burgeonings

thorpe for isaac

2010-01-17T11:14:00.003-05:00

This little cutie is my nephew Isaac, wearing the hat I knit him for Christmas. The pattern is Thorpe, and the yarn is Malabrigo Worsted - the same yarn I used for Levi's blue hat. Time got the best of me and although I had intended to knit Isaac this hat way back in October, I ended up casting on on Christmas Eve and finishing on Christmas Day. Phew! Anyway, I love these pictures of him walking like an old pro - he looks so confident and adorable in his new blue hat!

holiday sweets

2009-12-30T10:12:00.004-05:00

Every year I have great intentions of baking and cooking holiday sweets as gifts, but until this year it has never happened. This year I did get a little carried away, but the sweets were well-received and resulted in family members hiding their stashes so they wouldn't have to share with everyone else! That, of course, (despite not exactly promoting the Christmas spirit) made me very happy.

I've mentioned before that I have never gone wrong with Orangette's recipes. I made my favorite granola, and these cookies, which I learned about here. I ate an entire batch of those cookies in about a week, and then had to make another batch for gifts. They have to be one of my favorite cookies ever.

Then I went a little crazy with candied citrus peel. This was on my list of things to make last year, but Levi's birth was on time and therefore citrus peel making never happened. I used this recipe, and did 2 grapefruits, 3 oranges, and 4 lemons. I boiled them all together and they still maintained their individual flavors. Also, I cut the grapefruit peels a little thicker before I started freaking out that I was leaving too much pith (and therefore cut the lemon and orange much thinner), and I actually ended up liking the texture of the grapefruit the best.

Making candied citrus peel is not a quick undertaking. Although it wasn't especially labor intensive, it was time intensive, but the results are incredible. I dipped half in bittersweet chocolate and left half plain. I did not have any suitable packaging and couldn't bear to package my citrus peel in zip-loc bags (!), so I sewed little pouches out of parchment paper. They ended up looking great, but one caveat is that the citrus peel will dessicate if it is not in an air-tight container, so I stored these little gift bags in zip-locs and instructed their recipients to do the same!

After almost 8 hours of citrus peel making, and with Levi down for a nap, I looked at Adam and said "do you think I would be crazy if I made homemade marshmallows right now?" Homemade marshmallows have been on my list of things to make since the December 2003 Martha Stewart Living came out, and then this post really inspired me. I used the instructions from the link on the Angry Chicken post and they turned out perfectly.

I dipped some in dark chocolate and sprinkled them with crushed walnuts for giving. Next year I want to make snowflake-shaped marshmallows and give them as gifts with homemade hot cocoa mix.

organic cotton washcloths

2009-12-19T10:03:00.005-05:00

I just love handknit washcloths. They are the best thing to have on your needles when you want a mindless project, and they are the perfect gift. I have made several in the past out of handspun hemp, but this time I didn't have time for spinning and instead used this amazing soft (and cheap!) organic cotton yarn. I used a lace pattern called "Elfin Lace" from Barbara Walker's Treasury of Knitting patterns and did enough repeats for an approximately 8" square washcloth. Each cloth took less than a half of a ball of the organic cotton yarn, meaning these beautiful little things cost less than $1.25 each in supplies!

Add a nice bar of soap, and you have a lovely little gift. It would have been great if I had time to make some homemade soap for these, but that did not happen this year. I recently saw this post from melissa of tiny happy, and it seems that she had the opposite problem...time for the soap-making but not the knitting!

I wrapped each washcloth in brown tissue paper, tied them with string, added a hemlock branch from our woods, and they're all ready to be given as holiday gifts!

one

2009-12-13T16:01:00.004-05:00

My baby turned one last Friday. It hardly seems possible that a year has past since this amazing sweet boy came into our lives. For the occasion, cake was made and devoured, friends came over to play, and owl-themed party favors were made.

I knit these tiny owls and put them on hair clips for the little girls and pins for the little boys.

I originally intended to make small versions of these as well, but in an especially enlightened moment I came up with the idea of making little owl bean bags instead. These are filled with organic popcorn and I will definitely be making more of them. I think Levi needs a set of 5 for tossing!

dodie's mittens

2009-12-03T13:33:00.003-05:00

This is another pair of May mittens, but this time I made them in October! Consequently I used more autumnal colors than my last pair of springy mittens. I made these for my mother-in-law for her birthday, which was back in October, but I just gave them to her this Thanksgiving. She is one of my few readers, so I thought I'd hold off on posting them until they were gifted.

