AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

another FO

WIPs Wrestling sounds pretty corny, but the Olympics is a great excuse to pick up older projects and getting it done! Yesterday, my hubby suggested that rather than working on the fun new project (also a Ravellenic Games / Camp Loopy project) I should work on an old project. So, I pulled out socks.

These are the Broken Seed Stitch Socks that I started in January. I finished these tonight at about 8:30 pm when I finished Kitchenering the toe and weaving in the ends. Why didn't I finish these earlier? I had less than half a sock left, and while working with the needles and the yarn was a bit hard on the hands it wasn't so bad that I shouldn't have finished ages ago.

The yarn is the Maizy Solid and the Patons Kroy Sock Stretch. These are aren't wool free because of the Patons, but it is only 39% wool and I didn't even use 25 grams of the wool yarn.

I love how the pooling looks broken up by the seed stitch and better yet how the yarn stretches to fit my feet. Though these socks would still fit someone with slightly smaller feet better. Because my colors are closer in value, it is a more subtle sock than the other ones made from the recipe (recipe, because it doesn't really help you if you don't already know how to make a sock).

Now, I have a lot of yarn left. I originally bought 2 skeins of each of these sock yarns with the idea I would make a pair of black/grey socks out of the Patons Kroy and that I would make a pair of fancy socks from Knitty for my MIL out of the blue Maizy yarn. Unfortunately I really hated how the Maizy was working up with the socks I had chosen (either Rivercat socks or Hourglass). The Maizy yarn is fairly splitty, so it was not a pleasure to work with for twisting stitches. Even with this relatively simple pattern I had to go back and fix split stitches every once in a while. My MIL prefers (I don't know why, but it doesn't matter. A preference is still a preference even if it is a crazy one like preferring bacon dipped in mayo or something) non-wool socks. I think it is a hold over from the days when wool yarns were often scratchy and harder to care for (if you refuse to hand wash), but really it doesn't matter because this gives me an excuse to try other sock yarns that I wouldn't try in my preference for wool sock yarn myself.

Which is just a long winded way of saying I want to try the BMFA Sock Candy. It is only available in solids, and given the number of solid colors I wonder if they are phasing it out. Either way I should get some for my MIL. Maybe chocolate, because who doesn't like chocolate?

Moore, a sweater in a month

June 27 to July 27 was the allotted time for Camp Loopy project 2. I started Moore, a assymetrical cardigan on June 28th. I was off work the second week in July, theoretically an awesome time for knitting, but it was hot (sweltering really) and I was making ice cream. Suffice to say, not much knitting happened.

Then I knit a shawl for Into the Woods. It wasn't hard to do, but it took time away from the sweater. So, I was thrilled to finish weaving in the ends and blocking on July 27th. I was really thrilled to finish in time.

This is my second sweater with the Loopy Ewe Solid Series, this time in white. The other color is Velvet Port from Dream in Color Smooshy.

This sweater is knit from side to side, then you sew the shoulders, knit the neck edging and then pick up the sleeve and knit them down. The left shoulder is closed with snaps to create an invisible closure. Of course, like many sweaters I've knit in the past year it would benefit from my losing about 10 pounds.

10 pounds means less chocolate. And not replacing chocolate with fruit (healthy) or Doritos (unhealthy). This sweater is currently a tight fit. My tshirt shows up under the fabric (which makes  the other side view bad, becaue the blood drive logo is fairly visible under the sweater).

This sweater could have been a 3 week sweater with a bit more concentration, and I would happily make it again. Though if I were to do it again, I'd pick a heather or a tweed. The white is a nice color, but it is very one note and I prefer the extra color depth. My favorite on Ravelry is this one. I made mine with less length across the back, which I think detracts from the swingy Aline. If I make a second one, I will buy an extra skein to make it bigger. I really did not have enough yarn to make it another 3/4 of an inch wide across the back.

In the Ravellenic Games, I did some more work on Leftie for day 2. For day 3, I worked on one of my WIPs. It is great to see things getting done. Below is a progress picture of Leftie from Saturday. I love it. This project is awesome!

I think it might be time to start weaving in the ends. This is one of the end-iest projects I've made in the past year or so.

Parlez vous Olympics?

I probably used that same blog post name during Beijing, because really I like The Cutting Edge in all its cheesy glory.

