novamade

things to do in northern cali when you're crafty

I spent last week in northern California and due to having limited internet access took an unintentional blog break.  My apologies, I am working to catch myself up on your lives, projects and what-not.  But I wanted to share some of my doings with you, as most of them are of a somewhat crafty nature that you may or may not be interested in.

So here is my list of things that I did and things that you can do as well if you find yourself in northern California and you are crafty (if you are celebrating your birthday, that sort of helps too).

Pebble Beach, California. Wollmeise Gloria Cowl.

Start and finish knitting a Gloria Cowl (details here) to give to a friend for her birthday.  My friend is named Kathy, your friend can be named something else.

Artfibers in San Francisco, California.

Have your friend (Kathy) take you to local-to-her yarn shops like ImagiKnit and ArtFibers.  Acquire pretty things that make you smile.

If you are bloggy, take the opportunity to meet up with a knit bloggy friend and her beau. Especially if said knit bloggy friend is a birthday twin and is like some sort of long lost crafty twin of sorts. Apologize profusely for exposing your knit bloggy friend to your tired tyrannical toddler.

Rangsiwan meets a very tired Little Sir.

Because you can, go to a fabric store, there are lots of them in San Francisco.  If for some reason you, like me, are planning some sort of novelty quilt requiring 21 shades of silk dupioni, you should go to Fabrix like I did.

And since there is a Kinokuniya in San Francisco, you should go there and buy some Japanese craft books, especially if you can not decipher Japanese.  It makes crafting interesting.

And because you neither speak nor read Japanese and you bought a bunch of books written in that particular language, you should probably get some written in English (or whatever your primary language is) just to balance things out.

Whether you are crafty or not, you should take time to smell the roses (or whatever flora is at your disposal).

Pacific Grove, California.

And don't forget to take time to experience wonder.

Jellyfish at Monterey Aquarium in Monterey, CA.

When you return home, get giddy about the books you received for your birthday from friends near and far.

Utilize the book about pies as soon as possible, you know, if you are so inclined. 

Pineapple pie, a very sweet sweety pie.

So yes, good trip, I have a few more trips to California scheduled for the summer, but I am thinking they will not be as acquisition-friendly as this one, a birthday celebration is a great way to justify stash enhancements of all sorts.  While I usually kick off my birthday celebration on Cinco de Mayo and count up to my birthday (are you not doing this as well?), Special K suggested that we start the celebration on my actual birthday this year and add 8 days to it, isn't he sweet?  So with that said, I am still celebrating.  Though right now, I am trying to get my back to stop hurting after incorrectly lifting heavy boxes of books and documents at work.  I am also going to think about happy things, like friends in Philly having lots of fun.  And knitting, because I can do that lying down.

Hey, happy knitting, quilting, sewing, or pie baking!

required reading

Many people will be reading a certain book about a certain boy this weekend and next week.  Not me.  I'll be reading books of an all-together different sort.

Books about books, actually.

And I can't forget this little number (exciting stuff).

Little Sir thinks it is all quite interesting.

We have discussed the history of printing in some detail.

He is now an expert.  Me, not so much.

I hope I can squeeze in some knitting time on my above wips (sockapalooza socks, flowerbasket shawl, leftovers vest); but, I will be "in school" for a week here.  So if you get a chance, please do read something non-academic for me.

See you in a week or so!

perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

Cake.  I like to bake cakes, always have.  I think it's because it's one of the activities I did with my dad when I was kid (he is on a perpetual quest for the pefect bread pudding, but that is another story for another time).  I think I enjoy baking cakes more than actually eating them.  There is something about the chemistry involved, I think.  In any case, when my pal Al mentioned that her husband likes carrot cake and she wanted to get one for Easter, I started thinking about carrot cake.  I have never made a carrot cake.  I like carrots and all, but I have never really thought about the merits of carrots in a cake.  I suppose there are many, so why not. 

