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Archive for the ‘knitting’ Category

food of the south

Monday, May 17th, 2010

It is no secret that my favorite thing about the South is the weather. This feature goes hand-in-hand with the growing season. Last Tuesday we went to our first crawdad/crayfish/crawfish/mudbug boil, and it was super tasty.



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Crawfish can best be described as mini-lobsters. To prepare crawfish, you throw a bunch of live ones into seasoned boiling water for a few minutes. Then the deconstruction begins, separating the head from the tail. There are pincers, but they are too small to open without tools. Ty managed to get one opened and the meat was light like crab meat. After separating the head from the tail, the optional step is to suck the juices out of the head. Nintey-nine percent of the edible part of the crawfish is in the tail. That segment is encased in shrimp-like segments, but they usually have to be cracked open. After eating dozens of crawfish I had a slight bruise/bleed on my thubmb with a freshly cut thumbnail since the fresh skin was exposed.


The latest issue of the Oxford American
takes on food in the South. The climate makes the place, and the growing season, available ingredients, and preservation techniques make the food.

My garden has kicked it into gear. I’ve got tiny yellow squash, zucchini, egg plant, peppers, and tomatoes all ready to explode in the next month.



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male scarf

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

There aren’t very many good knitting patterns on the internet for masculine scarves. There also aren’t many days of winter left here in The South. Last weekend I had the chance to finish a new scarf for Ty. He wanted a shorter and thinner scarf that the ones he owned.

I started doing a 3×3 rib, but the rib really made the width too thin. I converted the middle ribs to seed stitch, and widened the scarf. The thought was to make it thickest at the middle part. That part should cover him from beard to jacket opening. The two tails should wrap around the back of his neck and tuck back into the jacket in the front. It needed to be a scarf that would work with only a sports coat for his early morning walks to school.

Model picture forthcoming, until then the file cabinet and the violet will have to show it off.



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If anyone has some scarf-making to do, I’d be happy to derive the pattern, but only if someone wants it.

Finished Sweater

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Finished the short sleeved fair isle sweater from the Vogue 2009 Holiday issue.



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Notes on this sweater: two rounds of seed stitch is not adequate. Two rounds with a long-tail cast on makes all of the cuffs really flippy. I added a round or two in places. On the neck, when I added a round or two, I continued the raglan decreases every other row. Chart 2 is incorrect. Columns 16 and 28 on row 14 show stitches in light blue. It should be light blue on row 12 instead of row 14. Row fourteen stitches in columns 16 and 28 should be dark blue to complete the cross motif.

A sentimental note on this sweater. I purchased the yarn and the pattern with a gift certificate from my husband while we were on my birthday trip to Fort Smith, AR. The green I purchased for the sweater appeared almost brown when I used it. I needed something closer to a lime green. Just then, I remembered a scrap ball of lime green I had from a friend who passed away in 2008. The tiny ball of green yarn worked perfectly!

Short Sleeved Fair Isle Sweater

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Back from my blogging break with fun, crafty updates.

I’ve been working on the Short Sleeved Fair Isle Sweater from the Holiday 2009 issue of Vogue Knitting. The body of the sweater took almost all football season. I would work on it when Ty and I would go to Gusano’s Pizza to watch the Denver Broncos. (Actually, I started working on it right before their losing streak!)

Here are the pictures from when we got back from Nebraska:


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Since then I’ve had some time to get the color work done, and that is the fun part:



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I’m on the last line of color work now, and I hope to get the neck done, and even block it tonight.

Today I also got outside. It has started to get warmer, so I ripped out a bunch of tomato cages. I’m also trying to figure out my seed order for spring! Seed savers looks like a really cool site, and they even have heirloom soybeans that Monsanto doesn’t own yet.

WIP:Teva Durham’s Ballet T-Shirt

Friday, April 17th, 2009

I’ve been super busy lately, but I had some time to start Teva Durham’s Ballet T-shirt from the knitting Loop-d-Loop book.



Cotton has never been my favorite medium, but is necessary in the hot, humid environment Arkansas wields from spring to fall. I’m really enjoying this work in progress. I’m working on extending the length of the top to the mid-hip so it works with the lower-cut pants of the late 2000s/late oughts.



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I’m using Cascade Yarns “Sierra” in color #03, an off-white.

feeling…different….

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

The cold is still around, but I’m not suffering from *it* anymore, I’m suffering from the cure. Insomnia is one of the side effects. It is good for my knitting blog!

Managed to catch up on all of my raverly.com posts. Even took a look at some beautiful sweaters, and bookmarked some for future knitting. The problem is that sweaters only sound like a good idea around here in mid-November to mid-February. The next pattern I develop should be a sweater vest, as I’ve found myself short on yarn, and I like to be able to wear some sort of knitted item 6 months out of the year.

Here are the initial pictures from Ty’s Denver Broncos Color Themed sweater vest: Mangyle. He tried it on right after I gave it to him, so the undershirt doesn’t match. I’ll get better pictures soon.



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I was hoping hoping hoping to find some sort of software development job on raverly.com, but unfortunately, it seems the site only has two paid coders and the rest of the work is volunteer.

