorly lit room a sock full of twisted stitches, k2tbl (or however knitting 2 together through the back loop is written) and various yarn overs.  Of course, this puts me behind on my sock knitting.  I wanted to mail this out before leaving for a wedding tomorrow.  Instead, I'm going to knit my fingers off tonight and tomorrow morning and see how much of this sock I can do.  I don't want to bring it with me (mostly because I'm close enough to done that I will not have any knitting when I'm there if I can only bring one knitting project), but want to send it out.  Everyone deserves pretty socks!

I'm going to be in the Pittsburgh area, but will be neither car accessible or probably have the free time to go to a yarn shop.  But I can dream!

Two steps forward

Of course, now I have that song stuck in my head.

I did a bit of cooking this weekend.  I finally made the Classic Winter Noodles, and as expected the big thrust of work was making the soup stock.  I'm full up on stock for a while, so I now have a few easy dinner options for the next umpteen months.

I got to try KickAss Cupcakes (thanks to winning a gift certificate through Spark), which was pretty good.  I didn't get to try the mojito cupcake but I did have a cupcake with milk duds on top.  Easy enough to do myself, but not something I had thought of.

I also finished the Sassy Ruffled Skirt.

Now, I started this some mumble-mumble time ago.  I used Karabella Breeze, which is amazing to work with.  I loved making this skirt.  At least until I got to the waist band.  The project languished (I'd estimate a year, but I don't truly remember when I got the yarn so it might be shorter) for a long time.  All that was left were a few ends to weave in and sewing the waist band.  Pathetic.

But I finished the waist band on Sunday (during the Patriots game) and tried it on.  Oops!  Too big.  But I have a plan.  It does, scarily, involve more sewing.  I want to sew belt loops (says the woman that dislikes belts) and then find a nice interesting belt to rescue my skirt back to wearability.

Of course, I will probably use ribbon to sew the belt loops.  I'll probably follow this short tutorial, and Frankenstein something together. 

Oh, and that thing about knitted skirts not working (I've heard it from a lot of people, so was skeptical when I started the project)?  It's not true.  I wore a short slip with this skirt and had no problems other than the aforementioned waist band, which is all my fault.

From Loop-D-Loop I go

Months ago I made the Yoke Vest.  I love it, but I was gutsy and didn't swatch.  I just kept knitting, trusting to the kindness of fate to save me.  The result was a beautiful top if a little too short and a tiny bit too snug for me.  I have let it lie fallow, waiting for me to either start over (not likely, it is only a little bit too snug if the expanding properties of cotton are to be believed) or add enough crocheted edging to straighten out the scary rolling and to give some additional length.

Of course, it is still fallow, but two weeks ago on my free day I wandered into Spark and picked up enough Cashmerino Aran to make the Ballet Top.  I bought a little bit of contrast, and proceeded to make a tiny swatch to figure out my actual cast on.

I mathed the top until I got the the decreases in the waist.  There I felt confident and slipped stitches onto a spare needle and tried the piece on.  Not too big, just a tiny bit loose feeling.  I continued when I got home from class on Wednesday, nearly to the end.

And at the end, we have this:

Ballet Top
Yarn: Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran
Color:  Umm, brown?  Kind of obvious

I did some crochet edging (this is the edging I was going to use on the Yoke Vest) on the armholes and the bottom hem along with just some single crochet around the neckhole.

It is a little sheer, though I'm pretty sure that most of that is the camera flash.  Kind of scary little camera flash. 

Oh, and yes, I just finished brushing my hair after getting out of the shower.  Makes me look like quite the drowned rat. 

Of course, now I am motoring through the last bit of my sock savior socks (yeah, the second sock is taking longer than the first).  My weekend plans are almost relaxing: knit about 40% of a sock, finish the waist and edging of the sassy ruffled skirt from last year, and maybe even start something new (because I can't drop to single digit WIPs - unnatural!).

where is the knitting?

I actually have knitting content (or so close I can practically taste it), but I'm mostly thinking about exercise and weddings.

I've gone to a large number of weddings this year and it is interesting to see the different approaches people have had to their bodies.

Most of the women love or at least comfortable with how they look, and so they wore dresses of varying levels of sparkle or color (there was a red and black dress one bride wore that I would have loved to wear).  Unsurprisingly despite the adage that every bride is beautiful, some of the dresses were not as flattering as others.  Some are dancers and could be beautiful in burlap sacks they are so long and clean lined of limb.