So I am trying to find the best recipe for a carrot cake.  My mission, and I have chosen to accept it is to make a bang up cake for some bang up great friends for Easter.  If the president of Iran can "gift" 15 sailors back to Britain, I can give my friends a carrot cake.

But which one?  Do you know how many recipes there are for carrot cake?  Why so many?  It's a cake with carrots!  Do I want one with pineapples or do I want one with steamed raisins, STEAMED RAISINS?!  So while I am wading through the finer points of carrot cake, dying eggs and trying to convince Little Sir that bunny ears are cool, I hope you and yours have a great weekend...Easter...Passover...Saturday and Sunday! 

Oh, and I will be knitting too, because nothing says Easter like a pink-stained Chevron scarf...or a Chevy, as I like to call it (not because I am cool, mostly because I am lazy).

i like you

I have been puzzling over the mechanics of how I happened to catch a mini-plague while Little Sir eked out the weekend none the sicker.  I have gotten in the habit of blaming my sicknesses on Little Sir and daycare (for the most part, rightly so); but, it seems now I only have myself (or my own petri dish) to blame.  I have done some calculations and I have not been healthy since Thanksgiving, now if that's not a bummer I don't know what is. 

I wish I could say that I spent the weekend of my sickness knitting, but not so much.  I went to a regional archivists meeting/conference in Chelmsford, Massachusetts (and probably got some archivists sick, sorry) where I met a blog reader that I did not previously know (I tried not to get her sick, she seemed so nice). As interesting as the meeting/conference was, I would say that I enjoyed listening to Amy Sedaris read her book I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence on audio CD (I think having her read her book adds a little something to the consumption of the work) on my drive to and from the conference more than the conference itself.  And the other part of my weekend (when I wasn't asleep) was spent untangling this mess...

This was actually after 24 hours of untangling--what you see here took another 6 hours.  It took way too long than is reasonable to solve this situation.

This is Sundara sock yarn (second installment of the current round of the Petals Collection) in Bird of Paradise-perfect for the second installment of Project Spectrum, no?  I am not really sure what happened with the whole skein winding catastrophe.  Given my love of winding, you would think that this sort of thing would never happen to me, apparently you (and I) would be wrong.

I didn't love the colorway of this yarn, to be honest.  I liked the green and the yellow is fun; but the pink...I sort of found it offensive.  I am just not a lover of pink,  occasionally I force myself to tolerate it. But hot pink?  A stretch, truly.  In any case, after trying all of the Koigu I purchased (which arrived super speedy style) I tried all sorts of Koigu iterations for my Chevron Scarf with no success, the colors were a little too "matchy matchy" for my taste.  Then I remembered the sock yarn that I had no idea what to do with and thought, "well, maybe I will give that a try."  I am still not in love with the hot pink, but it has been downgraded from offensive to simply bothersome, and it might be completely inert by the time I finish the scarf. And really, it is sort of starting to grow on me.

So after a weekend of ire and utterances of anger and hate concerning yarn and anything scarf-related, I was able to achieve a happy note and say to my scarf (because I will completely own up to talking to my knitting and all sorts of other inanimate objects), "I like you."

a good idea at the time

My weekend was spent reading, cooking and of course, doing a little knitting.  I am not sure if I mentioned it before, I am in a little book club.  I started it with a friend/neighbor a little over 2 years ago, and it has been good times.  It is my turn to host this month (tonight, actually) and I selected Julie and Julia, a chronicle of one woman's adventures in cooking through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I.  And because I thought it would be fun, I had people sign up to cook recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking for a little potluck dinner.  It seemed like a good idea at the time...  As I was making Boeuf Bourguignon at 2:00 this morning, it no longer seemed like such a good idea.  To be fair, I didn't start cooking till 9:30 last night; but, well, yes.  You see, I had to finish the book first.  The book is funny, if you have any culinary inclinations whatsoever (or really, even if you don't), you would probably enjoy this book.  It was a hilarious and quick read.  The cooking from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, not so quick; though hilarious it may turn out to be.  I still have to make the leek and potato soup (or Potage Parmentier, if you are so inclined) later this afternoon.  I have a feeling our discussion will be more about the insanity surrounding the cooking of the dishes than of the book; but it will be fun all the same.

