burgeonings

i'm free!

2008-06-29T12:55:00.003-04:00

The dissertation is done, defended, and turned in. I'm pretty much officially free from academia for a little while. There are still papers to be submitted for publication and other little projects to work on at my leisure, but for the most part, I am free!

I thought I would want to jump right back into knitting, sewing, and cooking...but I guess my body wanted me to do nothing but sleep and lay around like a big vegetable for the past week. I think I'm finally starting to feel a little more motivation now, so hopefully I can run with it.

The lovely little butterfly above is a wee wonderfuls pattern, and was heavily influenced by Meg's interpretation of the pattern on her blog. I haven't made Meg's chrysalis yet, but I did attach the wings by velcro so I could do that at some point in the future. I ordered some brown flannel fabric that might be perfect.

My butterfly is not perfect...It was my first hand sewing project of this type and I learned a lot. My felt was slightly low quality. I ordered it thinking it was 100% wool, but it turned out to be a blend...at least it is formaldehyde free and safe for babies to gnaw on. Also, I didn't have a fine sharp needle that had a big enough eye to fit the strands of embroidery floss through. These two limitations led to much cursing as I basically mutilated the felt while trying to sew. I eventually figured out a solution - two strands of embroidery floss instead of three, with one of my small-eyed sharp needles...and the rest went much more smoothly.

Anyway, I'm really happy with this cute little project and think I'll probably make another one of these days to see if I have improved enough to make one that is a little less lopsided!

foraging

2008-05-28T14:55:00.005-04:00

Saturday we went to an undisclosed forest in Vermont in search of the elusive morel mushroom. Looking for morels takes some serious concentration and patience - they are nearly invisible because they blend in so well with the leaf-littered forest floor. You have to scan the ground for odd darkish lumps that could well be morels. And they are few and far between, so there is a lot of nothing in between short bursts of excitement.

We went foraging with a friend who is a very experienced mushroom hunter, and we came home with about 3 pounds of morels between the three of us - in dollars, this is about $120 worth of morels! Adam and I took 1.5 pounds of them and planned our dinner the whole way home.

First we had to go up to the woods to get some wild leeks, a perfect partner for morels. I spent a few hours digging leeks on Thursday at Fat Rooster, and it was hard work in the deep rich soil near the farm. Luckily though, the soil in our woods is rocky and shallow, and pulling the leeks was really easy!

We decided to make homemade pasta to go with our morels, because it has been a long time since we last made pasta, and it really is superior to anything store bought. It seemed inappropriate to have our precious foraged morels and leeks with run-of-the-mill dried pasta, so we broke out the old pasta maker and made a simple egg fettuccini.

I sauteed the leeks and morels in butter and reduced some white wine into the mixture. I added heavy cream and tarragon, seasoned it all with salt and pepper, and boiled it until it was thickened. We had the morel sauce over our fresh pasta with a sprinkle of freshly grated parmesan cheese on top. It was one of those meals that left us nearly speechless, aside from the occasional moan or exclamation of how amazing it was. Happily we still had about a half-pound of morels left, so we had another wonderful morel dinner on Sunday night!

longing for freedom

2008-05-13T08:57:00.002-04:00

I haven't had time to do ANYthing lately. My dissertation is due to my committee in a week and a half, and then I fly out to Portland for my defense on June 9th. I can't WAIT until it is over!

We were in New York City on Friday and Saturday for a wedding, and I stopped at Purl Patchwork (I've been wanting to go there for so long!). Adam went to hang out with a friend and his last words to me were "buy lots of fabric," so I did! I couldn't resist getting some of the Cake Rock Beach fabrics plus a cute little spectrum bundle of orange and yellow fabrics. I don't know how I will manage to hold off on sewing with these awesome fabrics for another month!

It is gorgeous and spring-like outside and we have a family of foxes living in our field with FIVE babies! We watched them for almost an hour last night, chasing each other and leaping into the air and rolling around in the grass. Hopefully soon I can spend more time watching foxes, gardening, sewing, and knitting!

bark BSJ

2008-04-17T13:59:00.004-04:00

The trip to Portland involved a 2.5 hour bus ride and over 6 hours of flying, each way. Aside from a short nap here and there, pretty much all I did during the transit was knit this Baby Surprise Jacket. It is made from my handspun bark yarn (dyed by Pigeonroof Studios), which is a sport weight yarn, and I think I used size 4 needles for this one.