Again I used Noro silk garden. I'm still not sure about Noro yarns...once again I had to split out several of the colors from the skein because I thought they were ugly and clashing. I am happy with the colors that remained though. The bright blues remind me of my mother-in-law (I don't know why!) and the oranges and browns are a touch of my preferred colors. Once again, an enjoyable pattern and a pretty final result!

hibiscus

2009-11-21T09:53:00.006-05:00

It has been a couple weeks since I have knit anything. I guess I needed a little break after the flurry of knitting I've done recently. During my knitting lull, I did manage to finish a spinning project. This skein of yarn is merino & soysilk and is soft and lustrous and gorgeous. The roving was dyed by the talented Pigeonroof Studios. It is part of their "luminosity project," which I was a little obsessed with for a while (and still am, but I am taking a break from buying spinning fiber). The colors are really deep and intense and I love yarn that has subtle variegations but is mostly a solid color.

I generally don't wear much pink and I'm racking my brain trying to figure out what I should knit with this very pink yarn. It really is beautiful though, with all the different shades of pink, and I have enough yarn (the skein is about 4 ounces, 457 yards) for a scarf or shawl or other medium-sized project. When I was pregnant with Levi, I went through a major pink phase as some weird response to finding out I was having a boy. Maybe I should hold onto this skein in case I find myself in a similar situation one of these days!

ishbel

2009-11-08T13:45:00.006-05:00

I've never had a triangular shawl before, but somewhere along the line three shawl patterns ended up on my "must knit" list. I like that small shawls can be worn like scarves and that they usually only take one skein of yarn. This shawl pattern is Ishbel, and I made it with a skein of green Malabrigo lace that I have had for a while. I had started knitting a scarf with it, but hadn't knit a single stitch on that scarf in over 2 years, so it was ripped out in favor of this project.

I have to say (now that I have my first triangular shawl) that I actually prefer the triangle shape to the typical long rectangular scarf. For some reason, to me it seems more versatile. My favorite things about this particular shawl are the scalloped edge and the amazing yarn. It is so soft and fine and I love the subtle variegations in the yarn. It feels really light around my neck and I didn't want to take it off after photographing it today, even though it was 60 degrees outside.

This was a really great fun pattern, a little addictive (my family did a lot of groaning as I ignored them to work on this one), and I'm really happy with the outcome. There is definitely more shawl knitting on my schedule for this winter!

simple blue hat

2009-10-26T13:31:00.003-04:00

It is so funny trying to photograph a baby because you never know what you are going to get. For my last post, I had a very cooperative little boy who basically just sat in the grass and smiled at the camera. This time, when I tried to photograph this little blue hat, I literally chased Levi around the house for at least a half hour. He was moving around so quickly, and I was determined to not use a flash, so most of the dozens of pictures I took were just blue blurs. Somehow though, I got some seriously adorable pictures of Levi (check out the drool in that above picture!) that show off the blue hat quite well!

It is a very simple hat, scaled down from this pattern (yeah, I know, I even managed to get a basic hat pattern from Jared Flood), but it is a gorgeous turquoise blue, which is perfect for my little blue-eyed boy. The yarn is the super soft Malabrigo Worsted in color Touareg. Once again, I purposely knit it on the big side, with hopes that he can wear it next winter too.

little cobblestone

2009-10-26T10:15:00.001-04:00

I finally knit my baby boy a new wool sweater. This is the Cobblestone Pullover, yet another Jared Flood design. I'm not going to lie and say that this is the last of his designs that you'll be seeing from me - I think 4 of my next 6 projects are his patterns. A little obsessive maybe, but I really like his designs and they suit my style of knitting very well.

I have had the magazine with this sweater pattern for a couple years now, as I have been planning to knit this sweater for Adam. Other knitters have scaled the pattern down for children, and that (along with the fact that I happened to have a few balls of random tweedy yarn laying around) inspired me to knit this for Levi.

One really great thing about the sweater is that it will definitely fit him for at least another winter, if not two, and he can wear it now with the sleeves rolled up by about 2 inches. This was my goal - a longer-lived sweater for Levi. I got really sad putting all his tiny newborn handknits from last winter into storage, and was determined to knit something with a little more staying power. I really love this little sweater - it was super fun and easy to knit (all in one piece = no seaming = wonderful!), and it looks really cute on little Levi. Hopefully I'll get around to knitting this pattern for Adam, and then the two of them can be adorably matching in their cobblestones.

quincy

2009-10-18T06:31:00.006-04:00

I love this hat so much it almost makes up for the fact that our fall weather didn't last very long this year before cold wintery temperatures kicked in. At least I can wear wool every day! I knit this hat from the pattern book "Made in Brooklyn" by Jared Flood. I almost never buy pattern books, but this one has about 4 patterns that I seriously want to knit (or maybe I just want to wear) right this very second. And because they are designed by Jared Flood, I really couldn't resist buying this book - his designs are so elegant and usually involve very little seaming, which is the kind of knitting I love.

