Yarn Zombie

Hello! What’s been going on? I’ve been busy, mainly with photography related stuff and the odd bit of travel here and there. We went to New York and New Jersey!

And South Carolina and Georgia!

Yay travel! But now it’s the summer (almost), and time to just hang out at the homestead for the season, enjoying our deck, doing various crafty things, and sweating. Heck, I even spun yarn the past few days for the first time in a million years.

Crazy, I know! I’m going to try making socks out of it eventually. One ply is bamboo and the other is superwash wool. I’m not sure how well they’ll hold up, but what the hell – I’ve got a ton of handknit socks, so there’s no reason not to experiment.

I’ve got a couple of projects I’d like to get on the loom, too. My aunt Dorie sent me a skein of really awesome felted wool yarn she bought at a farmer’s market, and it’s just crying out to be made into a rug. I just need to figure out something appropriately sturdy and earthy to use as the warp.

Last summer I got Michael Ruhlman‘s Ratio cookbook, and that turned out to be pretty inspiring. I haven’t been in the mood to cook much lately, but weirdly, after the temperature reached the mid-80s here, I got the strangest sense of de ja vu and was all, “Must… make… noms… from Ratio…” So tonight, I tried making homemade mayonnaise for the first time. It’s a simple combination of canola oil, lemon juice, egg yolk, salt, and water. I wasn’t too keen on doing fifteen minutes of whisking, so I used my stick blender instead. The emulsion broke the first time I tried it, but after adding extra water, it was all good.

Since getting into making old cocktails, I’ve overcome my fear of consuming raw egg. Still, I had to mentally psyche myself up to try it. It was pretty tasty! I had some on a sandwich (pastrami, mayo, cheese, and homegrown lettuce on wheat), but I think I would like it even better as a french fry dip, a la those wacky Dutch.

We also just got an ice cream maker. I’ve been holding out on getting one, waiting to come across a good deal, and lo and behold! Costco had the Cuisinart 1.5 quart ice cream maker I was looking at for $40. And it came with an extra freezy bowl. And it was bright red. I’m a sucker for colors.

The first thing I tried making with it was the frozen yogurt recipe from 101 Cookbooks. I really liked it, but Travis was all “Eww! Gross buckets!” (paraphrased) But, you know, more for me. I ate the last of it this afternoon topped with fresh strawberries and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar. Holy good eats, Batman! Also, why the heck do I never remember that I really like strawberries? What’s up with that? I need to eat them by the bushel.

The second thing we tried in the ice cream maker was essentially frozen pudding. It was a recipe in the ice cream maker cookbook. Essentially, mix up milk and instant pudding mix. Insert into ice cream maker. And that’s it. It turned out pretty much exactly like it sounds, except the texture was kind of… odd. Unsettling. Maybe it needed to freeze longer. We ate it, but I can’t say I respected myself very much.

So, my next two adventures with the ice cream maker will be to make a strawberry-lime sorbet (complete with fresh strawberries, lime juice, and lemon and lime zest, for flecky goodness!), and to come up with a hybrid ice cream/frozen yogurt concoction that is frozen yogurt based, but tastes enough like ice cream so that Travis won’t be sad. I’m thinking about just mixing up a little of the creme anglaise from Ratio with some strained, sweetened yogurt. Also, if I don’t get to try this chocolate sorbet recipe from Vanilla Garlic soon, I think I’ll just die.

OMG… chocolate-strawberry-lime sorbet? Too many flavors?

I’ve got some Mexican chocolate (the kind that comes in wheels and is flavored with cinnamon) that I want to try mixing into some sort of frozen dessert, too. And hey, the ice cream maker is supposed to be the bomb for making frozen daiquiris and margaritas and such! The mind is boggling at the possibilities!

On a different note, I watched the Lost finale and liked it.

Do I wish the mysteries regarding Walt and the Dharma Initiative (Alvar Hanso, anyone?) had been solved? Yep. Do I feel like watching the whole series was a waste of my time? Hell no. You want to talk about a waste of my time? Let’s talk about the ending to the book Cold Mountain, shall we? I literally almost threw the book out the window when I got to the end of that. ARGH!!

So now Lost is over, and there’s just a few episodes left of Breaking Bad and Justified. I haz a sad. What will get me through the summer until Mad Men starts again?

And oh yeah, there are roosters in my neighborhood now. Sometimes, even in my front yard.

It’s all well and good until they wake you up at 4:59 am crowing. Then, not so good.

