Food and Hats: Both Good Things!

Life is going on, and alas, I am no less busy. But it's a good kind of busy - the kind where you feel like you're getting somewhere, where none of the tasks are loathsome, and where at least you have time to stop and pause once in a while, even if it's not for very long (just long enough to read a few chapters or eat some cake or knit a few rows).


Anyway, to business! First off, here's the hat I knitted for my brother:



Specifics: Pattern is Turn a Square, by Jared Flood. Yarn used was Bendigo Woollen Mills Rustic 12ply in 'Redcurrant' and Cleckheaton Merino Supreme (black). I used 5.5mm double pointed needles.

Comments? This is a great pattern. Followed unaltered it makes a rather nifty, very wearable hat, and it also provides a useful template to work from when you want to do something a little bit different. This is the second time I've made it, and both times I actually ended up using a different weight of yarn, but it's a great starting point, and very easy to adapt. This time around I decided to do some colourwork instead of stripes (my brother already has a stripey hat), so I just made up a very, very basic red/black chequered pattern (didn't bother drawing up a chart or anything - it's not like you really need to with something this basic!).

I managed to make the entire thing in a day without having to stress about it too much - the heavier yarn makes it a very fast knit, and the colour stranding doesn't slow you down too much since you don't have to be forever consulting a chart. Brother seemed quite happy with it, so I'm calling it a successful project!

My other knitting is coming along well. I have high hopes of finally finishing the Tea Leaves cardigan today, so stay tuned for that one in the next few days. I also started a cute little mini-neckwarmer in the lovely Louisa Harding yarn that I found squirreled away in a bedside table drawer.

Still, the last few days have really belonged to essays, work, and kitchen!



On Saturday night I made baked felafel, and then proceeded to eat nearly the entire batch, dipping them in Greek yoghurt and hummus as I shovelled them down. Even though the ingredients are pretty humble, they are really, really good, and I foresee many more batches in my future! Possibly starting tonight... And for all those omnivores out there who never know what to cook when they have to entertain vegetarian/vegan friends, I strong suggest these - they're very easy.

I also made the cupcakes to end all cupcakes. It was a coworker's last shift on Sunday, and she had requested something chocolatey. So, I complied... and then some.



The base was Nigella Lawson's chocolate cupcake recipe from How to Be a Domestic Goddess (amazing book - I have made so many wonderful things from her recipes). Some are iced with basic chocolate butter-cream and topped with a Malteaser, and the others have a cookies and cream icing (made by folding roughly chopped Oreos into vanilla butter-cream) and are decorated with an Oreo quarter. They were actually very easy to make, despite the fact that they look pleasingly fancy. I got out my piping bag. I love my piping bag.

More knitting and less food next post, I promise!

Birthday! May Also Contain Traces of Zoo.

So, it was my birthday two days ago! Alas, I had a lot of study to do on Monday, and several hours of classes to not only attend, but also lead discussion in, so there was not a lot of birthday-ing on my actual birthday. However, last Saturday we celebrated with (another) trip to Melbourne Zoo. Yes, I know that there was a zoo trip only a few months ago. But the zoo is fun! We all brought cakes and biscuits and savouries and picnicked on the grass near the seal enclosure. This was the first time in over 10 years that I'd dared to plan an outdoors event for my birthday - Melbourne has enjoyed torrential rain on May 17th for the last two years running, so I was a little wary. But I am happy to report that the sun shone on both my plans and all of the intrepid (cake-bearing) adventurers who came along for the fun.




I had never seen the bottom of a bear's foot before. It looks entertainingly like a slipper (these slippers in particular). And just to make sure our good old Aussie wildlife is represented:



After the zoo, there was a knitting at the pub, and I ate a cupcake with a criminal amount of icing (I got some assistance from The Boy, and even so I was barely able to finish!). On Sunday, my family presented me with some new cupcake and muffin tins, a new teapot, and a couple of nice leather notebooks (I plan on lugging at least one of them along with me on my travels). And yesterday The Boy and two good friends organised a surprise dinner at Kamel, which was lovely. We ate the vegetarian banquet, and walked out very full afterward. Oh, and they gave me the Wuthering Heights mug that I have been coveting for months now.