This is the Quincy hat, which I knit in Classic Elite Ariosa. It is a super soft blend of merino and cashmere and is pretty bulky, so it knits up really fast. The hat pattern is amazing. You basically just knit a long garter stitch band, twist it, sew the ends together, and then pick up stitches for the top of the hat. Super easy, but brilliant...and I love wearing it. Oh yeah...and did you notice the lack of handknits on my poor cold baby? That is being remedied...stay tuned!

peat

2009-09-25T08:52:00.004-04:00

Here is my latest handspun yarn. It was spun from (yet another) Pigeonroof Studios roving, in color "peat." It's 80% merino, 20% tussah silk. I have to admit that I started spinning this about a year ago and then got wrapped up in teaching and taking care of Levi, and it got ignored. Well, with all this goat frenzy as well as wanting something to enter in the Vermont Sheep & Wool Festival, I finished the spinning over the past few days.

It is navajo plied, which is a method of getting a 3-ply yarn from a single strand of singles yarn, and I did this to preserve each individual color of the roving. So, instead of ending up with all the colors plied and blended together (resulting in a tweedy yarn), I got a yarn that will give a more stripey effect when I knit with it. I'm really happy with how it turned out and now have 3 skeins of yarn to enter in next week's wool festival!

Speaking of the goat frenzy, it seems that there are at least 3 other people, if not more, with way more votes than me. That's okay, we'll be patient until the day when we finally have some fiber animals of our own. I am grateful to all my family and friends who solicited votes for me. I'm especially grateful to my siblings, who got involved in this quite passionately. I didn't know that they understood my passions and interests as well as they apparently do...and I feel very lucky to have such supportive people in my life!

angora goats

2009-09-23T09:14:00.002-04:00

Please vote for my essay in the amazing goat giveaway from Hudson Valley Fiber Farms. This would be a dream come true for all of us! All you have to do is click on the star below my essay and your vote will be counted for me. There are almost 50 entries, but it's worth a shot! The winner will be announced on October 2nd.

ocean

2009-07-04T14:46:00.005-04:00

Part of the fun of watching Levi grow up is seeing his reaction to new things. If his interests as a 7-month old were any indication of what he would grow to love, this baby would be a botanist. Every grass spike and flower we show him is met with such interest...pursed lips, outstretched hand, close inspection.

But water is a different story. We've tried to acquaint Levi with water in the form of bathtubs, lakes, and most recently the ocean, and he's never really loved it. He now tolerates baths, but only with me, and only for a short while. We couldn't wait to show him the ocean...and on a recent trip to visit family in Newport we stopped to dip his little toes in. To say the least, he was not immediately thrilled with it...but I think he'll come around eventually!

alders and acorns

2009-06-15T19:33:00.005-04:00

When Adam showed me this beautiful bowl that he turned out of red alder wood, the first words out of my mouth were "I love it. Is it for me?" He laughed and told me that I could have any bowl I want. This one is just so simple and beautiful. I love the little foot it rests on and the colors in the wood. And it is the perfect size for me to fill with little treasures...

So I finally made my felt acorns! It might seem like felt acorns would be better suited for an oak bowl, but I've never been a huge fan of oak...so alder will have to do!

6 months

2009-06-11T13:58:00.002-04:00

I can't believe that my sweet baby boy is 6 months old today. The older I get, the faster time seems to go, and it seems inconceivable that a half-a-year has passed since Levi was born. I already miss little things he used to do, but then every day there is something new to love. Happy half-birthday, dear Levi.

may mittens

2009-06-03T09:49:00.005-04:00

Elizabeth Zimmerman says that you should always knit mittens in May. If you knit them in the winter-time, you are rushed because you want to wear them so badly, and you might end up with imperfect mittens. In May, you take your time so they always end up just right. I have to say that I totally agree with this advice - while knitting these mitered mittens (from The Knitter's Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmerman), I ripped out an entire mitten just because I wasn't happy with the way the colors played out. Would I have done that in January? Hmmm...