I literally think every woman I know between the ages of 28 and 35 is currently pregnant, so I anticipate knitting many more Baby Surprise Jackets in the near future. I'm in love with this one though, because the handspun merino-silk yarn is so beautiful, almost too luxurious for a baby! But you know, nothing is too good for certain babies.

spring greens

2008-04-08T10:30:00.002-04:00

We returned from Portland on Saturday and picked up our last winter CSA share on Sunday. It's slightly sparse on the root vegetables, because obviously by now many of them are suffering from being stored all winter. But they made up for that with a dozen eggs and a huge bag of spring greens. It's hard to tell from the photo, but that bag of greens must weigh at least two pounds...and they are delicious!

Portland went very well, Adam is done with his dissertation, we ate some incredible meals, and saw some friends. Everything is in bloom there and it is just gorgeous. Luckily though, when we got home, most of our snow had melted! We can see our driveway, yard, and back patio again, and spring is definitely in the air here too.

I finished a couple knitting projects, and will try to post them soon! But I am really a little frantic right now about finishing the last chapter of my dissertation, so posting knits might have to wait.

congratulations, adam!

2008-03-31T08:31:00.005-04:00

Adam finished his dissertation and we're heading to Portland, Oregon tomorrow for his defense. I'm so happy for him and now he will have more time to work on his wood lathe...he is learning how to turn wood bowls, and I can't wait to see what he creates! I'm also really excited to visit Portland...I miss that wonderful city!

I am hoping to do a lot of knitting on the airplane. I've almost finished knitting my bitter orange yarn into a plain garter stitch scarf (inspired by a similar scarf by jared at brooklyntweed), and now I think I'm going to make a Baby Surprise Jacket with my handspun bark yarn. Next up is the Minimalist Cardigan, which will definitely satisfy my current desire to make a sweater (which I haven't done in years), and I know it is something I will actually wear for a change! And on the sewing front, I can't wait to make some things with this new fabric line, Cake Rock Beach...I really want to make these pillows, and I have some other ideas up my sleeve too!

I have to quell some of my creative urges for a while though, because now that Adam is done with his dissertation, it is my turn to finish mine!

bitter orange

2008-03-25T08:47:00.002-04:00

The last few Pigeonroof rovings that I have spun have been so beautiful as yarn that I am hesitant to knit with them. I'd rather just look at them! This one is different. It's colorway "bitter orange" in 80% merino and 20% tussah silk. I really loved the color of this one and was excited to spin it. But I'm not happy with my spinning at all! I was trying to spin a thicker yarn, but this one just seems dense and it isn't very pretty to look at. I'm also not as even of a spinner when I try to spin thicker (I think in the future I'm going to stop trying - I'll just 3-ply my thin singles if I want a thicker yarn). Plus it is very barber-poley, which I'm not so crazy about in a yarn.

And I learned something about myself. When I am not 100% satisfied with a yarn, I just want to knit it right away! So I discovered a way to get myself to knit more: spin yarns that I'm unhappy with! Just kidding, I won't do that, but check out how amazingly gorgeous the bitter orange is in this knitted garter stitch swatch I made.

I LOVE it. It's tweedy and interesting and it drapes really well (because of the silk)...and I love all the colors. Now I just have to figure out what I'm going to make with it. Unfortunately I only have about 200 yards, which isn't a whole lot. I'm really anxious to knit with it though, so hopefully I'll figure out something good.

finished quilt!

2008-03-22T14:08:00.003-04:00

As promised, here is my finished quilt! Like I said before, I am really happy with it, and still amazed that I did such an extensive sewing project. I quilted it in a diamond pattern, the same way it was done in the book where I got the instructions for making this quilt (Last Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts). Some of the quilting lines are a little wobbly, mainly due to my beginning sewing skills. My really old crappy sewing machine didn't help much either...my walking foot fell off more than a dozen times during the quilting, so there was a lot of stopping, carefully trying to put it back on, and getting everything lined up again so there was no obvious gap in the quilting line. I would love to get a new sewing machine some day.