I’ve discovered two new (to me) food blogs that I’ve really been digging lately. The first is Ezra Pound Cake, which I was immediately drawn to because of the name. I’ve bookmarked about a million of recipes on there, including this Beer Bread we made about a week ago and didn’t photograph because we were too busy eating it.

The other site is Macheesmo, which I ran into a few days ago and have so far made 3 recipes from. We rocked the fire roasted salsa, blender style:

Made a Spanish version of pasta carbonara, using chorizo and manchego cheese:

And, because I had a few lonely balls of fresh mozzarella leftover from the last time we made pizza, I decided to give Macheesmo’s homemade fried mozz recipe a shot.

They were a little fiddly to make, and I avoid deep frying as much as possible (I hate the thought of pouring a ton of oil into a pan and then dumping it all out later), so I cut the mozzarella balls in half and fried them in just about 1/4″ of oil.

They turned out fine.

Well, more than fine. Delicious. Easily consumed. Longed after.

Travis and I also made some deep dish pizza for the first time yesterday. We used a recipe that I won’t link to, since the crust turned out kind of odd tasting. Not really tasty. The fillings were fine, and it cooked without any problem, the crust was just weird. I still like making regular pizza better, but I do want to give the deep dish another shot, this time just using our standard pizza crust. I mean, it’s cooked in a cast iron skillet in the oven – surely, using a different crust, it will turn out delicious, right?

So, I finally finished picking off all the tiny scraps of paper on the back of the quilt top. That was the hard part. The actual basting, quilting, and binding were a piece of cake.

I had actually sewed all of the squares together a long time ago, probably circa 2004. I think my original intent was to make some grandiosely huge quilt out of millions of 3″ squares, but, predictably, I was distracted by something shiny and all of the squares and fabric I was using got put aside in a box to sit. For YEARS! Anyway, it’s done now, finally. The quilt wound up being a 48″ square, which is a perfect size to thrown on top of the coffee table/chest thingy in our living room.

Anyway, the squares were taken care of, but I was still left with a bunch of strips of fabric from my fabric cutting insanity when I was paper piecing the squares. Yesterday I sorted all of the fabric strips by length, and then started sewing them all together into longer pieces of fabric.

I’m not measuring anything. I’m not trimming off selvages, or unevenly cut ends. I’m not being anal about making sure all of my sewn lines are straight. To hell with it. I have a bunch of fabric strips that have sat around being strips for 6 years, and it’s time for them to get to work.

It’s actually quite freeing. Once I get my longer pieces of fabric sewn together, I’ll look at what I have and try to fashion all of the pieces into a biggish rectangle (I’m thinking somewhere around twin sized to a couch sized quilt). If there are any gaps, I’ll just fill them in with other big fabric pieces. Because if there’s anything I happen to have, it’s about 17 tons of fabric that’s waiting to be used.

Once I get done (that is assuming I get done without being distracted by something for another 6 years) with this quilt, I’m going to make some really big, bold geometric quilts. I’ve got a bunch of fabric I hand dyed a while ago, and I’m finally in the mood to do something with it. I want to do big, chunky quilts with gigantic shapes and crazy quilting. Monochrome quilts that use only dozens of shades of blue. Stuff like that. I did a few years’ time with paper piecing and applique and fiddly little sewing, and none of that really grabs me anymore. So big, bold, and messy is the way to go.

In addition to the quilt, also made some delectable, ohmygodthisissobadformebutidon’tcare chocolate caramel matzo cookies.

Except I had to use saltines because there was a mysterious matzoh shortage at Krogers. Which is kind of random. Anyway, they still turned out awesome. Recipe from Zoe Bakes.

Still on the sock repair knitting brigade. Finished fixing a pair of Travis’ socks a few nights ago, and have started in on another one. I feel a bit like I’m in knitting purgatory.

We went to go see They Might Be Giants again, this time playing a kids show in Columbus. My brother, sister-in-law, and nephew went, too, so that was fun. I mean, it has to be fun when this much confetti is involved, right?

Weirdly, we were allowed to take pictures and videos inside the concert. So I did.

Puppets were involved.

Yay, knitting! John and John are just barely visible in that picture – they’re down in the corner, playing puppets in front of the camera.

Here’s Istanbul (not Constantinople) with a wicked horn intro. Also, more confetti!

It was a good show. But any concert that features confetti, knitted puppets, giant foam fingers, and accordions has to be a great concert.