I used Noro Silk Garden color 255, and Kathryn Ivy's thumb gusset modifications. The yarn is one that I never ever would have chosen if I saw it in person. I ordered it online and was disappointed with it when I received it. Luckily, I love these mittens, so the yarn ended up not being a huge mistake. I did, however, only use partial skeins so I could avoid the colors in the yarn that I really hated. I do love the turquoise and rust colored stripes, and how they work with all the shades of green.

I just love this pattern, and think the yarn was a perfect match for it. The only bad thing about making mittens in May is that now I have to wait so many months and months before I can wear them!

spring food

2009-05-30T15:38:00.003-04:00

The wild leeks are pretty much done for the year. They are starting to look trampled and some have little flower spikes. Last spring I didn't get to enjoy them a whole lot as my morning sickness wouldn't really allow it. But this year we put them in nearly any recipe that called for leeks, onions, or garlic. We made wild leek pizza, wild leek pasta, and best of all potato and wild leek soup. The soup was so delicious that I made it twice, using this simple recipe, but using two bunches of wild leeks (whole leeks, greens and all) instead of the regular leeks.

Also on our spring menu is mass quantities of rhubarb. I am sad to say that I have never lived in any place long enough to justify planting rhubarb, but our wonderful neighbors have kindly kept us stocked with all the rhubarb we want. Every spring, I look forward to this recipe, and I end up making it dozens of times until I am thoroughly sick of it. Last May I still had frozen strawberries that I picked the year before, but this year I don't...so I have been omitting the strawberries and using 3 cups of rhubarb instead of 2.

Unfortunately this year we have not been lucky enough to go foraging for copious amounts of my favorite spring food, but today Adam found these two gigantic morels underneath our back porch. How morels ended up under our porch, I have no idea...but we will be sure to enjoy them sauteed in butter tonight.

maeve's sweater

2009-05-24T09:28:00.002-04:00

I knit this sweater for my friend's baby, Maeve, who turned one last weekend. It's from the Nashua Handknits book, Sprout: Designs for Baby, but I used Valley Yarns Northfield in Chestnut. The yarn is 70% merino, 20% baby alpaca, and 10% silk and seemed to work well for the pattern. I really hate seaming sweaters (I know I've mentioned this before), and this sweater had a fair amount of seaming, but I think it turned out great! Maeve is a very small one-year-old, and I made the 18-24 month size, so unfortunately it may be a little while before I get to see her in it.

crinkly owl

2009-05-15T10:12:00.003-04:00

I made these crinkly felt owls for Levi and his sweet cousin Isaac. When I saw the post with instructions for them, I immediately thought of Levi. He loves animals, especially ones that make noises - "Owl says whoooooo whooooo..." Sure enough, it was a big hit...especially the ears which are constantly soaking wet from being sucked on! I hope his cousin likes his owl too.

fox family

2009-05-11T08:43:00.005-04:00

A few weeks ago, when Levi and I stepped out of our garage to go for a walk, I heard a thump from over near the barn and a mother fox ran up the hill. I walked towards the barn and two tiny fur-balls jumped out...my first instinct was that they were kittens whose lives I had saved by scaring away the fox, but when I investigated further I realized we had baby foxes again!

We had a fox family last year, but they were much more elusive. Aside from one time that we stumbled across the babies while on a walk, we mainly watched them from a distance as they scampered around at the top of our hill. This year, the six fox babies spent the first couple weeks of their life living underneath our barn, sunning on our driveway, chasing each other through our garage.

A few days ago, they disappeared. Yesterday while we were walking at the top of the hill, Adam asked where I thought the mother fox moved her babies...and a few steps later, right in front of us, a little baby fox head popped up out of a hole in the ground and looked around. So we discovered the answer to Adam's question!

We don't yet have any chickens or pets that could become fox-prey, so we love our fox family. Happy Mother's Day, mama fox.

lightning bowls

2009-05-05T10:15:00.004-04:00

Here is another set of bowls that Adam turned. They are from a huge tree that used to be in my parents' front yard. It had to be taken down last year when it got struck by lightning and all its bark blew off. We somehow got a big old chunk of it from Ohio to New Hampshire and although it was pretty cracked, Adam managed to create two little bowls from it. We have no idea what kind of wood it is - maybe some ornamental, maybe hickory? - but it is really interesting wood. It is lightweight and has little tiny holes throughout it from the tree's xylem (water-drinking vessels). It also has this really crazy striping in addition to the normal tree rings. You can see that in the above picture - the vertical light stripes. I have no idea what caused that.

The above bowl was made from a piece of wood with a lot of worm damage - that's why there is the darker band near the rim. Adam loves wood with "character," so he's a huge fan of spalting and worm holes and other imperfections. The bowl below has a really amazing shape. It's small and perfect and we're sending it to my parents so they can always remember their tree.

why did it have to end?