I did a double-fold binding, which involves hand sewing the entire binding onto the back of the quilt. I was dreading this part because I've always heard how time consuming it is, but it was my favorite part of the whole process! I really liked the slow precise hand sewing, and it was the only part of the process where I felt somewhat in control. It didn't even take that long...basically two nights of sewing. Look how cute my little polka-dotted binding is.

Making a quilt was on my "life list," or list of things to do during my lifetime. It is always such a good feeling when I actually accomplish one of these things. And the greatest part is that I really want to keep making quilts, so this definitely will not be a one-time thing. In fact, I just bought some gorgeous fabric for my next project! There will definitely be some hand-quilting in my future too, since I enjoyed the hand sewing so much.

bark handspun

2008-03-20T14:45:00.003-04:00

I finished spinning yet another Pigeonroof roving. It is one of the two I talked about here... 80%merino, 20% tussah silk dyed in colorway "bark." It was a really subtle roving, which suits me well...I'm still not a huge fan of wildly variegated yarns, and it spun into a gorgeous yarn with a slight shine from the silk.

It's about 360 yards, 4.1 ounces, and once again it fluffed up into a really soft squishy yarn. Back in my spinning heyday (just over 5 years ago when I lived in Moscow, Idaho), I never spun yarns like this...I mainly spun drapey, very fine yarns with a looser ply. It is probably partly because I am spinning a lot of merino these days, which is really springy, and partly because I've been making a conscious effort to ply tighter. I'm really really happy with my current spinning though, and it is very knitting-friendly (though obviously I haven't even been knitting with it!), so I guess I'm just going to keep it up. I did recently buy some chocolate brown bombyx silk, which I can't wait to spin, and that will be a nice change of pace from all this fluffy merino.

Anyway, stay tuned (my two readers!) because my quilt is officially finished, and I will try to get some decent pictures this weekend and post it. It turned out really great, and I'm so glad that I did the whole process myself instead of having someone else quilt it.

work in progress

2008-03-18T10:09:00.004-04:00

Not a whole lot is going on here, and I have no finished projects to show. Most of my free time has been spent working on my quilt, which I spent all of last weekend machine quilting. I got the binding attached yesterday night, and now I just have to hand-finish the binding by blind stitching it onto the back of the quilt. There have been many points during the process where I've said "I'm never doing this again," like when my walking foot fell off of my sewing machine for the 20th time, and when my quilting lines seemed just a little too wobbly. But now that it is almost done and I realize that it actually looks pretty good, I can't wait to do it again! I have a couple small projects in mind.

The daffodils are from Adam. It always amazes me how much something so simple, like a vase of flowers, can brighten my mood! When we lived in Portland, I had fresh flowers in my house almost all the time. But here, it is really difficult to find nice flowers...and there aren't any growing outside yet since we're still buried under snow.

This is pretty much the only knitting work in progress I have going on these days. The photo is blurry, but I'm not going to take the time to re-photograph it until it is done! It's a hydrangea lace scarf in malabrigo lace, probably the softest yarn I've ever felt. I'm actually not so crazy about the lace pattern (though I do love hydrangeas!)...I grabbed the pattern and the yarn one day at Webs when I was in a hurry (code for Adam wanted to leave). They had a sample of this scarf knit in this yarn and it was gorgeous and soft. I probably could have found or designed a pattern I like more, but I'm happy enough to do something fairly mindless and I figure you can't go wrong with malabrigo lace!

dried garlic

2008-03-15T13:48:00.003-04:00

Our supply of garlic was getting completely out of control. Not only did we have the garlic from our winter CSA share, but we also had our own crop of garlic...about 50 heads that we planted during our last fall in Portland that were harvested by my brother about a month after we moved to New Hampshire. Well, now it is getting warm and inevitably some of our garlic has started to sprout a little and we had to find a way to preserve it.

Adam came up with the idea of putting it in the food dehydrator and making little dried slivers of garlic. We are storing it in the freezer to further its shelf-life. At first I wasn't quite sure what to do with dried garlic, but I was making a recipe the other day that called for garlic powder and I don't have any because I typically prefer to use fresh garlic. I figured I'd give the dried garlic a chance and Adam ground some in a mortar & pestle into the finest most wonderfully fragrant golden garlic powder I have ever seen. It probably comes as no surprise that freshly ground garlic powder is far superior to anything that has been sitting in a jar for months or years...but really, this stuff is amazing!

tote bag

2008-03-13T08:17:00.003-04:00

This is a prototype tote bag that I made last Saturday. I had this red fabric from Kirin & Co. that I didn't have any plans for. It came in some packs of small pieces of assorted fabric that I bought specifically for the blue ginkgo and birch forest fabrics that I used in my pillow and quilt. I also have a piece of green ginkgo fabric that I plan to make a tote bag from, but I thought I'd make this red one first so I could refine my techniques for the next one!