Last night despite being sick, but probably because of my long nap, I watched the opening ceremonies while casting on for the 2012 Ravellenic Games (I'm cheesy too). My lovely husband provided a simplle infographic covering many of the important features of the ceremonies from the eyes of a geek.

I loved the opening ceremonies, but I definitely saw this as well as the one ring being forged to bind the other rings. I don't know if this was intended, but it was pretty much how all the geeks I know saw it.

For the Ravellenic Games, I'm competing in two events (hey, feel the cheese): the Shawl Sailing and the WIPs Wrestling. Unsurprisingly, I cast on for the shawl last night, because the new project is always more interesting than the old project much to their detriment. The shawl I'm doing is Leftie, and it is also my Camp Loopy project 3 (I'll post my photos of project 2 tomorrow after it finishes drying). Leftie is intended to use up your leftovers, so here is my quick gloss over that I bought 2 new skeins of yarn for the project. I am still using some leftovers in it from a shawl I made last year.

This was my progress last night (picture from the iPad, so the colors are very off). I am using a skein of Sweet Georgia superwash sock in Lakeshore Drive and one of Lorna's Laces Solemate in Cookies Deep Dark Secret. These are both new to me yarns, though I've been seeing photos of these yarns for months.

I've made a lot more progress than this today and will probably take another photo nearer to the end of the night. Sandi is doing a stitch count and a progress photo to document hers. It is a great idea and a simple thing for trying to get back into more regular blogging. Of course, my stitch numbers change nearly every row, so I am not doing a stitch count. I am too lazy for that.

Also, last night's opening ceremony could have used more corgis.

Even more corgis.

Umm, yeah, more corgis.

What, they were cute! I love most dogs, but the corgis were more adorable than most. I hope that they show more shots of the dogs, because I'm just sick enough that I don't get to walk outside as much (well and it is super rainy). Makes it awefully hard to go out and greet all of the pups in the neighborhood.

sewing the dress

At the beginning of the month I was in this dress class at Gather Here: the Hazel Dress. The Hazel dress is a wide strapped dress with a fitted bodice, a gathered skirt and an invisible zipper. Now I'm not super good at the sewing. Lack of practice means lack of skill don't you know. But in 2 sessions, Virginia was able to coax a respectable dress out of me. It was fun to make and fun to wear and I will be making another one. (with something funky for the bodice).

(Yes, my hair is wet out of the shower. When your hair is this short there is no point in doing too much. Just a little gel or spray wax to spike it up a bit.)

The Hazel Dress is a Colinette dress pattern and I have to admit that I loved the format. The little booklet was a lot of fun, almost like reading a magazine, which is good when you feel a bit intimidated.

The first step was to cut out the pattern pieces and transfer them to Pattern Ease. Now, Pattern Ease is this thick paper-like material that is woven or extruded or something in a way that it doesn't mess with scissors like normal paper. It is also much sturdier than the tissue paper this is my bane for most commercial patterns. So, we cut around the pattern pieces at the largest size (and not cut out, just cut around) and then transferred our size to the Pattern Ease. Now, I am a rectangle. Almost no indentation at my waist and certainly not as much as the pattern required, so we graded the bodice so that the bottom would fit with a different skirt size.

Grading is kind of fun and kind of, well, terrifiying. If you don't love sewing then the idea that you don't know how it will turn out is a bit freaky, so we sewed a muslin of the bodice. My bodice came out perfect in the muslin (the grading worked), but others had to make adjustments there.

That was the first session.

Between sessions we were to cut out the dress fabric, sew the bodice, sew the straps, and sew the skirt. Attaching the sections, gathering the skirt, adding the zipper and hemming were all part of the second session.

My husband was away that weekend and it was hot! So, I mostly worked on my dress in the day before and the morning of the class.

This dress is awesome, because it has gloriously roomy pockets. However, my markings (or lack of markings) meant that one of my pockets was off and I ended up doing a lot of seam ripping. I also flubbed the bodice because I somehow had set my needle so it wasn't in the middle and had consistent 1/2 seams. Darn!

Despite those issues, I did end up leaving the class with a finished dress that fit, looked cool and was really wearable. However, for work I wanted to hide my back tattoo, so I plopped on my sweater (which I'm not sure I ever blogged about) that I finished before Squam. Cria is made out of the Riveting yarn, recycled denim, and is a great match for the dress!

