AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

Happy Birthday

to my hubby (and that's where I'm stopping, so I don't embarrass him).

So, this morning I made (with his assistance) Gingered Pumpkin-Apple turnovers.

I've been thinking about turnovers since the football season started, because my mind decided that it was just wrong for terminology to be the same.  I haven't made turnovers before, but The Spice Cookbook (I checked and it is from 1964) had a recipe for apple turnovers.  I made their pie crust and it came out pretty darn flaky.  The recipe itself was standard, but it was a little more elaborate in explaining ways to mix the dough together so it became flaky rather than leaden.

Of course one of the best things about making turnovers (or anything with a pie crust) is using the leftover dough to make crust cookies.  I did a little milk wash and cinnamon and sugar, so the entire house smells wonderful.

(and yesterday, I made the Gingered Applesauce I used in the turnovers.)

Freedom (and some more shame)

I started this cropped bolero top ages ago.  I used this lovely blue soy silk that I had and spent a lot of time worrying if I had enough yarn.  I was prepared to unravel my swatch for it.  I had done the ribbing, and then I stopped.

I was going to be hanging out with friends tonight, and probably working on the baby blanket in the interstices of conversation and gaming (Nobilis - which I was really looking forward to).  Given that has been postponed, I figured I should do something useful with my time.  Thus I have decided to pull from my catalog of shame and try to finish something (stupidly old) this month.

I added it to my ravelry queue, so I now feel compelled to complete it.  It worked with the skirt (though I still need to work on belt loops), so hopefully it will work on this top.  If I'm really lucky, I will finish it and it will even fit!

(Of course, that means the active items I'm planning on knitting over this weekend are the baby blanket, the cropped top, and Christmas stockings for the Holiday Bazaar.  This might be too much and read my textbook too.)

Life on ravelry

Brainy Alison asked yesterday how many items were in our Ravelry queues.  The last number I remembered was 16.  I was wrong.  I have 20 items in my queue, and I was one of the lowballs in the group.

One of the things I love best about Ravelry is the ability to look at a pattern and quasi-bookmark it for later.  I love everything on my queue.  They are mostly based on things in my books.  Handy reminders that I still want to knit that jacket if I ever get 13 skeins of the yarn, or that this pattern would be good for stash busting.  I have patterns in there that I want to use the recommended yarn even though it would break the bank, because the yarn is just that gorgeous.  And I have patterns in there as reminders that I don't need to print (and lose the printout) and reprint the free online pattern until I'm actually ready to knit the darn thing.

My current favorites (just the top 3) from the land of the queue are:

1.  The Vortex Street Pullover from Knitting Nature (Norah Gaughan).  I have a definite idea and plan to use substandard yarn (I have Woolease that I don't know what to do with, so forgive me internets).

2.  The Cabled Riding Jacket from Loop-d-Loop (Teva Durham).  Everything I've made so far from the book has not looked as good on me as it has on the models, but I love them and this pattern anyway.  I just wish that I could see and try one on in person first.

3.  Fete by Amy Polcyn (the only one where the pattern is available online).  I'll admit that I mostly fell in love with the yarn.  I can't afford, can't justify Tilli Tomas yarns.  But I want to.  I want to buy the yarn with the silly little sequins and knit just a tank top, because I can.  Three skeins is my yarn budget for an entire quarter at least, but right now I just love it and don't care.  However, I'm smarter than I look sometimes and I'm holding off until I get a bonus or a tax refund where I can a portion of the funds and buy myself a treat.

Ah, maybe in the spring.

reprieve

Yesterday, I got a lovely email from my FIL saying that the shower is November 24th.  This is wonderful news.  The long slog of the blanket is still there, but I have about 10 more days to work on it than I was calculating. 

So, this morning when I woke up for no good reason at 3:30, I got up, played a game for a bit, and knit on the blanket for about an hour.  It's at about 16 inches now.  No pictures because a 12 inch blanket looks mostly like a 16 inch blanket.  So, anyway, I was sitting there knitting away and my brain was buzzing about the Holiday Bazaar. 

The Holiday Bazaar is a yearly event at work.  I've been trying to figure out if I'm going to do it this year.  At least one year I made melt and pour soaps (maybe even 2 years), and last year I did a lot of knit scarves and other things.  People objected to wool, or didn't think a scarf that was handknit with 2 skeins of Malabrigo was worth more than $20.  Obviously I didn't sell as much as I wanted, because I wanted to price items at higher than the material cost. 

I was thinking this morning and then just broke down.  The blanket went into the bag, and I dove into one of my little cubbies and pulled out a skein of yarn.  I dug into my box of needles (I definitely need a better way of organizing them) and started a sock - a Christmas stocking.  I wonder how many Christmas Stockings I can make between now and the beginning of December.

a spoonful of sugar?

Going to Pittsburgh and seeing the in-laws makes me always horribly aware of how messy I keep house (hint: I don't), so I've been trying to be a little bit better.  Dirty dishes go in the dishwasher.  Clean ones come out sooner, and are put away.  The paper cruft is sorted and filed (some circularly).  And the special case rooms (the rooms I hate when they are dirtied) are actually cleaned.

I started the process of cleaning our tiny bathroom this weekend by spraying the scary mold-defying spray all over the tub.  I even did a little bit of scrubbing in the area.  But I'm hoping that around real life - yes, housekeeping is not part of my real life - I'll be able to wash the floors, clean the windows and mirror, and generally make the porcelain (or fake porcelain) dust free.

I figure that if I do a little bit of this cleaning thing each day then maybe at some point it will become second nature, and the condo will no longer look like I love squallor.

In the grind

Let me just get something out in the open.