I roughly used the tutorial on super eggplant, except when I sewed the lining into the bag I just topstitched instead of doing the crazy inside-out thing. Mainly because I was lazy and also worried that I'd end up with handles stuck between the lining and the outside of the bag, or something crazy like that.

The brown fabric is linen & cotton, as is Lara's fabric, so it has a nice texture to it. I messed up one of the corners, but it doesn't bother me too much, and overall I think the bag looks really nice! It reminds me of summer though, so I'm having trouble using it now (it's too cheerful for March!)...but I'll get over it.

vermont gold

2008-03-11T07:47:00.002-04:00

On Sunday, I helped inaugurate the 2008 maple sugaring season out at the farm. We tapped about 60 more maple trees (they had already tapped a bunch a few days prior), and then spent the whole afternoon collecting sap to bring down to the sugar shack.

Most of the trees are hooked up to tubes that all drain into huge 250 gallon collecting tanks, but a number of trees are still done with the old fashioned bucket hanging from a tree. Most of the trees with buckets are along the road, but it is really difficult to climb up the huge pile of snow on the side of the road (all the while risking the chance that you'll fall through the thin icy layer on top and end up waist-high in a snow drift!) and make your way to the buckets, empty them into your bigger bucket, then make your way back down the snow drift...without spilling too much sap!

All in all, we gathered almost 600 gallons of sap, which sounds like a lot, but with a ratio of 40 gallons of sap to every one gallon of maple syrup, that is only enough for about 15 gallons of syrup! But the sugaring season has just begun, and the sap is likely to flow like crazy this week since we are expected to have daytime temperatures above freezing for the rest of the week.

green tea

2008-03-08T15:57:00.004-05:00

Above is another roving I was lucky enough to get from Pigeonroof Studios. It is 3.9 ounces of organic merino dyed in colorway "Green Tea." It had every shade of green from minty green to olive green, several shades of brown, including some reddish-brown, and even a couple tiny patches of blue. Pretty amazing. The whole time I was spinning the singles, I was worried about how all those colors would blend together...but I am SO happy with the final yarn, I can't stop looking at it.

I spun it really fine (I ended up getting over 400 yards of yarn from this 3.9 ounce roving), and the organic merino is so springy and soft that it fluffed up into an amazing squishy yarn. It would be perfect for socks, but I'm just not sure yet what it will become. Obviously I haven't been spending much time knitting these days...so I'll have to work on that. I just can't stop spinning!

signs of spring

2008-03-06T14:52:00.006-05:00

I spent four hours today in the greenhouse at Fat Rooster Farm, planting radicchio, basil, escarole, chard, bok choy, parsley, artichokes, spinach, arugula, and cabbage. They have also already started 21,000 onion seeds! It was so wonderful to spend some time in a sunny, hot greenhouse today! It was over 100 degrees in there, which felt really really nice.

Also at the farm...more than 20 lambs have been born over the past couple weeks! They are so curious, and entertaining to watch. My favorite is this little reddish lamb below (I guess I can relate...I have red hair too).

These two (my reddish lamb and another with reddish legs) were definitely interested in me, and the camera...so it was easier to get pictures of them than the rest of the lambs running around like crazy! There was a really cute black lamb that I wanted to get a picture of...but he was uncooperative.