In knitting news, I made an impromptu hat for my brother's birthday. Amusingly enough, it's from the same pattern as his Christmas hat, but instead of stripes I made up a chequered pattern in red and black. I think he liked it. Pictures next post, if I can coerce him into modelling for them.

I've also been knitting away on my Tea Leaves cardigan, but it's been a little while in finishing because I just can't make up my mind about the sleeves. More specifically, I can't decide whether to make them 3/4 length or full length. I am pretty sure I have enough yarn for full length, but not 100% positive. So then I started considering 3/4, and now I just can't decide. I've reached the stage on one where if I wanted to go 3/4 I would have to start the garter edging, so I'm thinking that I'll just slip the stitches onto waste yarn for the moment, knit the other sleeve, and then see how I'm going for yarn when they're at matching lengths. I've already knitted the button bands, so I don't have to factor those in. Urgh, I hate indecision - it's the single biggest enemy of creativity, in my experience. Even more so than procrastination.

On other fronts, I've just been busy busy busy. I'm trying to get final assignments going, trying to organise my internship for next semester, and just dealing with all of those other random things that crop up (like, oh, I don't know - planning an overseas holiday that starts in LESS THAN A MONTH!). Still, busy is good. Makes you remember that you're alive! Or something.

Hat-ness and new yarn!

Well, Richard's hat is now finished, though I think it's going to end up being a hat for me, because I honestly don't think it would fit him and his giant teenage boy type head. Here it is on me, anyway:



I look like some kind of cartoon character in this picture... Sorry about the blurriness... what can I say, but I suck at photos (especially ones taken of myself in the bathroom mirror).


Anyway, this means that I have successfully wrangled colour work for the first time. And had to do it with a self-designed thing, because I am stubborn and overly ambitious. Well, it worked anyway, or at least the colourwork part did. However, the top shaping fell victim to my short attention span, and my lack of botheredness when it comes to maths. So the decreases are bizarrely random and weirdly spaced, and it's a little too short. Methinks I shall refine the design a little (change the colourwork pattern so it's worked over a saner number of stitches, or at least one that's more easily divisible for decrease purposes, and make it a little bigger) and then make another one for the brother dear. Since I do still owe him a hat. Oh well, it's still thirty-odd degree weather here, so I'm sure he can wait a while longer...


Anyway, still beavering away on the Basalt tank. I picked up stitches with no issues (for some reason, I'm still deathly afraid of it, one button band and half a log cabin later), and am now happily working my way through hexagon two.


Oh, and I have shiny, shiny, lovely yarn.

I ordered some Merino/Cashmere sock yarn from The Knittery earlier this week, and was beginning to wonder why it hadn't arrived yet (it didn't have to travel very far, and the website had implied that it would be there within a day or so - which had passed). I got home yesterday from a three hour lecture all cranky because my bank account was overdrawn again and I had blisters on my toes that were as big as the toes themselves (or very nearly anyway), hoping that my shiny nice yarn would be waiting for me. There was no yarn...


Anyway, so I cheered myself up in other ways (other ways in this instance being eating cheese on toast and Lindt chilli dark chocolate, reading some Michael Moorcock, watching Lady Chatterly and knitting some more of my Basalt tank - all fine things), and then at about 11pm Chris got home. When I was just going to bed not long after this he said "By the way, a package came for you the other day. It's in the car, because I keep forgetting to bring it in". So, while I was languishing and yarnless (okay, not yarnless, but without this yarn), my beloved Merino Cashmere 4ply was going for pizza scented joy rides in Chris' car.... Right...


Anyway, we finally got there!
I bought two skeins, one in Moonlight (the bottom one) and the other in Earth, and they're... just... so... pretty.
I should not be allowed to own things as pretty as this:

*swoons*. And they came with a Chuppa Chup in the package!

I'm thinking I quite like The Knittery...

Idiocy and new verbs

Stupid Melbourne weather. It decides to crank out a cold day to celebrate the end of summer, and what happens? We all get sick, that's what happens (and by all, I mean me and about three other people I know... so 'all' might be a slight exaggeration, but so what...). So, just before uni goes back, I'm all sniffly and gross. Hurrah.

