February 2010

merely overwhelmed my resolve. You’re probably thinking I’m talking about three yarn-y goodies. No, not today. It’s cold and raining and running the oven is the best way to keep warm. Therefore, yesterday’s dough became today’s big pile o’ cookies:

I have sampled each kind and they are great. The lighter ones are Rum Spice cookies and the darker ones are non-sandwiched Chocolate-Pistachio Sandwich cookies. The chocolate ones are indeed wonderful by themselves so I am not making the frosting to make them sandwich cookies. Note to self: need to crush the pistachios a lot smaller next time. I used a rolling pin to crush them and some bits were still large. The bigger hunks simply fell off the dough and skittered about the kitchen when I sliced off cookies.

Of course, chasing those rogue pistachios gave me an opportunity to practice my sweeping. Does this count as today’s exercise? Probably not. Although when Homer and Marge were Olympic curlers last week this was how Marge warmed up.

Back on track, I did say triumvirate, didn’t I, so here’s the third thing for today. This is a recipe called Milk Chocolate Crunchies that I got from my American grandmother. She and I hoover up a batch of these every time I visit her. Mostly while playing dice and card games.

These go quickly, under half an hour from start to finish, excluding cooling time.

Step 1: Put 2 cups (12 ounces) of chocolate chips and half a cup of peanut butter into a double boiler:

Her recipe calls for milk chocolate chips but I like my chocolate darker (”come to the dark side… we have cookies”) so I went with semi-sweet chips. The peanut butter can be creamy or chunky. I used creamy, half regular peanut butter and half honey peanut butter.

Step 2: Heat until melted:

Step 3: Add 2 cups of quick oats and 1/4 to 1/3 cup slivered almonds. I used toasted slivered almonds. If you keep your oats or almonds in the refrigerator or freezer, you need to let them come to room temperature before tossing them in the chocolate.

Step 4: Stir until well-coated. Turn off the heat on your double-boiler.

Step 5: Drop by tablespoons on wax paper or a cookie sheet. I use cookie sheets. The chocolate is too hot to handle with bare hands so I use a 2-spoon method to scoop and shape the crunchies before dropping them on the sheet. Resist the urge to taste the very hot melted crunchie base. Athk me how I learned thith.

Here are half my crunchies, hot off the spoon. I have no idea why I spaced them. They don’t expand:

Step 6: Put your cookie sheets in a cool location (in my house, that’s anywhere but the top of the oven) so your crunchies can harden. While waiting for that, use the non-sharp utensil of your choice to scrape the remaining few cooled chocolate bits out of your double boiler. Lick the utensil. Yum. Note: this also reduces clean-up.

Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator. Then do a few extra minutes of step aerobics.

Today was all about errands and dough. Besides the usual weekend errands I ran an extra one to pick up buttons for the fuchsia sweater that I finally, finally did the finishing work on this morning and heel reinforcement thread for my socks in progress. Here’s the sweater, unblocked, with buttons not yet sewn on:

The pink and purple buttons ImagiKnit had didn’t quite work so I went with yellow ones that pop nicely. And even though Stitches West is next week and I’m saving my money for that, I ended up not leaving the shop without a bit of yarn. It went with me to the bank and the library, then posed for this photo:

That’s Malabrigo Lace for those of you who were wondering.

I realize you’ve been seeing a lot of green, blue, and brown projects here lately. I didn’t even notice I was doing this until I saw all my projects lined up in Ravelry. So for a change of color, I’ll show you the little socks that also got done this week:

Pattern: own (I cast on 28 for the smaller sock and 36 for the larger one, then made a sock)
Yarn: Zitron Trekking XXL Sport, 75% wool, 25% nylon, color 1454
Needles: US size 1
Size: infant and bigger infant
Started 1/29 and finished 2/11/2010

There rest of today was devoted to dough. I turned out a loaf of shredded wheat whole wheat bread and made dough logs for chocolate cookies rolled in pistachios and rum spice cookies:

I plan to bake them tomorrow. I have no idea what possessed me to make so many cookies this weekend but they freeze and keep well so it’s not a problem. The chocolate ones are supposed to be sandwich cookies with a chocolate frosting between them but for the sake of my girlish figure I think I’ll stick with plain cookies. Plus I’ll have twice as many that way.

Tonight I have to work on my Stitches West homework. It won’t take very long.