So, it seems like spring really is on its way! (Finally!)

march vegetables

2008-03-05T07:50:00.006-05:00

We got our March CSA box last weekend, and I'm happy that we got 8 pounds of carrots and 8 pounds of beets! I am falling behind a little bit on the potatoes...they are gorgeous potatoes, but it is hard for us (a family of 2) to eat 10 pounds of potatoes in a month! I can hardly wait any longer for spring to come...and spring produce. Somewhere beneath the snow there are wild leeks in the woods behind my house, and morel-hunting to be done...and all those wonderful spring salad greens that are probably starting to grow in greenhouses as we speak. We have two more months of winter CSA vegetables, but I bet we will start getting some early spring produce next month...I hope! It is rainy and windy today, and just generally bleak outside. Not a very likely day for me to be thinking of spring...but I guess it is the kind of day that makes me long for spring!

some alpaca spinning

2008-03-03T07:32:00.005-05:00

I am amassing quite the collection of handspun yarn, and I really need to start knitting with some of it! For some reason, spinning has been very therapeutic to me lately so I've been spending more time spinning than anything else.

These two yarns are from amazing batts I purchased from Loop. The brown yarn was spun from batts called "Butterscotch Sundae." It is three colors of baby alpaca: Dark brown, light brown, and white, topped off with some gold tussah silk. I love what silk does to yarn...the beautiful glowing quality that it gives. The brown skeins are spun pretty fine...a little heavier than true laceweight yarn, and I have no plans for it yet.

The green skein below is from Loop batts named "Sour Apple." It is a blend of 50% gray and green alpaca with 50% green bamboo and a touch of tussah silk and silk noil. It is a silky, drapey, and strong light worsted weight yarn...and I love the color! For some reason I think it would make a beautiful throw pillow cover. I was thinking of using it as the weft in a piece of woven fabric that I could make into the front of a pillow cover. My thought is that it would be really pretty aside my birch forest pillow on the bed that will (someday) be home to my quilt.

lucky

2008-02-26T11:32:00.004-05:00

Oh, how I love good mail! This amazing pack of cards was printed by Kaija of Paperiaarre, and I actually won them in a giveaway she had on her blog. I am so happy that I won, because I am typically not a very lucky person! I really love her work...I have had my eye on this journal of hers on etsy for months now, and wish that I could justify the expense. I also love her bird-in-a-circle motif and was so happy that the tag she attached to the cards I won had this image on it. Imagine a coptic-bound journal with the bird-in-circle motif printed on front...hmmm...that would be amazing. Maybe someday!

I guess this mail is lucky too, but I had to pay for this bit of luck! Not quite as good as winning something...but Pigeonroof Studios' rovings are so hard to come by that it still feels lucky when I manage to get my hands on them. These two are 80% merino, 20% tussah silk...the inner braid is colorway "bitter orange," and the outer braid is colorway "bark." I love how the two different colorways coordinate with each other, and I can't wait to spin them! I've been doing a lot of spinning lately, so I'll be posting some of my handspun yarn soon...

my first quilt!

2008-02-23T17:02:00.007-05:00

I am very proud of myself that I pieced my first quilt over the past couple days! I can't believe that I actually made something so substantial (and so pretty). I never expected that everything would line up so well! I guess I just really didn't think that I could do this, but I'm glad I bit the bullet and did it anyway.

It's a stacked coins quilt that I made according to the instructions in Last Minute Patchwork and Quilted Gifts...I LOVE the oranges and yellows in this quilt from the book (pictured below), but I was inspired by the fabric designed by Lara Cameron of Kirin & Co., so I went with a blue-green-brown color scheme instead so I could use some of those fabrics in the quilt.

The top (and bottom) pictures, which were taken with a flash, actually make the blues in Lara's fabric look much brighter than they actually are. The picture below, taken without a flash, is more true to color (although it is fuzzy!). I used three of the fabrics from Kirin & Co., including my very favorite birch forest fabric, which I have talked about before. The rest of the fabrics I chose to coordinate, but not stand out too much...I wanted to real focus to be on the ginkgo and birch fabrics. I am really happy with how all the fabrics worked together. I love the brighter green fabric because it adds so much brightness, and the little tiny birds, and the grass fabric too...I pretty much love them all, which is good!

The quilt is around 65 inches long and 52 inches wide, so it is a good size and will hopefully someday go on a twin bed. Now I just have to figure out what I am going to do about getting it quilted. I've already decided that I will NOT be hand quilting this particular quilt...I think it would take forever, and I don't have that kind of patience right now. So either I will machine quilt it myself, or I will have it professionally machine quilted. I think I'll probably go with the last option because I'm a little daunted by the prospect of quilting it myself...maybe some day I'll work up to that, but for now I'm just so proud that I managed to piece the quilt, that I think I'll let someone else quilt it.