Cake!

Pinterest is almost (but not quite) an addiction. For me, Pinterest is like my Ravelry queue only not just knitting. Other crafts, food, interesting clothing that might work as a DIY project populate the vast majority of my boards. But food, mostly food, and of the foods, mostly sweets. I'm nothing if not consistent.

One of the latest cakes I pinned was this Black Forest Cake. The blogger posted this cake from Sky High: Irresistible Triple-Layer Cakes, a book that I have to wonder why I don't own (I'm sure it is because I'm too lazy to go to the bookstore). Over the weekend, I bought cherries, cherry brandy and even more chocolate. This cake is easy and fairly forgiving as long as you love the parchment paper.

Now, I'm lazy, so I did separate out additional cherries for decoration, but I decided chocolate curls were enough decoration.

Whipped cream is an issue though. I love whipped cream, and it is very easy to spread. However, I wish I had either made more whipped cream (like 3 cups wasn't enough) or had at least made stabilized whipped cream (or this for gelatin-free methods). I just couldn't envision piping the whipped cream into pretty swirls to hold the reserved cherries.

So, as a vegetarian I don't really approve of gelatin. I use it every once in a while, because gelatin does things that cannot easily be duplicated with other normal household ingredients. This cake has normal whipped cream only, because the sponge cake is designed to absorb liquid. Having not made a true sponge cake before, I was amazed by how much liquid the cake could absorb without a great alteration in appearance.

That might mean there is too much brandy in this cake, if such a thing is possible.

(Oh, and I am still trying to get pictures of a dress I made. When my husband got the photos off the camera for some reason they were all marked as 0 kb and that does me no good. Hopefully I'll have them tomorrow.)

party! in a heatwave

Oh, ice cream. This past week I was home, making ice cream and playing Word Realms (beta!). I was supposed to get so much done and I did. I made 18 ice creams, sorbets, frozen yoghurts and granitas. And then on one of the hottest days of the week, people gathered and ate. It was super hot, so cold ice cream was more appreciated than ever!

Now, I operate fairly well on deadline, but more than 2 deadlines and my brain goes explody. I had ice cream and two knitting projects, so really the only thing that happened was ice cream.

My flavors this year included:
Gin and tonic granita
Whoopie pie ice cream
Fleur de lait ice cream
Mimosa sorbet
Basil ice cream
Mango lassi kulfi frozen yoghurt
French toast ice cream
Apple crisp sorbet (bars)¹
Eggs Benedict ice cream
Taro sorbet
Rice gelato ice cream
Strawberry sorbet with balsamic pearls
Pop rocks ice cream
Salted caramel ice cream¹
Bittersweet chocolate sorbet
Milk chocolate ice cream¹
Raita frozen yoghurt
Roasted peach pie ice cream

While most people had favorites, I think the losers were pretty obvious. The taro sorbet needed to be more like an ice cream with a coconut base. The rice gelato was delicious, but needed more time to soften. The apple crisp sorbet was also pretty hard, but we cut it with a knife and ate it like a bar cookie (would have benefited from a crust).

The winners were a little harder to pin down, because there were a few more choices. The strawberry sorbet was a joy to scoop and the balsamic pearls were a beautiful visual touch. The two ice creams from Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream for the Home Cook (my newest cookbook thanks to my husband) were also easy to scoop and very tasty despite the oddity to me in the method². The dark chocolate sorbet was really popular amongst the chocoholics, and my husband's favorite was whoopie pie.

Mine? My favorites were the raita frozen yoghurt and pop rocks. The pop rocks ice cream was the orange popsicle ice cream from the Perfect Scoop with chocolate covered pop rocks. My nephew was so upset that he didn't just have pop rocks to eat. I probably am a bad person for finding it funny, but it was such a silly thing to be upset over that I thought it was hilarious.

Because of the heat, people faded a lot faster. That meant some of the ice creams didn't come back for a second time. So, the granita and the peach pie are gone. There are so many ice creams left, that I might not need to make ice cream for months!

Other than leftover ice cream the best thing was getting to see so many people. There were people who made it who didn't get to come last year, so it was great to see people that I don't normally get to spend time with!

Ice cream photos (slideshow in Flickr, some are from last year because I'm too lazy to make another set)

¹These ice creams were from Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream for the Home Cook.