The weather this past weekend was pretty awful, cold and damp, but it looks like it’ll start warming up tomorrow. I’ve got some dyeing I’m going to get done this week to replenish the yarny goodness. I’ve also got some odd cotton yarns that I’ll probably post soon (in the next few days or so) that will be on sale, and some fibery samplers. I’m in the kind of mood that wants to clear out a bunch of the older fibery stuff I have in order to make room for new fibery stuff, so there will probably be a lot of randomness in the shop soon. Mmm, randomness…

I’ve actually been knitting a ton lately, but most of it has been repair work on old knit socks – a bunch that I knit a million years ago are starting to have the heels go out on them, so I’ve been doing a lot of reknitting feet. Yes, I’d rather reknit the whole foot of a sock than darn it. Is that weird? I hate darning.

I’ve also been kind of working on getting a small (well, 48″ square) quilt made.

This should just be a piece of cake – all I have to do is baste the top, batting, and back together and then do simple machine quilting, but unfortunately for me, all of the little squares are paper pieced, so Travis and I have spent the past week picking little bits of paper off the back of it. I expect to get the paper off in the next few days, and hopefully can get this quilt done before it starts to be a major albatross.

It’s been really cold and snowy here, like much of the country, so I’ve been cooped up, doing indoorsy type crafts (as opposed to outdoorsy type crafts like dyeing, which frankly is not appealing right now). In addition to The World’s Longest Strand of I-cord, I put together something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

I made curtains for our front door out of old Kodachrome slides and aluminum chainmail rings. They are awesome.

Travis drilled all of the tiny little holes using a Dremel tool and a Dremel tool drillpress. He taped a cardboard jig to the drillpress so the holes wound up in the right place. Then I connected them all together with the chainmail rings.

It actually went together surprisingly quick. We worked on it while watching the craptastic NBC Olympic coverage, starting on Friday and finishing it up yesterday afternoon.

The slides I used all came from a single lot of slides I bought in Kansas City last fall. The ones in the curtain are all Kodachrome, and seem to date from 1961 or earlier (the older ones aren’t stamped with a date, unfortunately). About half of them feature a picture of a horse. I guess the people who took the pictures were horse people.

I’m not sure how long the Kodachrome slides will stand up to being in direct sunlight, but since we’ve had about 25 minutes of sun in the past month, I’m not too worried about them fading super quick. And hey, they’ve lasted this long already! If I was a slide, I’d rather be out on display then packed in a moldy box in the dark. Poor slides.

I liked the way these came out so much that I think I’m going to coordinating curtains for my living room windows. Those will probably feature a strip (maybe 2 or 3 slides high) of the slides in the top third of the curtains, and be connected to fabric along the bottom. In my head, it looks really cool. I just need to dig out my sewing machine and go to JoAn Fabrics for a few supplies. Now I’m regretting my decision to chuck the latest JoAn’s ad (“Oh, I won’t be needing to go there anytime soon.” D’oh!).

Besides making mad scientist projects (I made a camera recently, too!), I’ve been watching the Olympics. I freaking love the Olympics. It’s my best sports thing. Unfortunately, my Olympics love has been tainted for the past many, many years by the overwhelmingly horrid coverage by NBC. OH MY GOD, NBC, COULD YOU SUCK ANY MORE? The answer is yes, yes they can. I know this because it seems that every night of coverage they suck a little bit more. They win gold medals in their own network Olympics of Sucking. People on the West Coast are bitching because the events that are occurring live in Vancouver, in the SAME FREAKING TIMEZONE, are tape-delayed. NBC’s response? “Oh, well they’re being shown live in the East and Central time zones, and 80 percent of the country is in those time zones, so that’s how many people are able to watch it live.” Which, okay, I could maybe buy that, except it’s not being shown live on the East Coast, either, NBC! YOU LIE!

