Survival, a scarf, and yet more garlic.

Good evening internet! I am pleased to announce that I have officially survived my Week-of-Assignment-Hell. I even have my sanity intact (more or less).

Okay, perhaps I'm blowing it all ever-so-slightly out of proportion, but it has been a long and gruelling couple of weeks. Once I had handed the last essay in, I was so wrecked that it was all I could do just to stagger onto the tram and let it carry me a few blocks to my comfort food joint of choice. Half an hour, a dozen steamed veggie dumplings, and a thermos of tea later, I felt more or less ready to face the world again. That was late last week, and while I've had work and uni since, I spent the last two days making the most of my long weekend, and sleeping as much as possible. Which is not actually all that much, as I tend to wake early and get hungry, but hey, I'm trying!




I've not been idle either, despite all of the aforementioned sleep. I finished the Boy Thing's scarf, and it is just as cosy warm as I'd hoped it would be. Just in time too, as cold weather has hit Melbourne in a big way the last day or so - on my walk last night I experienced the first 'visible breath' of the year. Yes, I know that to all those readers who regularly have snow, this is a little pathetic, but in my neck of the woods, below 10 degrees Celsius is cold, all right!



Mmmm... so warm. I only tried it on for a moment, I swear!

I also got a lot done on my current major project - I'm making a Tea Leaves cardigan from some Dream in Colour 'Classy' that I've had kicking around, sad and purposeless, for quite a while now.




I've just finished the textured part of the yoke, so now it's straight sailing in stockinette until I divide for the sleeves. While I am definitely no stranger to top-down construction, this is the first time in ages that I haven't used the raglan style, so the round yoke is providing quite a novel experience. It feels like it's taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r, but they always seem to. And I'm really pleased with how the semi solid yarn is working here. The variegation is quite subtle, and looks quite lovely.

In other news, I have been doing what I always do when I have some free time - cooking! I spent the worst of the Week of Doom living mainly off of tinned soup and breakfast cereal, so the first thing I did once finished (okay, the first thing after dumplings and sleep) was make up a huge vat of vegetable and barley soup. Of course, the wonderful thing about doing this is that you have meals for days afterwards without having to do anything more taxing than turning the microwave on for a minute or two. And, if you feel so inclined, this gives you more time to get creative with your accompaniments. I've done garlic bread before, obviously, and toasted Turkish bread is something I am rarely without, but this was something else entirely:



Isn't it glorious? Cheesy garlic Turkish bread. I grilled some chopped garlic and olive oil on a square of foil until the garlic was cooked, then spread it on the bumpy side of the bread. I then sprinkled some mozzarella cheese over it and microwaved it just a tiny bit to soften the cheese. And then the whole thing got a good grilling - just long enough to melt the cheese. I always used to just spread raw garlic on the bread, but this usually entails toasting the bread to within an inch of its life in order to cook the garlic through. This was the garlic is properly cooked, but the bread is still ultra soft.

I will be making this A Lot over the coming autumn and winter... I know, I know, I have a bit of a tragic addiction to garlic, but how many foods are there that manage to be this delicious, healthy and inexpensive all at the same time? Ours is a love affair that will continue for a long time to come!

Busy, busy, busy...

Alas, aside from this brief post, the blog silence will be continuing on for a little while yet. I am having one-of-those-weeks as far as university goes: three assignments due over the course of four days. I am a very busy girl.

But it's okay, because I have stress-free knitting, in the form of the previously mentioned tasty-warm Malabrigo scarf for The Boy:




I'm also back home, and have my beloved fish to stare at. And a capsicum - I try and make sure that I have some sort of vegie plant growing at times of academic stress, because they're fun to take five minutes to go look at when things are getting hectic. Hah, I'm turning into such a hippie...




Hopefully I'll post sometime late this week, possibly with a completed scarf and news of other projects. In the mean time, enjoy my paltry attempts at home-grown foodstuffs!

March at Last!

So, it's finally March. February felt oddly long for me, but March is bringing a lot 0f change. New season, new course at uni, new plans, and so on. Oh, and now having to pay full price on public transport because apparently postgraduate students aren't real students *gripe*

Now while I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about this year and the coming month both, seemingly everyone else I know has taken it upon themselves to get sick (probably has something to do with that lovely alternation between searingly hot and cold and rainy that my beloved city tends to do so very well). As of right now, I do not have this dubious honour, and am attempting to continue on in this way by employing my three proven ways of staying well: resting, staying warm, and good food.




