Wedding Wraps for a Distraction

So I have been knitting furiously to keep myself from going nuts waiting to hear about the job for which I interviewed. I will admit my focus is better this week than waiting hear last week. Last Friday I found out I was in the top two and I am supposed to find out today one way or another, but it is nearly five and no news. It's alright, I'll lean on the "no news is good news" phrase and keep my patience growing.

In all this waiting I have completed the second bridesmaid wrap and have 4 more inches to go on the third. I have also found that I very much prefer twisting the fringe to braiding it. Braiding takes about 4 hours and twisting takes more like 2 hours - if I remember right.

The pattern is the Phiaro Scarf from Interweave and here is the Ravelry link. For these wraps I am knitting the bamboo satin on US 5 needles. I am casting on 180 stitches using the long tail method and knitting until the fabric measures 17 inches.

We will be wearing the wraps with these great dresses from Target.

If I keep knitting at this rate I should be able to get them done before we move on from the valley.

Please excuse the bra straps in the back photo and my odd expression in the other. It was late and I just wanted to show you all how great it looks across the shoulders.

Mail!

Yesterday the mail was very exciting!

First of all we received a beautiful wedding invitation. Lovely handmade paper and earth tones.

Also we received a sweet birth announcement of a college friend.

And lastly, I got this fabulous skein of sock yarn. I claimed it on Ravelry and offered some of my handspun up in exchange. It is just the color I was hoping it would be and it finally arrived all the way from Australia.

Of course, I can't cast of for socks until I make some more wrap progress (update later).

This weekend is the SLV Folk Art and Fiber Festival it should be a lovely time, have a good one!

I have returned.... and made pizza

I have returned from my journey to Ohio and back. Overall it was a very nice trip. Rather exhausting work, but we really enjoyed seeing family and friends - and being back in the lush mid-west. Good news, the van's air conditioning didn't stop working until we go back to Colorado, thankfully.

I left my flash drive at home so I can't share any knitting updates so instead I'll share with you the amazing pizza I made last night. My usual pizza making involves honey wheat crust with pesto sauce. This is all well and good, but sometimes you just need some tomato saucy white crust pizza.

Start by getting the dough rising. I used Smitten Kitchen's Stand-by Crust. I'll admit I was afraid it wasn't going to rise for me, but it was just testing my patience. I had to wait the full hour as instructed.

Once you have the crust rising then get started on the homemade sauce. I have shared that recipe before, but now I can personally recommend it. I barely even tweeked it. I just added a little extra garlic. So easy and so good. If a bit spicy isn't your thing then you might want to reduce the red pepper flakes. Also, I had a pint of sauce left over from making one pizza.

While the sauce simmers and the dough rises you can prep your toppings. I used a poblano pepper, hard salami, kalmata olives, and fresh mozzarella.

Seriously, wonderful. It definately hit the spot for me, and David kept cutting one piece after another so... give it a try.

Side note: while I was picking up my pizza toppings at the store I came across lychees!!!! This was my absolute favorite fruit when I spent time in Mozambique and I have never been able to find fresh ones in States, until now. The ones I found were at Safeway and are a product of Mexico, but I bet Meijer would have them as well. If you've never tried them go get a few - enjoy!

Weekend Treats

This weekend my kitchen and I had some bonding time. Dishes and treats made this weekend include: pasta salad, nectarine jam, waffles, and chocolate layer cake.

The pasta salad was your run-of-the-mill type salad. The pasta used was orzo and I tossed it with feta cheese, kalamata olives, tomato, and homemade Greek dressing.

Now let's talk jam. I work/live in a non-for-profit and we are often given expired or expiring food. These nectarines fit that description so we decided to whip up some jam.

This was the first time I used "natural pectin" by cooking tart apples and lemons. I am fairly happy with the result. The jam is definately less solid than jams I have made using store bought pectin, but not watery.

The flavor of this jam is very fresh and the color is beautiful! Yet another happy canning experience.

We'll skip over most of the waffle details since they are generally uninteresting. But this is the first time I made waffles using the recipe my mom always used from my ABC Gold Medal Flour Cookbook. The most interesting difference is beating the egg whites to stiff peak state.

Moving on to chocolate layer cake. Today is a dear friend's birthday and so I decided she must have cake. Her choice was chocolate chocolate, that is always David's choice too. Since I am a high altitude baker I picked up my copy of The Joy of Cooking to find the right recipe.

I decided on chocolate fudge cake - but I didn't make the recommend frosting. I used all of their altitude corrects except I forgot to sour my milk. I'm glad to say my forgetfulness did not make a difference.

For frosting I made your standard powdered sugar, butter, cocoa, and vanilla frosting.

I am now going to go share a piece with my friend because the work day is over, hooray! And on a side note, please send up your prayers for me tomorrow. I will be driving some and interviewing for a paralegal position that I think I really want! Thanks!

New Etsy Item

Today I thought I'd share with you the latest addition to my Etsy shop. I know it seems odd to add alpaca mitts to my shop in June, but hey, it is winter somewhere, right?

I designed these mitts quite awhile back, but just recently wrote out the pattern.