Last night, the men’s moguls was one of the marquee events. Men’s Moguls! One of Canada’s best chances to win a gold medal on home soil! Well, yay! That’s actually kind of an interesting story, NBC. So here I am, somewhat invested in the men’s mogul story. I’m also flipping to the Olympics live blog on Jezebel, because it’s the internet age, and I like to have my thoughts validated by anonymous people online. That’s who we are now, NBC! Your audience – it multitasks! And that’s when I saw a bunch of the Canadian commenter start celebrating because their guy won the gold. Which, great for them, Team Canada, yay, but it was 25 minutes before we got to that point on the NBC broadcast. Also, considering how much figure skating is hyped as the glamour sport of the Olympics, did NBC manage to show more than about 40 minutes of that last night? I don’t think so. I probably saw 40 minutes of Bob Freaking Costas and puff pieces about Apollo Ohno (whom I actually like!), but I know I didn’t see but a handful of the pairs figure skating team. People skating to Bohemian Rhapsody? I heard that happened and is something I would really like to watch, NBC, but can’t because you’ve blocked all foreign live streaming and coverage and you don’t seem to be offering the full events like that to watch. Don’t even say Silverlight to me, NBC. You can take Silverlight and choke on it.

Oh, and did I mention NBC’s charmingly ADD type of coverage, where they show one team skating, or skiing, or what have you, and then immediately zip to a commercial? And then they come back, flip to another sport, and then zip to another commercial? All this does is disorient the viewer, who eventually has no idea what the hell is going on or who is in what place or even WHAT EVENT WE’RE WATCHING. I watched something yesterday during the day that NBC actually did a half decent job of covering (because they stuck with the event the entire time it was happening). It was the shooting/cross country skiing event. It was a really exciting race! Yay! But I have no idea what the name of the sport was because NBC never said it or put it on the screen! It may have been Nordic Combined, but I don’t know the distance or if that’s even the right name. I have no idea. Dammit, NBC, I am in your key demographic! Cater to me!

It’s all okay, though, because hopefully NBC will lose millions of dollars on the Olympics and be too poor to ever bid on broadcasting them again. I wish ABC would cover it. I grew up with ABC’s Olympic coverage! I miss it! [sob!]

Enough angst. Here’s your moment of Zen:

Oh, we’re supposed to get about 8 more inches of snow. [sob! again!]

Had a massive computer fail twice in the past month. Travis was able to cobble together a temporary fix, but needs to do some repair work to get it all the way healthy again. Blerg.

I’m still doing quite a lot of knitting. I’ve been a sock machine lately, but when I get sick of socks, I’ve moved on to my latest bit of lunacy, knitting a really long piece of I-cord.

My master plan is to sew or crochet it into a rug. So I knit and knit, and occasionally wind the whole thing up into a circle to see how much I’ve gotten. My latest check shows that it is just big enough to be a kitty rug.

Everytime I coil up the I-cord, Ellie immediately jumps on top of it, like it’s a kitty target. Weird.

Spider! from juicysauce on Vimeo.

A couple of days ago, I decided to knit Travis a fully realistic, to scale model of a spider. In the interest of science, you know. Here’s what I came up with.

It’s somewhat amazing how accurate I managed to make it. You may notice that, unlike most spiders, this one only has seven legs.

That’s due to it also doubling as an homage to the greatest piece of art ever made, the seven legged spider.

I promise not to kill you…

In other news, the New Year’s Eve food turned out delicious, except for the crepes, which instead of being crepetastic were craptastic. Oh well. We’ve already made more of the pepperoni breadsticks and the roasted garlic potato soup.

Nom!

It’s been a while since I last posted – it didn’t seem that long, but I think I just got caught up in the annual flurry of Christmas knitting that happens (Must… knit… SOCKS!!!). I’ve been on a mini-hiatus of sorts from the shop, because I’ve been in really productive mode lately (re: knitting stuff), but look forward to putting more fibery goodness back up in January, barring horrible bitterly cold temps that make me want to curl up in the fetal position until winter passes.

We’ve had bitterly cold temps recently, and all it’s done is made me knit socks. So, here it is, the last sock of Ought-Nine:

It’s a modified version of the Slouch pattern (pdf link). I just made a roll top, shorter gusset, and an eye-of-partridge heel instead. I’ll start working on the matching sock today, but don’t think I’ll get it done before New Year’s. I have 12 tons of food I’m planning on making for New Year’s Eve festivities instead. Hooray, food!

My theme for New Year’s Eve Foodstravaganza is, roughly, “shit I feel like making.” This includes the following:

1. Pepperoni breadsticks and cheesy sauce (inspired by, and based on, cheap pepperoni breadsticks made by what was Pizza Luca and is now Pizza di Roma in the Muncie Mall). Basically, I’m just making some pizza dough, letting that rise, and then roll out and cut into breadstick shapes. Then, I’m going to slit open the dough, insert tiny pepperonis (have you seen the tiny round pepperonis they have available now? So adorable!), let rise again, brush with olive oil and melted butter, and then sprinkle garlic powder on top of that. And then bake. I haven’t tried making these yet, but in theory, they sound really good.