Homemade lasagne (vegetarian of course). Looks awesome, does it not? And it tasted even better...

I was particularly pleased with this one because it was the first time I'd tried my hand at lasagne, and I didn't use a recipe. I've noticed that more and more these days I tend to rely less on recipes. What I do instead (and this is made So Much Easier with the internet, and the wealth of information that it provides upon the simple entering of a few choice words into Google) is find a handful of different recipes for a dish, read through them, take note of the key points, and then make my own version. I did the same thing day before yesterday with homemade toasted museli (which may warrant a blog post of its own in the near future, so awesome was the result). While this method might not be for everyone, I'm finding it works really well for me. I'm very much of the opinion that one of the best things about cooking yourself is being able to tailor recipes to suit your individual likes and dislikes, and this method lets you do this while hopefully making a minimum of fatal errors (and while I dearly love doing my own thing, I'll be the first to acknowledge that cooking does contain a great many non-negotiable rules).

At any rate, for all those playing along at home, I filled my lasagna with instant dried pasta sheets, basic tomato sauce (made from onion, garlic, passata, bay leaves, olive oil and a slurp of some gifted red wine that was, ahem, not really a desirable drinking option, with some baby spinach tossed in at the end), thinly sliced zucchini and pumpkin, and a small amount of grated mozzarella cheese. I topped it with more sauce, poured some extra passata around the edges (because I was clever and didn't make enough sauce), and then topped it with some more cheese and some dried basil and oregano. Once it came out of the oven, I put some fresh basil on top, because I am a fiend for basil. And I lived off the leftovers for three days. Happy Anna.




In knitting news, the boy has been walking around wearing several shop bought scarves. As you can all probably imagine, this simply will not do. It's been a while now - I think I can tempt fate and knit him one. After all, they call it the "sweater curse", not the scarf curse. I am planning on knitting this scarf in the worsted Malabrigo pictured above, just like this version.

Yes, I think I might be in the middle of a bit of a cable binge. Oh well - at least there will be pretty things by the end of it.

Liesl and such...

Well, I'm still alive! Uni is kicking my arse several times a week, but I'm definitely still alive and kicking. Or alive enough to be quite chronically bored by the Acts Interpretation Act anyway (erm, hooray for statutory interpretation, or something...). And my Japanese classes started this week, just in case law school wasn't enough. Japanese looks like it's going to be a lot of fun, though learning how to write hiragana is a challenge - I've done so much Western style calligraphy in my life that the different stroke order (horizontal stroke before vertical) is driving me spare. In a good way though!

Thankfully for my sanity, there have been plenty of developments on the crafty front as well.

For a start, I finally finished my Liesl cardigan:


The nitty gritty: Liesl by Ysolda Teague. Knitted with about 2.3 skeins of Malabrigo Worsted on an 8mm needle.

The colour commentary: I'm mostly happy with how it came out, though I think that I really could have made it a size smaller - you can't see it in this shot, but it's actually a little bit large for me, and therefore not as flattering as it could have been. Also, I'm not entirely sure that this style suits me. Oh well - I'm still mostly happy with it, and I've already worn it, so obviously I don't dislike it that much!

Ha - this project was really me wanting to see what all of the fuss was about. Liesl is such a popular pattern on Ravelry, and people never seem to shut up about Malabrigo either, so this was a good opportunity to suss both of them out. Liesl is a great pattern, for all that I'm not particularly sure that it's quite my style. I wasn't particularly surprised by that though - Ysolda is such a talented designer, and I'm never anything less than enthralled when I knit her patterns. They always come together so nicely - it's very satisfying the way that everything just works! Working with the Malabrigo was very nice too, as I believe I've already said. It's beautifully soft, though I'm not sure that I'd want to use it for everything. Perhaps I'm a little old fashioned, but I kind of like my wool with a little more substance. Still, I'll definitely use it again!