I plan to offer the pattern for sale at some point this summer so you can gear up for the fall.

Featherweight Cardigan Saga

Before you ask, no. I didn't accomplish yesterday's goal to finish one mitt so we are just going to move on...

The Featherweight Cardigan by Hannah Fettig and published on knitbot. This is the beauty that I knit twice. Grab a cup of tea and sit back to hear the tale of the twice knit.

In early May I decided I would knit a white(ish) cardigan for a wedding we were attending the first weekend in June. Not only would it be cute, but it would make about three more of my "dressy" outfits more versatile.

I knew it would take awhile because it is for summer so I wanted to knit it with a finer yarn. I scouted out my local yarn shop and found some squishy merino silk mix in lace weight that was perfect for this project. I decided to get one skein since I wasn't sure how far using a double strand on size 6 needles would get me.

I followed the pattern pretty much to the letter, except for the part where you are supposed to check you gauge. I mean, I looked at it a little, but not in depth. I just kept knitting away. At one point I thought, "Sheesh, these arm holes are rather large." But when I would try it on I'd convince myself that somehow it was going to look just fine.

This knitting in uncertainty continued till the end of May. I started to realize my deadline for finishing this cardigan, it was a Thursday. I needed to pack it on the following Tuesday night so I needed to finish it by that Sunday night (so it would have time to dry from being blocked).

Because of this realization I decided I better knit fast and it looked I was going to need another skein for the last inch of the collar. So I headed over to the yarn shop.

For reasons beyond the control of the actual yarn shop owner, the people watching the shop had decided to close early. I thought no problem, I'll just come back tomorrow (Friday) and get my skein - I looked through the window to be sure it was there and it was.

Well, I had forgotten about the Pagosa Spring Fiber Festival that was starting on Friday night and going through the weekend. When I got to the shop on Friday I realized my error as quite a bit of yarn that was there the night before was taken out of the shop for the fest - including the skein I needed.

I knew that if I pulled out the entire cardigan and reknit it so that it wasn't too big I would probably have exactly enough yarn to finish it, but I thought "there is NO way I have time for that, I'm leaving in 4 days!".

What to do? I thought just maybe they yarn hadn't yet been taken to over the mountain just yet. So I got out the phone book (first time in years) and looked up the home number of my lys owner. From there I got her cell and caught her on the road.

Let's just say she is AMAZING! She stopped by my office on her way through town and we opened up every bag of yarn on her truck till we found the skein I needed! Seriously. She saved my knitting!

With my new skein in hand I was ready to finish my cardigan over the weekend. And I did! I stayed up till midnight on Sunday finishing the collar (why did I do a sewn bind off?!?!). I tried it on and didn't like it at all. It didn't fit right - the arms were way to big and it was really wide.

In my infinite wisdom I decided to check the gauge now that the project was complete. Yeah. As you wiser knitters know my row gauge was off by a few as were my stitches. Simply, I had knit about 18 too many rows for the arms.

This meant I needed to rip out the collar, the sleeves, and the body all the way back to where my sleeves should have ended. I went to bed then debating this ripping out - should I just wear it big for the wedding? Could I really re-knit it in time for the wedding? I laid there for an hour then got up and ripped it all out till about 2:30am.

Monday I knit the body. Tuesday I knit the collar. Wednesday (at the airport) I knit the arms. Thursday night I blocked it and Friday I wore it. Mission accomplished.

Now I have an entire skein left so I can knit another one or a similar cardigan and since it is white I can dye it whatever color I want! I do really like how this fits and I really like the texture of the yarn. It falls open a bit with tank tops, but over all it is a fabulous design!

Spinning Distractions

I thought this might happen... I got burned out on my knitting projects. Yup - I know that seems hard to believe. I knit three pairs of baby socks in two days and re-knit an entire cardigan (double lace weight) in three and half days and that was all within a week so that has left me with three projects on needles.

The first one that is still on the needles is Juls' sweater which is coming along nicely. I put on the button bands last night so that leaves the collar and sleeves. I'm not feeling at a stand still on this projects, actually it is currently my most intriguing knit.

The second project still on the needles are some fingerless mitts that I am doing for a fabulous fiber trade. I'm knitting up a friends black and green hand spun in trade from some very nice wool. This is motivating because I am currently on a huge spinning kick, but at the same time the mitts aren't getting much attention.

Lastly, the third project that will be in continuous progress for awhile are the bridesmaid wraps/shawls I'm working on. I'll give some more details and photos on them later, but I'll just say there are five of them that need to be done by September 12th. I'm about a quarter of the way through the first one - uh yeah I need to focus a little.

So, as I mentioned I'm on a spinning kick. I have been spinning some local Colorado wool and am near that highly gratifying plying stage. The above photo is of some hand dyed super wash wool that I spun and plied by spindle - it took me awhile to get through the plying on my Navajo spindle but I did it! T

he other reason I am pretty excited about spinning right now is that I realized that my wheel savings are over the half way mark! So I feel much closer to getting my own wheel (photo link is a pretty one ganked from flickr)! Only $200 more to go!

Okay... my goal today: finish one fingerless mitt before the softball game!