Baby Blankets are a grind.  A nose to the grindstone kind of project even for someone who doesn't have a problem with deadline knitting.  As of this morning, I'm about a third of the way through.  Pretty good progress for something with a double knit panel in the middle (I don't know why I showed the MIL this one other than some strange masochistic streak, because I knew it would take longer than most of the other blankets).

The scary thing is that other than the strange lethargy that can come over me after knitting on this for more than 30 minutes straight I'm enjoying it.  The blanket in progress has nifty texture going on while still being simple.  It's smooth yet squishy in the middle, like one of the quilted puffy jackets.  The edges are more rough with fingerable garter stitch.  Neither section would be that interesting on its own, but together they are pleasing.  Though sometimes, like now, I'm thinking of the blanket as a knitting peanut butter cup. 

<cue indignant voice 1>
voice1: Hey, you got your garter stitch in my stockinette!

voice2:  Well, you got your stockinette in my garter stitch!

<sounds of people tussling about on the floor>

And because I'm mathematically focused on this project, I need to do 2.35 inches each day to finish this blanket by November 14th.  I should contact my MIL and see when she needs the blanket by.  It would be nice to have another day or two to work on it.

(I edited it to add the pictures I took this morning after I timed myself.  1 inch = 1 hour.  Doom!)

The unexpected hour

I didn't really enjoy the changes to Daylight Savings Time over the last couple of years.   Because a lot of my friends are programmers or system admins, I heard a lot of grumbling because this act meant a lot of concentrated work to write patches and fix machines when the government changed when Daylight Savings Time was.   Every computer and nearly every computer program has some need for time and calendaring.  It could have been a pretty big mess.

However, daylight savings time felt horribly welcome this weekend.  The extra time meant I still could go to visit with friends on the other side of Boston and make Pumpkin Spice Bread.  I had time for a double rise, because I had an unexpected hour.  I made pretty good use of the time, roasting pumpkin seeds and baking bread.

I like my Spice Cookbook.  I found it at McIntyre and Moore a number of years ago.  It's fairly old, but the recipes are interesting and use the types of things I keep in my cupboard - cardamom, ginger, and other spices.  At this time of year, I want to bake and fill the house with delicious smells.

When I left for my trek to Medford, my hubby left to get my rings (being resized again!).  They are now a size four and actually fit. 

A little bit of everything

Or a pocketful of kryptonite.

I sort of wish more days could be like yesterday.  Just enough cleaning to qualify as having done something useful, a cheesy movie that I can't believe I watched, and custard cooked in pumpkin (Baked Whole Pumpkin from allrecipes).

I mailed my Everyday Bag back to Namaste.  Now, I bought the bag over a year ago, and the handles came undone probably 6 or more months ago, but between one thing and another I never thought to check their site for information.  I know I'm pretty hard on my bags, so while it was irritating for the bag to break so soon I figured it was completely my fault.  Then I compounded the problem by trying to fix things.  Umm, with superglue.  That was a bad idea and just wasn't strong enough for even a project like the Hoover Blanket (4 100-gram skeins of yarn).  Oops.  So, I was at their site to see what their new bags looked like, and I sent them email about how to repair the bag.  Lo and behold they said to send it back and they would send me a new one! 

So, Saturday I went to ye olde Post Office and mailed my sockapaloooza sock savior socks (or SSSS, whew!) and the Everyday Bag.  I brought my rings to be resized and a few other chores.

Oh, and I did something silly.  I went through my latest Patternworks catalog and circled yarns I might be interested in working with in case any friends or family ask my hubby what I want for Christmas (other than a nap).

Not quite nanowrimo

Last year I did NaNoWriMo (the National Novel Writers Month), and I completed my 50K words.  It was a travesty masquerading as literature.  Of course, this year has been extra busy with weddings and class.  I promised or at least hemmed and hawed that I wouldn't do NaNoWriMo this year.  I didn't attempt an outline or anything else that would constitute prepping for the WriMo.

Instead I signed up for the NaBloPoMo.  It was a kind of silly thing to do, but I needed to do something to scratch the itch of not doing the NaNoWriMo (this post is just too full of acronyms).  I needed to write, but I needed to leave myself unconstrained by plot and characterization.  Things that did truly have me going batty last year as my characters devolved into some of the worst romantic tripe.  While my blog might also be full of mindless drivel at least here I do not feel compelled to make every statement fall pleasingly to the next.

Of course, that doesn't mean I don't intend to have guidelines for myself.  I would prefer most of these posts to be about knitting, considering how much of my non-work life this hobby eats up.  And I most certainly do not want these posts to end up being pointless one liners indicating that I just don't have anything to say because I'm just not that interesting a person (I believe you know what I mean).

So here is to November, Thanksgiving (too soon), writing and No Whining!

Found: something really cool

I read Circuits every week.  I like reading David Pogue's article even though I haven't bothered to get the NY Times to see his other articles.  This week's article and the CBS Sunday news (at 9 a.m. EST) feature - or are supposed to feature - the Solar Decathlon.

I've always been a science geek and even though it isn't my life anymore there are certain things I definitely follow.  Clean energy, renewable resources are two of my big topics.  I don't talk about them often, but I like to read about them.

The site has all of these houses that are made to be 100% energy efficient, so they don't need to rely on the power grid.  They reuse materials, use solar power (hence the name) and while some of them might be a little out there on the inside, most of the indoor pictures feature kitchens that I would happily live in.  A gorgeous, large kitchen is definitely something I miss most living in our condo.

The houses are small for the competition (800 square feet, though that is palatial in some regions), but with only about 300 additional square feet they could easily be my dream house.  Beauty and function all in one space.  Wonderful!