Update! After 24 hours of mulling over how to have this thing quilted (and asking a friend in the area how I would even go about having that done), I think I might try to quilt it myself...it could be a disaster, but it seems like it might be worth a try!

handspun hemp washcloths

2008-02-17T13:01:00.004-05:00

About six or seven years ago I made my first batch of these handspun hemp exfoliating washcloths...I gave one to my sister and one to a friend. In the past year or so, I visited these two recipients and happily noticed that the washcloths are still in use! So recently, when I was going through my stash of yarn and spinning fiber and found two little packets of hemp fiber from Habu Textiles, I pulled them out and started spinning.

Spinning hemp is no walk in the park. I spin because I love the tactile qualities of merino, alpaca, and silk. In fact, I'm so spoiled these days that I don't spin anything but the very softest most luxurious fibers...probably because my time for spinning is so few and far between, so I want to make the most of it. Hemp is coarse and stringy and clumpy, and the only reason I tolerated spinning it was the promise of some really cool little washcloths at the end. I spun with a little bowl of water next to me, and I periodically dipped my drafting hand into the water so I could smooth out the fibers as I spun. I ended up with a fairly fine (though not as fine as my first foray into spinning hemp so many years ago) two-ply hemp yarn.

Exfoliating hemp washcloths are best done in a lace pattern, so I turned to Barbara Walker's A Treasury of Knitting Patterns and picked out three patterns. I aimed for enough repeats to give me an approximately 8.5-9 inch square washcloth. The top washcloth is 4 repeats of "Shell Lace" (p. 209), the one in the picture above is four repeats of "Fern or leaf-patterned lace" (p. 208), and the washcloth nearest the bar of soap is five repeats of "Vine Lace" (p. 218). I added a garter stitch border on all sides of each washcloth. I knit these on US size 3 knitting needles.

Knitting with hemp is a little like knitting with twine (i.e. not very pleasant), but it actually softens as you knit with it. Also, I threw the washcloths in the washing machine and they came out even softer. So the cloths are the perfect texture for gently exfoliating, and will definitely not be scratchy on the skin at all.

Two of these are staying in my own household this time, and the third will be a gift (along with a bar of amazing soap) for my friend Jen who just defended her master's thesis. By the way, the bamboo charcoal soap pictured above is from Purusha, who quite possibly makes the best soap I have ever used.

sugar high

2008-02-13T08:31:00.004-05:00

As promised, Adam made me my favorite dessert on Saturday afternoon. I love lemon bars more than anything. When we lived in Portland, Oregon, I often went out of my way on my walk home just so I could buy a lemon bar. I also think I've tried every lemon bar in the city and could probably tell you where to get the best one!

Half of the pan disappeared by the end of the day on Saturday. We slowed down a little bit after that, but I ate the last little sliver of lemon bar on Tuesday morning for breakfast. Adam said that I ate nearly the entire pan by myself, and I actually think he might be right. I looked at the recipe and realized that in the span of two and a half days I probably ate over a cup and a half of sugar and over a stick of butter. That's just disgusting. But they're sooooo good!

Here is the recipe, which we have adapted from a little recipe card we picked up at Penzey's Spices. We've tried a lot of lemon bar recipes, and this one is exceptional.

1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
2/3 c. powdered sugar
pinch of salt
1 1/2 sticks cold butter, cut into pieces
3 eggs
1 1/2 c. sugar
3 T. all-purpose flour
1/3 c. fresh lemon juice
1 t finely grated lemon peel
powdered sugar for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. In a medium bowl, mix the first three ingredients. Rub the butter into the flour mixture (or use a pastry cutter or food processor) until it is crumbly. Press into an ungreased 9x13 inch pan and bake for about 20 minutes (until very lightly golden). While the crust is baking, beat the eggs until foamy, and add the sugar, flour, lemon juice, and lemon peel. Beat until well combined. Remove the crust from the oven, increase the oven temperature to 350 degrees. Pour the filling over the crust and bake about 15 minutes. When cool, sprinkle with powdered sugar.

baby surprise jacket

2008-02-11T14:05:00.001-05:00

I finally finished my first "Baby Surprise Jacket" by Elizabeth Zimmerman. It took a while because I ran out of yarn and had to track down another ball...it is a closeout yarn from Webs, Elsebeth Lavold Classic, and I thought I might run out, so I checked their stock and found that they had over 100 balls of this color (dark teal) and I figured I'd be fine. Well, when I did run out of yarn, I checked again and it was completely gone!! I called them, and miraculously they managed to scrape up a third ball of the yarn, so I was saved.