The Jolly Green Giant will not get his socks because I have unraveled and started again, this time using a modified version of Little Arrowhead Lace, a pattern that I have also seen called Gull Wings. The sock and I went to the park today and looked at the garden of absent dahlias:

It was warm today, I’d say close to 70 even though the forecast was for 62. And there I was inappropriately warmly dressed because it was still only 61 indoors so I assumed it was colder outside and I couldn’t take off my sweater because what I was wearing under my shirt didn’t work. Sloppy dressing, even on the weekend, isn’t a good idea. So I took my 1.5-hour walk and took a shady break a couple of times to admire all the turtles out in every body of water. I only saw one turtle swimming; the rest were all sunning themselves on rocks and logs. They are probably just as happy as I am for a break in the rain. There was a huge crowd buying tickets outside the Academy of Sciences today so I didn’t go in. I was really looking forward to sitting and knitting in front of the coral reef tank but I don’t like to go when it’s super-crowded. Ah, well. Next time.

The sock and I walked over to see the poppies more closely instead:

Then we went home and relaxed with a beer and watched the biathlon and luge events on TV.

It’s been a while. And the reason for that is that here at MmmYarn I have had a whole bunch of knitting failure. Go figure. All these years of experience and this is where I am, at total knitting system collapse. It’s discouraging.

All right, before I get into all that, I guess I did do one thing right in the past month. I finally brought myself to finish the little hat that Mr. MmmYarn started last May, when he asked me to teach him to knit when he was practically crawling up the walls with boredom being cooped up all the time. I had him make a garter stitch band and then work in the round up the body. Last week I finished the last 7 rounds of the body and the crown and sewed that little seam at the band.

Pattern: Mr. MmmYarn’s own
Yarn: Mountain Colors Weaver’s Wool Quarters, color: Huckleberry (how very Nelson Munz)
Needles: size 6
Size: infant
Started 5/5/2009 and finished 2/2/2010

Matt always did have great taste in yarn and colors and his stitches are wonderfully even. He wanted to donate this to the hospital as a chemo cap but they won’t take this where I inquired so I am going to add it to the Afghans for Afghans pile. He would be OK with that.

How bad can the rest of it be, you ask? Here is the list.

The secret fuchsia pullover project is still in progress. Yes, still. I can’t believe it, either. I wove in all sleeve and body ends and made a neckline with facing. 4 times! The first time I had the decreases and increases reversed, increasing where I should have decreased and vice versa. So rip rip rip it went and I started again. And made the same mistake a second time. Gah! So out it went and this time I got the shaping right. Only now I had too many stitches on the neck and not enough on the body and everything was weirdly askew before I even noticed the problem. Out one more time. Do you want to see what I ended up with? It looks pretty good with its solid fuchsia lining:

So I guess not a total failure, but definitely a time-suck. Now it’s in the procrastination pile because I dislike putting buttonhole stitch around buttonholes. I am hopeless. That kid is getting bigger by the minute.

The little brown and blue double knitted hat that was coming along so slowly suddenly got faster when I got out of the double knitting part. The problem is my gauge toward the end of the pattern chart, where only a couple of stitches were in the pattern and the rest were all one solid color or another, is completely off the rest of the hat. It looks ridiculous and is sitting in the pile of things that need to be ripped and re-worked. I am only going to rip it to the point of major gauge change. The rest will come out in blocking.

Next up is sock failure. The first Froot Loop sock looks pretty good here, right?

Well, way way way too small for my foot. I worked about 6 inches of cuff before a try-on and that cuff will not go up over my heel. Or really anywhere near my heel. So I’ve cast on again with more stitches so I can put a separate purl stitch between each motif but the half inch I have done looks so big that I believe it might clothe the Jolly Green Giant. While he will look smashing in robin’s egg blue socks, I do want these to be my socks. I’m going to slog along for another couple of inches and if it’s still huge, I’ll redesign it to have a purl panel on the back of the leg. Or I’ll say the heck with it and make another sock with the gull wings pattern I’ve used before. We’ll see.

Bag failure is up next. The black Origami Bag is defying all attempts at being sewn together properly. It needs two little 5″ straight seams and my seams are crookeder than the squirrelly part of Lombard Street. Perhaps I’ll try drawing lines with a ruler and tailor’s chalk and see if I can manage to follow them. Or perhaps I will throw the darn thing in the garbage chute.

Non-knitting has been busy, too. The other things that kept me from writing here are more bank stuff (closing accounts for someone who is deceased is a long-term project) and I became an iPerson. I switched over to using our Mac computer because my little Windows computer is having several aggravating-but-not-fatal hardware problems that are more pricey to fix than the computer is worth. I do have Windows XP as a VMWare instance so I can keep Sweater Wizard and some of my card games and continue to play online Scrabble with my mom. There is a learning curve with the Mac: I keep using the wrong keyboard shortcuts and doing things I don’t mean to do. I will figure it out.

Oh, one more small thing is done. I managed a tiny sock. Yep, just one. It needs a mate. Sigh.