In other crafty news, I broke out the fabric paint - something I'd been meaning to do for a very long time:


I love painting random designs on things - it's so therapeutic. I was very pleased with how this one came out too - don't worry, it's a lot less patchy now (the above shot was taken just after the first coat). It was the test run, since I hadn't used this brand of fabric paint before, and the directions for setting it were infuriatingly vague. But it's been washed since, and all seems to be well. Now it's all I can do to restrain myself from running out to buy more plain tops to paint. And I have plans for skirts as well. Because I don't have enough hobbies already, or anything...

I've also started a scarf (already halfway through thanks to all the lecture recordings I've sat through this week - my iPod is a lot more forgiving of me knitting through lectures than I imagine the actual lecturers would be if I tried doing it in class!), and a shawl. I have particularly high hopes for the shawl. It's a Laminaria, and I'm using some Wired for Fibre yarn in the most beautiful shade of dark green ever (in case you haven't noticed, I have a bit of a tragic addiction to green). I'm scared to death of it, because it's my first attempt at charted lace, but the thought of how beautiful it would be is enough to spur me on. But first, I need to knit something ridiculous for a friend's engagement party tomorrow. More on that at a later date...

Progress and plans

Yes, yes, I'm a lazy bum and haven't been blogging here as much. Life has been a bit crazy lately. And it's only going to get crazier - I go back to uni next week. I'm taking a full load of law subjects for a change, hopefully wrangling some volunteer legal work with the Student Union, probably taking a Japanese language class on the side, and working part-time. Um, what was I saying about crazy? I won't have time to breathe. But I'm sure I'll still find time to knit and procrastinate, and everything else will flow from there...

I'm doing some smaller projects at the moment. Okay fine, one of them is a cardigan, which I suppose doesn't really count as 'small', but it's lace on big needles and apparently doesn't take very long at all, so I am optimistic.


The lighter green item on the left is a hat I'm making from some very lovely Wired for Fibre yarn. It's my own design, so it may or may not actually work out. But in the meantime, the colour is absolutely beautiful - it's varigated, but without any of that nasty obvious pooling that sometimes makes me twitch a little.

The darker green is the aforementioned Liesl cardigan. I was curious about all of the fuss being made over Malabrigo yarn, and then when I found an Australian vendor who sold it, I decided to check it out. I can now see why people go on about it so much - it is lovely and soft, and the colours are beautiful. I don't think that I'd want to use it for everything, but it is very pretty. It was originally earmarked for a Sand Dollar Pullover (Ravelry link, because I couldn't find a decent picture elsewhere), but then after taking a long and hard look at this jumper, I realised that it was probably not likely to work very well with my body shape. As we know, I'm rather tall, and most of my height is in my torso. I don't want to end up with a midriff jumper - it's not a good look. So the yarn is going to be a Liesl instead. Hopefully it'll work out well (though I've already arsed the pattern up a little bit - oops).

(The orangey-gold yarn is a skein of Sundara that I have no idea what to do with. I love the colour, but I'm really not sure that it will suit me in a garment. It's in the photo because, well, it looks really nice with the other yarns, and it might as well earn its keep by posing for me until I figure out what to do with it!)


And there are other things that I'm in a perpetual state of working on. What can I say - I have somewhat of an impulse control problem when it comes to casting on for new things. The above is a kind of armwarmer-esque creature, born from a perverse whim to attempt some colourwork with the Dream in Colour yarn I had left from my Corona jumper. It's languishing at the moment because I can't be bothered to make the thumb hole (that requires, you know, thought and concentration). There's also those long-neglected colourwork socks I started late last year, and also a soon-to-be-felted bag. And who knows what else. Like I said, impulse control problems.

I also promised my Dad that I'd make a jumper for him too - he saw the moss stitch on my Terra jumper (see last entry) and liked the way that it looked in the yarn I was using, so now he wants a jumper. Laugh at me if you want, but this is quite exciting. Normally my family view the knitting as somewhat odd. I mean, I've made things for them, but unless we're actually in sub-zero temperatures (and living in Australia, that doesn't exactly happen often), they don't tend to get worn. On this note: Abby - you asked if I knitted much for others. The answer is no, not really, but it's more because of lack of demand for said knitting than any overt knitter's selfishness on my part. So a family member actually requesting a garment is unprecedented! I'm having fun fossicking through potential patterns...

Anyway, that's enough rambling. I have overdue items to return to the uni library - whoops...