I chose the little pewter flower buttons because the jacket is for a little girl who will be born this May and I think the baby's mom will like them. I really enjoyed knitting this little sweater, and I love how it turned out...it is way cuter than my photos suggest (hard to photograph!). It's really nice because it is all knit in one piece, which makes for an easy and pretty mindless project. This is such a satisfying pattern, and I think I'll definitely be making more of these.

homemade granola

2008-02-09T09:38:00.000-05:00

I really love the recipes on Orangette...everything I have made so far has been really excellent. I'm actually currently addicted to French-style Carrot Salad and I always add a peeled grated raw beet to the salad, which is a delicious addition. Since I discovered that salad, the carrots from our monthly winter CSA boxes are always the first things we run out of.

Yesterday, I made Orangette's Daily Granola. I decided to make it as written, because I've never made granola before and because reading the post makes you believe that it is the most perfectly wonderful granola in the world. I was skeptical because I'm not a huge fan of sesame seeds, but I added them anyway. This granola really is excellent, and addictive too...it is now all over the floor because I couldn't resist scooping up handfuls of it and shoving it into my mouth. Adam, our primary household cereal eater, also gave it a huge thumbs up. It has the perfect balance of sweeetness, and tastes slightly fruity because of the apple sauce, which I would never have thought to add to granola. I'm not a huge cereal person, but this morning I happily devoured my bowl of this granola with milk and sliced bananas.

river cottage

2008-02-07T08:35:00.000-05:00

I got this cookbook for Christmas, and have been slowly perusing it...I just have to say that it is unlike ANY cookbook I have ever seen. Actually, the recipes part of the cookbook is the least exciting thing about the book, although I would guess that the recipes are also very good (I haven't made anything yet, but I have made a couple excellent dishes from the River Cottage website)...what is truly remarkable is that this book is almost a guide to the production of food. There are not only sections on how to buy produce and meat, but also how to grow vegetables, choose varieties for flavor, freeze vegetables, choose a breed of pig or cow to raise, dry-cure your own bacon, bottle-rear orphan lambs, kill a chicken, smoke fish, and forage for wild greens. And much more too, of course.

Jenn from Fat Rooster Farm has the flu, so I'm not heading out there to work today...which is unfortunate because I am out of perfect Fat Rooster eggs. Actually, I bought a half-dozen of local though mass-produced eggs last week in case I ran out of FR eggs before Thursday came along, and this morning I ate the last of the FR eggs and one of the mass-produced eggs. I just have to say that when I cracked the eggs into the bowl to scramble them, the difference was shocking. The FR egg had a large orange yolk and a firm white, and the mass-produced egg had a tiny pale yellow yolk and a runny white...I guess I'll have to head out to FR this weekend or Monday to get my fix. And we'll use those mass-produced eggs for some lemon squares that Adam promised to make me this weekend.

We got about 5 inches of snow overnight, and it looks like good snow too...not the wet snow we got yesterday. This means that I will probably head out cross-country skiing for the first time in weeks. I'm really happy about that!

birch throw pillow

2008-02-04T09:01:00.001-05:00

I have to admit that I am a little obsessed with this birch fabric. I first came across the birch pattern as letterpress note cards (I love letterpress cards)...the cards were a collaboration between Lynn of Satsuma Press, who did the letterpress printing, and Lara of Kirin & Co, who designed the birch scene, and I snatched up a few cards with the intention of framing one of them (still working on that!). Well...then I discovered that Lara has fabric printed in this birch pattern, and I just had to have some....even though I have barely sewed anything in my life! My fabric arrived from Australia late last week and over the weekend I whipped up this little throw pillow. It is 14x14", and has a natural colored linen/cotton fabric on the back of the pillow and the birch fabric (which is also linen/cotton) on the front. It is not perfect...my corners could have been done a bit more professionally, but I am totally thrilled with this pillow. And it definitely satisfies my desire to have something made in this fabric that I can look at all the time.