Anyway, because I'm sick and disoriented, I'm being a little bit of an idiot at the moment. I should be writing, I should be wanting to write, but instead I would rather hexagon. Yes, I have proclaimed hexagon to be a verb. Perhaps that should be 'hexagonning'. I quite like that. I've started knitting the Basalt tank from Knitting Nature, so there's going to be a lot of hexagonning around here for the next while. It's lots of fun so far; it's one of those patterns where you look at it and are totally unsure of whether it's going to actually look decent on you. But it looks like it will be fun to knit if nothing else, and even if it doesn't look good on me, I'll settle for unusual looking. Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, hexagonning:

Behold the fruits of the hexagonning! I'm liking the yarn as well (Jo Sharp Soho Summer DK Cotton); I went and raided Woolbaa (I definitely didn't buy Noro while I was there either) for it, and I'm glad I made the trip. It's nice to knit with, the colour is lovely (much darker in real life than in this picture), and it wasn't too expensive (comparatively anyway - much cheaper than the Rowan Wool Cotton the pattern suggested). Anyway, so all is well on the hexagon front, so far.

Right now it feels like there are so many things I could finish and get out of the way if I just bothered to put in a concerted effort for a short while. My mystery yarn bag only needs me to get the sewing machine out for about fifteen minutes before it will be done. The hat I'm knitting for the Pilchard only needs me to sit down for about that to figure out the top half of the colourwork, and then maybe an hour, or two at the most, of actual knitting to finish. And my story (I love my story, have I told anyone that lately?) only needs about 1-2 hours of sustained effort before the first draft is finished (not some stupid word count milestone but actually start-to-end finished!), but here I am blogging instead. At least I know what will be on my agenda if I leave work early today from being sick (which may or may not happen - husbandy type creature is a hard taskmaster - not to mention amusingly different in his views on when I should take a sickie now that he is running the place I'm working for).

Maybe I'll go hexagon some more...

New stuff

Well, celebrated yesterday's day off from pizza servitude by making a pilgrimage to Sunspun in search of some more Noro to finish my poor languishing Argosy scarf. Unfortunately, they didn't have any more of the colourway I needed, so unless Woolbaa has it (which I doubt), it may need to be a shorter scarf than I intended. Never mind, it's still pretty, and I'm sure it'll grow a bit when I block it. I just don't like stingy scarves.

The lesson to be learned from this is that when I'm looking at scarf patterns, I should bear my above inclination in mind and buy an extra ball of yarn that what the pattern states. Problem solved. Anyway, it seemed a waste to spend an hour on public transport and not buy something while I was over there (and heaven knows they have no shortage of beautiful, beautiful yarns), so I indulged:

Hehe, what a weird photo. I was trying to get some good light, so the yarn is sitting on my knee in the kitchen (you can see the blue handle of the dustpan and brush underneath the table in the background)... Still, yarn is beautiful! I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do with it. At $16 a ball, making anything large out of just this yarn is totally out of the question budget wise, so I'm tossing up between just making a Dream Swatch head scarf out of the ball that I do have (http://www.knitandtonic.typepad.com/dreamswatchwrap.pdf ), or making Excuses (hehe), which I've had my eyes on for a while ( http://www.magknits.com/Dec07/patterns/excuses.htm). Currently, I'm leaning towards the latter, because I'm not really a head scarf kind of person. I can't even wear shawls without them falling off...

Anyway, Richard's hat is coming along well. The colourwork is coming out nicely; I half wasn't expecting it to work, but it is. Unfortunately, I couldn't take a decent photo of it because it's gloomy and overcast today, and it's hard enough to take a photo of a hat in progress even when there's good light. There'll be a pic of this one soon enough.

Anyway, the day is getting on, so I should go and prise the boy out of bed. Thankfully, I probably don't have an entire night of pizza servitude to sit through tonight (the plan is for me to get everything prepared, and then high tail it when the other staff get in - and I am very much hoping that we stick to this plan), so more work will be done on hat this evening. Also, have written nearly 90k on my story. This pleases me greatly; first draft is nearly done now!