2. Spicy bean salsa. My mom made this for Christmas and it was the bomb. She looked at the recipe as a jumping off point, and added fresh jalepeno, cilantro, and some other stuff in it.

3. Roasted Garlic and Potato soup. Just because I ran across the recipe yesterday and it sounded tasty.

4. Crock Pot Italian beef sandwiches. Spicy messy noms!

5. Crepes with 3 toppings/fillings: Chocolate ganache, sauteed apples, and/or creme anglaise. The crepe part of the meal is courtesy of Michael Ruhlman‘s Ratio cookbook. And also the wacky crepe making concoction Travis got for me this summer. Made the ganache already!

On a related subject to both knitting and cooking, I got a netbook last month and it has come in even more useful than I had anticipated. I’ve taken to transferring a bunch of my standard knitting patterns in to it and use that while knitting instead of referring to my old, beat up, torn, and practically illegible notebook I’ve been scribbling patterns into for the past two years. It’s also nice to use while cooking, because I can bring the netbook into the kitchen and just reference recipes I have bookmarked online rather than having to print stuff out and waste a bunch of paper (and get more and more disorganized). It’s not much heavier than a cookbook, actually. The future is now!

So here’s some insanely bright mohair yarn that I dyed.

I think I shall name this yarn “OMG! MOHAIR! KITTENZ! RAAAAINBOW POOPS!’ Or something like that. The weather has been nice the past week, so I’ve gotten a bunch of dyeing done. I should have a shop update sometime later this week.

Bela inexplicably woke me up this morning by howling. WTF? She’s never done that. Toby used to, once every four months or so, but this is a first (that I know of) for Bela. Bizarre.

Other happy things for a gray day: Yan Yan

and sugar cookies:

Been doing a lot of knitting lately. I am in sock machine mode. Also finished spinning a skein of superwash yarn that is destined to become socks.

I’m not real keen on the way the yarn looks in the skein, but I think I’ll like it better once it becomes a sock.

I bought some Mexican cocoa tea stuff at Whole Foods a while back. I didn’t realize it had anise in it. I’ve tried it both hot and cold now, and it still tastes foul to me. I think I’m just going to pitch the rest of it. What is wrong with people that would make them think adding anise to Mexican cocoa is a good idea?!

Been crafty lately! I put a bunch of stuff up in the shop on Friday, including some hand dyed fabric.

Is that not the most cheerful fabric bundle ever? It makes me happy to look at it.

I put the fabric up because I’ve been in a fabric-y mood lately. After not having done anything with the sewing machine in months, I got it back out in order to try getting this Big Ass Quilt quilted.

It took me about 3 hours just to get the thing basted. And now it weighs about a million pounds. So I’m working on quilting it, but slowly, because I can only stand to deal with it and the sewing machine for about an hour at a time.

If it wasn’t quite so big and heavy, it would actually be enjoyable. I just want to get it done and on the bed. I bought a duvet thingy at Ikea last time we went, but it has a huge opening in the bottom of the duvet cover and it keeps pooping out the duvet innards at night. I need to put velcro or buttons or something to keep it closed.

Despite it being kind of a pain to deal with, I’m actually getting excited about quilting again, which is nice. I have 12 tons of fabric, but haven’t felt like doing anything with it for so long. I think I’m going to make a bunch of quilts this winter.

Also back into knitting again, happily. Finished a new pair of socks made from handspun. They don’t match at all, which is awesome.

I still had 39 grams (I haz a scale) of handspun left, so I started knitting another pair of socks with them in order to use the yarn up. I knit down to where the heel starts, and then am using some leftover chunks of hand dyed yarns to finish them off.

They look a little odd, but who cares? It’s nice to be able to an entire skein of yarn. I use *all* the parts of the skein, including the squeal!

Last night I successfully made coconut rice for the first time (there was an earlier, unsuccessful attempt…). I used this recipe. It was a piece of cake and cooked perfectly. I topped it with, what else, roasted garbanzo beans. I love them so. I think if I were a magician, my stage name would be The Great Garbanzo. I think next time I make it, I want to combine some onions and carrots in with the garbanzos. I don’t know why, but carrots seem like they would be a perfect match to the coconut rice.

After about 3 years of not doing so, my cat has suddenly started jumping up on the couch with me and Bela and snuggling. It’s terribly cute.