Do you remember the seamless hybrid I have been working on for, let's just say, a long time?  I am thisclose to finishing it.  Seriously:

the sweater just needs a collar, some joined underarms and a good blocking.  The idea of knitting this sweater seemed like a great idea, brilliance itself, a nice quick sweater to give me one completed adult sweater under my belt.  It was a good idea, until it wasn't.  There were trials and tribulations, and in hindsight, it was kind of ridiculous; but, it was a learning process.  But more on that later when I have an actual finished project to report.

I leave you with one last thing that seemed like a good idea.  But really?  Well, no.  Little Sir got a toy from his Great Grandmother for Christmas.  We like to pull his toys out in phases or he gets overwhelmed.  This weekend we pulled out a new toy, good idea, right? As Little Sir would say, "no, no, no...."  This particular toy horrifies him.  It's a little plastic pull dog that makes weird clicking noises when pulled...

Yeah, I know Kiddo, it scares me too.

last minute knitted gift

After my experience with the Swallowtail Shawl (thank you for the lovely comments), I realized that babies have been born, and I have been remiss in my gifting for them.  A friend of mine gave birth to a little girl at the beginning of October...I can't remember the last time I made anything for a girl!  So I needed something, quick...last minute...knitted... So naturally I turned to LMKG, this little hat is great!  A quick easy knit and supremely satisfying when you weave in the ends.  Because the baby is in Florida, I figured cotton was key, so I used the specified yarn (if you haven't used the 1824 cotton, I highly recommend it, it's scrumptious...for cotton.  I think the hat took me 5 hours,  and that was only because the i-cord ribbon took so long and I checked the internet to find corrections that I didn't feel like figuring out on my own...gotta love the internet--why reinvent the wheel?

Children's Cotton Hat

Pattern: from Joelle Hoverson's Last Minute Knitted Gifts, with corrections courtesy of Alison

Yarn: Mission Falls 1824 Cotton in Coral

Size: the middle size for a baby--kind of big, but she'll grow into it

Needles: Bamboo Circular, US 6; Susan Bates Aluminum dpn's, US 6

Modifications: Just encorporated Alison's corrections

This is a super easy pattern, once you are aware of the corrections you need to make for the larger sizes.  For whatever reason, I didn't read through the pattern and just started knitting.  Very silly, when I know that the book has errata all over the place... but it's pretty obvious when you get to the yarnovers to make the holes for the ribbon.  This is a cute pattern and it knits up ridiculously fast.  Which is perfect when you need a last minute knitted gift!

Totally unrelated to the hat and knitting, books...so I haven't changed my "look what I am reading" section for a while, though I have been reading other things.  I found the True Story of Hansel and Gretel somewhat depressing but a rewarding read, all the same.  It was enlightening to read about the Holocaust from the perspective of children(all be it a fictionalized account). 

And then there was Sarah Waters' Night Watch...What a waste of my time.  I usually LOVE Waters' books, I have always been a fan of her understanding of relationships and her attention to historical detail; but, perhaps it was the attention to historical detail that had me snoozing through this book.  I just couldn't take it, and because I can't just not read a book that I have started, of course I slogged through it.  If you like historical fiction, you might enjoy this book.  If you like historical fiction that moves past the pace of a trickle of maple syrup, this book is probably not for you.  1940s London has never been so dull for me...and I love historical fiction and I am something of an Anglophile...I just found the book a bore which surprised me since, as I said, I am a fan...

Knitting continues on the Seamless Hybrid, just a bunch of stockinette still, so nothing uber-facinating to flash.  Finishing up Hedera, for Lacevember this time (you know, since Socktober was such a success for me); I am also casting on for the Shetland Triangle Shawl in Wrap Style, for myself...because I am worth it.  And then there is the Christmas gift knitting...