Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts

Friday, October 11, 2013

Finished (almost) and Other Awesomeness

Bigger on the inside
After waiting for over a year, I now have a door, a proper door, for our bedroom. This was my husband's birthday/Christmas/I love you gift to me. I can also be argued that it was really part of an unfinished art project and was going to be made with or without my consent. Luckily for him, I love it. I do need to get better pictures but I wanted to share it today because it started off my week which ended up being filled with Awesomeness. Of course, as the title suggests, this is also a project that is almost finished. The doors are up and they close but they don't latch. There's also some finish work to be done around the door opening (top and bottom and the inside where there would normally be trim masking the gap). This is where my finished project this week is as well. 



Waves of Love, very wavy when unblocked
Here is the Waves of Love shawl, off the needles. I ended up not finishing it correctly because I really wanted to finish it. It still looks lovely and I'll see how well it blocks. This is the most intricate piece I've had to block so far and I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to block it one. The scarf that went to Japan got blocked using cork trivet things but I need a larger something to block this piece. Thankfully it's a birthday present for December, so I'm not horribly worried yet. Hopefully I can  come up with something before then. I also need to weave in the ends. It doesn't seem to matter how many tapestry needles I own, I can never seem to find them when I need them. I've decided that I'm just going to get some more and put them into my Hippo bag as soon as possible as the Hippo bag doesn't seem to cause things to disappear.  It does mean that I can now cast on Bigger on the Inside, which I've been holding off on doing. I'm trying to limit how many projects I have going at once and of those, how many of each type of project I have going at once. I'm still working on Fuzzy, which should hopefully be done soon. After talking with mom, I've decided to take it to about 36" long. They may not use up all the yarn that I intended to (3 skeins has gotten it to 29" long) but it will be a nice length. Does one block blankets as well?

Monday was exciting because I got my Cookie A October sock yarn. I had already peeked at the spoilers thread, so I knew what the color would look like. I think I drove the kids batty (at least the youngest one) because I didn't open it immediately. 
In fact, I just opened it this morning. 
It is definitely my color. While I still claim that green is my favorite color, there is something about rich reds that I adore. Maybe it's all those years of surrounding myself in green that my eyes love deep reds. Who knows.








Monday there was also a package slip for me. At least I knew it was for me as the zip code of the sender is my mom's. Having a husband with a name that shares your initial is sometimes amusing when they only write the first initial and the last name on the package slip. 

I did know what was coming in the package as well since mom had messaged me that she had sent off the package. This one I did immediately open outside of the post office to take a look at it. Mom did the Colorado yarn crawl this year, which I may have introduced her to by taking her to a new yarn shop this past June where they mentioned it. She managed to get to all of the shops and she bought yarn (though she didn't buy yarn at all of the shops) and sent some onto me. I'm not doing too well at this whole knitting more than I'm acquiring but it's so soft and comforting and pretty. Now to just find the perfect project for all of it...


My half of the haul from the Colorado Yarn Crawl.

Note the awesome color for my soon to be made awesome socks.
 I am also now the proud owner of Qiviut sock yarn. Husband can't tell the difference between it and most of the other yarn (he did notice that some is coarser than this yarn) but I can definitely feel the difference. I can't wait to make these into socks. It's also very similar to the Cookie A sock club yarn so I could make both patterns (I love both of them too!) in similar colors.



 The best part of the package wasn't the yarn, but the swift that was also in it. Thirteen years ago this past April, my Great-Aunt CeCe passed away. She was a teacher and I remember she had a million books (and corgis; she's to blame for my love of corgis) whenever we would visit her house. She also had a million things of knitting. Projects, yarn, needles. She convinced a friend of hers to publish a book and this friend is now a well-known knitting author. Mom ended up with all of her knitting supplies after she passed away. Recently mom found Cece's old swift and asked if I wanted it. This was a silly question to ask as she knows I've been wanting a swift for a while as I find winding skeins tedious without one. It's nice having somethings of CeCe's. She was always this mysterious, elegant woman in my mind. She was always dressed well but not necessarily normally and she didn't give a care what anyone thought of her. I'm sure she probably did on some level as she always looked amazing. I think she and my other Great-Aunt helped inspire my love of museums as they were both involved with the ones in Denver. When we would go spend time with either of them, we were usually going to a museum. So a family tradition lives onto another generation through me. My sister has no patience for knitting but that means that I have another person I can gift things to (the hot pink in the yarn haul picture that's in a separate bag is going to become a hat for her; she already knows about it too).



Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Adventures in cookie making

At some point yesterday, my eldest step-daughter once again saw the giant bag of chocolate chips that we have (you can never be too prepared) and suggested (demanded) that we make cookies today. This was after another bout of clothes shopping (I really, really hate shopping for women's clothing because it's either cheaply made or non-functional; if I had the time, I'd consider making more of it myself just so I didn't have to deal with the annoyance of shopping), a trip to the library (we found All the Doctor Who books...and checked them out) and dinner. All of this was after I'd worked a crazy kind of day so my brain wasn't in the correct place to really function, but I had promised cookies.

The first thing we (read I) did was make the dough for some homemade Jammie Dodgers (which I've misspelling all over the internet...I'm tired, leave me along). Once that was made and put into the freezer to chill, we started on the chocolate chip cookies.

My youngest step-daughter is currently not allowed to eat chocolate which has led to a lot of whining and moaning and comments on how she was going to get more of the Jammie dodgers because she can't have the chocolate. I, however, had a plan. After the dough was mixed, I split it into two containers and added white chocolate to half of it. I then had the eldest the chocolate chips to the other half. All of the chips, as in, a full batch worth of chips. She asked if this was correct multiple times and I assured her that it was correct. Silly me.

We ended up with this:


The best part? It took me way too long to figure out what happened. My step-daughter even explained it to me and I didn't get it. I have no idea when the light bulb finally went on but it was certainly a slow one. At least they are still edible. Reminds me of a birthday cake I was once given that sort of....exploded into a platter filled with 5 pounds of chocolaty goodness.

Once these were out of the oven and "cooling", we moved onto the jammie dodgers. Most of our cookie cutters are holiday themed in nature. Something about making sugar cookies around the holidays.... I had decided to make them heart shaped because that was the least...cold related cookie cutter we had that wouldn't also break it's neck (eldest step-daughter has a thing for giraffes and got a giraffe shaped cookie cutter for her birthday). I didn't have a smaller cutter to make a window in the top cookie. At first we were going to just leave it and throw caution to the wind as far as the recipe was concerned. Then I commented how cool it would be to have a keyhole opening because we could then call them Kingdom Hearts jammie dodgers. And so we started to carve out keyholes in half of the cookies. Well, mostly half of the cookies. The youngest made a face for one of the cookies. I don't know why but I have learned to not question almost-9-year-olds anymore. It's safer that way.

So after much silliness and giggling (and some fighting and trying to talk to Husband), we baked some jammie dodgers. About half ended up with raspberry jam and the other half got blood orange marmalade. I just hope the girls crashed from all the sugar and are now sleeping.