Currently applied for a few tech jobs that don’t entirely match my skill set. We’ll see what comes of those. Also in the doctor’s office yesterday, I struck up a conversation with two ladies that work for the top two tech employers in town. One had bad news about the established company, and how they don’t really need as many people right now. The other lady had weird news, saying the newer company hadn’t even hired the actual tech-workers yet, only sales and call center people.

the nighttime sniffling sneezing coughing aching stuffy head fever so you can rest medicine

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

I’ve been down and out with sinusitis, so the blog has to wait sometimes.

Two Christmas gifts that has made sickness easier:



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The first picture is the awesome rug Tyrone gave me for Christmas. It is thick and beautiful and intricate. It keeps my feet off of the cold tile, along with the awesome suede Minnetonka Moccasins we got from Ty’s parents. Ty’s father managed to get two pairs of slippers for Christmas, and Ty implied that they shared the same shoe size. We both ended up getting a pair and I love them.

They remind me of my Grandma Kresha. She had super wide feet, and was unable to find shoes to fit her later in life. My mother will have to confirm this, but I think she had size 13.5 EEE feet. She’d have to special order shoes. When her shoes wore out, she would go around in her moccasin slippers! I reminded my father of this, and he reminded me that he had pair of leather ones he wore for many years until he ruined them by wearing them outside.

Herein lies the beauty of having two families at Christmas! One side spurs ideas of the best gifts to give the other side. Luckily my father does not read this, and if he did, he really doesn’t worry about ruined Christmas surprises.

Other thing going on
-still applying for jobs in the Conway/Little Rock area.
-working on a submission for the Summer 09 issue of Knitty.com. I thought my deadline was January 15th, but it’s March 15th. WHEW!

back to crafting, the labyrinth rug.

Monday, September 1st, 2008

I made my mother a labyrinth rug last Christmas, and I wanted one for the tower. Right now I’m in the middle of one.



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I started it earlier this summer to use up some yarn scraps. Now I’m waiting on some very special yarn scraps to finish it up.



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the south and artsy-crafty websites in the fall

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

The students are back in school, but here in Arkansas, it still feels like July. I’m told that 80F days in August in Arkansas are unseasonably cool, but I’m also told people mow their lawns until December.

Also, the ground is so warm here, it is hard to tell the hot water from the cold water. In fact, the hot water runs cooler than the cold for the first few seconds. We’ve got a faucet that is set up backwards, so I’m constantly trying to switch back and forth to figure out which side is the hot water.

Last night Tyrone and I went to a couple of school gatherings. Even though it has been cooler out, the super humidity is still in effect. I still don’t understand wearing pants and sleeves out into that weather unless it is your mosquito armor.

My fear is that we’re still months away from fall around here. Luckily, fall has arrived in Sweden, and I can watch. One of my favorite crafty blogs, smosch.com, features elegant pictures as well as fun knitting and crocheting projects from Sweden. Everything Sandra does is classy with a little bit of cute. Her latest project, wrist worms, are so cool that they sell out the minute they are posted to her etsy shop.

If you are also yearning for fall, I encourage to visit my friend Jen’s etsy shop, where she has a hat and gauntlets for sale. She is soon to have more.

Finally, I found a shop that sells the newsprint yarn, for $30/30 yards. She frequently sells out. If I get this spinning thing down, I may try to do some of that.

hand spun newsprint

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

A few days ago, there was a tutorial on spinning newsprint into a type of yarn on the greenupgrader.com website.

The spools of newsprint on the site seem to have a really delicate yarn on them. Although I didn’t know what I was going to make with the yarn, I wanted to make some.

First I needed a spindle to spin with. After looking all over the internet for instructions, I put a hybrid of instructions together to write an instructable for a spindle. If you’ve never heard of it before, instructables.com is an open-source site for patterns, instructions, and how-to’s on almost anything you can dream up.



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Here is my instructable on constructing a Drop Spindle. On the last page, there is a video from a crafty spinning website, The Art of Megan, that shows you how to spin wool.

After I had my new spindle, I started spinning. I noticed that the 1/2 inch strips of newspaper were creating a thicker yarn than what the tutorial indicated.



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Thinking that my brand new spinning technique could be flawed a little bit, I kept spinning, trying to get the yarn a little thinner, but it kept tearing off on those attempts. Also, in cutting the newspaper, my strips could have been a little wider than 1/2 inch. Next time I spin newsprint, I’ll measure out an exact 1/2 inch for the strips.



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I ended up getting a couple of spindlefulls of yarn from one section of the newspaper. One warning, my fingers turned black really quickly. The ink does rub off on your fingers, and then when knitting, on the tips of the needles. Amazingly the newsprint does not look smudged after spinning.



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I knitted up this swatch on size 13 needles. It isn’t the most enjoyable stuff to knit, and I did get two tears in the swatch. One tear stuck back together after being slightly moistened, and the other just wants to completely unravel. Both of the tears happened in previously knitted rows, when I was working rows above the place of the tear.



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Even though spun newsprint isn’t a perfect medium, the finished texture is amazing. I’m not quite sure when or how to use it since it needs to stay away from water. It would be good for a semi-transparent room divider, or a thick platter/place setting for dry goods only. I can’t get the stitch down small enough to obscure any stuffing behind the material.



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How would you use hand spun newsprint?