One bride however started the engagement period where I had been - overweight and pudgy.  While I decided months after my wedding (while looking at the pictures) that I wanted to be healthy and thin (or at least thinner than my 190+ pound body was at the time), she decided during her engagement to lose weight.  She did it and was a slender bride, but I wonder how much harder it was to plan and prepare everything with the added component of losing weight.  Losing weight like every life change is stressful, because you are changing your focus and discarding comforts and coping mechanisms that while not healthy were there.  If you eat bread and potatoes when you are upset, you have to find something else.  Not finding that something else can make you and everyone around you pretty miserable.

Everyone is a bit frazzled approaching their wedding day.  It is a huge concentration of money and effort and thought for a relatively small spot on our lives.  I wonder how much harder we make it on ourselves with high expectations of our bodies and what a wedding should be.  When did princess become such a goal.

Of course, I'm attending another wedding next week, so I'll be able to see another approach, another gorgeous bride and another wave of stressed families.  I hope all the brides I've known this year are doing well and are calming down from the frenetic pace of planning.

t-shirts (T・ｼｬｰﾂ)

I love t-shirts. Losing weight means replacing clothing, and while I haven't lost weight in months (a good thing) I still haven't bothered to replace most of my clothes.  I have a lot of things that are way too loose.

Now, I don't buy t-shirts on a regular basis, because I don't buy clothing for the most part that I can't wear to work.  My husband recently got for me a girly-style T that says "Red Sox" (sort of) in kanji on the front and Matsuzaka Daisuke on the back.  It's cute and I have worn it, even though I was too cold to take off my sweatshirt.

So, I love Threadless.  I don't get to buy from there often, but I keep looking at their interesting t-shirts.  I get their emails every week.  This week was a doozy.  There was a t-shirt aimed for library geeks: November was a Good Month.  My hubby keeps asking me what I want for Christmas.  Now maybe I have an answer other than a "nap."  It's almost as much fun as my Questionable Content t-shirt that reads, "She Blinded me with Library Science."

A weekend of sugar

I spent most of this weekend cooking.  Cake (both little filled ones like the ones over thar and the larger one I brought to work today), frosting, homemade fondant, and pudding as well as soup stock (Dashi) and pickled ginger.

There were a number of things I learned from my extravaganza of baking. 

1.  Buy extra sugar.  4 pounds of confectioner's sugar was just not enough.  That way you don't have to cobble together a chocolate frosting out of nearly nothing.

2.  Use a cake that can hold up to cutting.  Fluffy white cake from a cake mix might be quick, but the cakes crumble into nothing with a knife.

3.  American frosting becomes much harder to use once it has cooled.  Work quickly.

And 4.  It doesn't matter as long as it is tasty and eaten.

I think I'm baked out for a while (my hubby will rejoice), but there is a small chocolate cake left.  Maybe I'll have a slice when I get home if I do a little exercise for it.

Sweets to the Sweet

I like to cook sweets.  If I were a better person, I would put more of my cooking energies into soups and other low-calorie, nutritious foods to fill up the belly without breaking the bank.  Instead, I think of cookies, ice creams, fudges, and cakes.

I don't normally bake for things at work.  I can buy a cake for our small group at Rebeccas or Rosies and have something people will truly enjoy.  However, I decided I wanted to make a white cake with strawberries for a birthday (and potentially a second birthday being celebrated within a day), so I've been looking online and thinking about all of the cookbooks and decorating books I have. 

One of my favorites is a little gem, Sweets to the Sweet.  It's not the biggest or the best cookbook, but it makes up for its brevity with its Mary Engelbreit feel.  There is a recipe for faerie cakes in it that I've been dying to try out for a couple of years (a bit time consuming really) as well as profiterole and pies. 

Of course, I'm going to be spending a fair amount of today baking.  I have this little vision of a white cake, 2 or three layers.  The cakes will have a thin layer of seedless strawberry jam (wish I could ask one of my friends who makes jam if he has any, because he makes an excellent Strawberry Basalmic) with a bit of whipped strawberries (whipped cream with a bit of liqueur and either very small pieces of strawberries or a bit of strawberry juice).  The frosting will be a buttercream frosting, white, with floral decorations in the lightest pink I can manage.  Of course, I've made wedding cakes.  They were high on taste and low on presentation.  But the image in my head is of a cake with high marks for taste and looks.  I wonder if I can pull it off.

Beauties

Foldings
This is amazingly beautiful works.  When my husband sent me the link, I didn't really say anything to him about it (and honestly, didn't click on it right away).  Then I clicked and stared.  I'm not really any good at origami.  I love paper, but it is a back drop or a tool.  I don't really do folding and have never done much beyond the cranes.  When I worked at Sasuga, I would scan book covers for the website and the newsletter.  I loved the different books for dinosaurs or boxes made out of pieces of folded paper.  I even bought a few older books from eBay, even though I never got around to trying it out.  Just a crane here or a tulip there.  Basic folds that even an indifferent beginner could work their way around.

But these?  These are art.