²Jeni's method for most ice creams involves heating milk and cream or other dairy until boiling. After it has boiled for a while you add a slurry with cornstarch (or tapioca starch, which I used) and boil till it thickens. Then you add it to cream cheese. All of those ingredients, including corn syrup, are designed to bind up the water, so the ice cream won't get icy. It works, and it tastes mostly the same but not as rich as a custard based ice cream. However, it meant I didn't go through more than 2 dozen eggs, so it was awesome.

a week of ice cream

(my first post was eaten by a grue)

I am home this week doing one of my favorite things: making ice cream. It's a hard life, really. My ice cream party is on Sunday and I have about 8 more ice creams to make by then.

I love making ice creams (and other frozen concoctions) no matter the recipe. Sorbets cooking on the stove, velvety custards, icy soothing granitas. They are all fair game. This year's assortment has a few more sorbets than last year but fewer dairy free options outside of them. It's something I should consider fixing before Sunday.

Most of my ice creams are either from the Perfect Scoop or are based on custard or non-custard ice creams that I just know in my bones. However, my husband just returned home with Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams for the Home Cook, and I am trying out her technique. Jeni's method is definitely a chemistry meets art approach with the water being bound up by glucose (corn syrup), milk proteins (milk, cream, evaporated milk, cream cheese) and starch (corn, though I am using tapioca as her standard alternative). The result is an ice cream with a longer cooking time on the stove than many of my non-custard ice creams that has a gluey texture before churning. Hopefully I will know more once I have churned the first batch, but the mixture is currently cooling.

There is nothing too odd about this year's ice creams save one. Molecular gastronomy makes a little bit of an entrance in a couple of my recipes. I added balsamic pearls to my strawberry sorbet, and I am making a breakfast line up of ice creams and sorbets including mimosa sorbet, french toast and eggs benedict.

Yeah, eggs benedict with a bit of molecular gastronomy for the hollandaise. Hey, it cannot be any odder than pad thai, right?

It's all about cake

Most of my friends at this point realize that I like to bake, and that I like to try and bake allergen free when possible. Obviously successes vary, but every once in a while it is possible to succeed in nearly all fronts.

I made this chocolate cake from Bakerella's site. I was making it lactose free for a friend's vacation, and I didn't want to buy lactose free milk (mostly because it pushed me from 2 grocery shopping trips to 3). In the end it was dairy free and gluten free, but I still had eggs and nuts.

This cake uses vegetable oil, and while I was looking originally for cakes that used butter I chose this one at least in part because I ran out of time and because, well, it looks delicious. However, I wanted to try baking with coconut oil, so I used the coconut oil in place of vegetable oil. For the milk in the batter, I used hazelnut milk (after opening the container of chocolate hazelnut milk and deciding it was too scary to use).

This cake was an easy swap to make it gluten free, because one of the containers of flour I have is Arrowhead Mills Gluten Free all purpose flour. It has xanthan gum and leavenings already in it, and suggests using it as a 1:1 replacement for the flour in your recipes with no other changes. So, I did a simple flour swap, which worked lovely.

I used the same frosting recipe as in Bakerella's recipe, except I used 1/2 cup of coconut oil and 2 sticks of Earth Balance. I probably used less sugar as well, but it was certainly sweet enough for my sweet tooth and made a ridiculously huge amount of frosting.

Ganache. Well, that is where things sort of fell down. I made these coconut milk caramels, which taste awesome. However, I don't have a large enough container for making this much caramel, so I divided into 2 pans. I knew I wanted to use it like a ganache, but it wasn't developing enough color to contrast with the bright white frosting, so I took it off the heat at about 230° (or 235° F) and added about an ounce or 2 of semisweet (dairy free) chocolate. It was already solidifying by the time I got to pouring it on the cake, so it wasn't as beautifully smooth as a ganache.

Long story short. It was delicious, but too coconutty for my husband. I have a bit of caramel left to do something with, and I brought the leftover cake to Gather Here to share its coconut chocolate goodness.

I can definitely recommend Arrowhead Mills for gf baking. It's my second time using the flour (first time was cookies), and it doesn't have that gritty texture that can sometimes happen, doesn't interfere with the other flavors of baking and seems to rise fine. Obviously more testing needs to happen, which is fine because I need to make cookies to mail to my mom and dad. Testing away!