2009-04-28T13:15:00.006-04:00

I wasn't going to write about this book - many others have...I've seen it mentioned on several blogs that I regularly read - but I want to. I can't stop thinking about it and I want to talk about it. First of all, this is the first book I have read for pleasure in probably over a year. My dissertation took its toll, followed by a pregnancy during which my brain was fried - and I haven't been able to concentrate long enough to really get into a book for a long time. Also, this book made me really want to cook...something that has definitely fallen by the wayside since I had Levi.

I think Molly's blog, Orangette, was the first blog I ever read. When I discovered the wonderful world of blogging, I was writing my dissertation but my brain would think about nothing but food, so the first blogs I read were food-related. I have made a handful of her recipes and I have to say that every single one has been wonderful. Most I made numerous times. Fall and winter of 2007 we lived on her carrot salad - I probably made it a dozen or more times until we ate so much of it that neither Adam or I thought we ever wanted to see it again (I might finally have gotten over that).

Anyway, I love her book. I started it last week and was reading only a chapter or two every night while pumping breast milk before going to bed. I was savoring it slowly and was actually looking forward to my (previously dreaded) nighttime pumping sessions. Well, then I got obsessed and started reading it while nursing too. And I just now finished it...during Levi's nap. I actually regret the obsessive reading glut, because I was enjoying taking it slow and mulling over one or two recipes at a time. Also, I read it so fast that I have only had the chance to make one recipe so far - Buckwheat Pancakes, which I made on Sunday morning with blueberries, and which were exceptional. It would have been fun to take my time and cook my way through the book.

I am dying to make almost every recipe in there, and the only reason I might skip some of them is that a few seem quite labor intensive and Levi does not allow me that kind of cooking. Most of the recipes are accessible and unintimidating though, and I'm sure they are all delicious. I already bought a huge bunch of bananas specifically so some will over-ripen and I can make the Banana Bread with Chocolate and Crystallized Ginger. And I'm about to go make a big old shopping list so I can make a few other recipes this week. This book not only got me reading again, but also got me cooking again, and because of that I am unbelievably happy.

tweed vest

2009-04-06T18:13:00.004-04:00

This is one of those knits that I wish my baby would never grow out of. I just might have to rewrite the pattern again in an even bigger size, so he has a vest to wear next fall too! The pattern is from thrifty knitter, the cobblestone inspired "manly vest." It is written in a small 0-3 month size, so I added more stitches in an attempt to make it bigger. It perfectly fits my 15+ pound 4 month old son right now.

One of the best parts of the vest are the buttons - which are on one of the shoulders and all the way down that same side. So it is really easy to get on and off a squirmy baby. I also just really love the simplicity of it - it's a knit that requires minimal finishing (you only have to sew together the non-buttoned shoulder), and that is the kind of knitting that I prefer since I really hate seaming together knitted pieces.

For knitters who want to know how I made this bigger, here are the details: I used Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran Tweed and size 6 needles. I cast on 90 stitches and used a wrong-side row of S1 K4 P37 K7 P37 K4. I did buttonholes every 12th row (rows 7, 19, 31, 43, 55) and knit a total of 57 rows before dividing for armholes. I had 9 stitches on either side of the bound off neck rather than 8. That's all there is to it!

spalted maple

2009-03-31T10:55:00.006-04:00

It really feels like spring now. Levi and I have finally emerged from the house to take walks in the woods. I tried to show him birch bark and pine cones, and seeing as he is only 4 months old, these things were met with little enthusiasm. It seems I need to do better at enjoying each stage in his life instead of being so excited for when I can show him all the amazing things in this world.

I haven't had time to photograph the last knitting projects I finished, but I do have some pictures of two more turning projects that Adam finished. These two bowls were made from spalted figured maple that he salvaged from an old fallen maple tree in the woods behind our house. I'm told that spalting (the black lines in the wood you can see below) is actually caused by fungus. The type of spalting in these bowls is from where two different types of fungi have interacted and left little barriers to protect their own resources. Fungi fences.

The figuring in the wood makes almost iridescent stripes of light and dark. It was much less evident when the bowl was first turned, but then Adam finished the bowl with some butcher block oil and the figuring just popped out. Apparently figuring is pretty common in old large maple trees because the weight of the tree pushes down on the wood at the bottom of the trunk and causes disruptions in the normal even tree ring pattern.

I think this (the bowl above and below) is my favorite bowl Adam has made so far. The spalting is striking and maple is pretty amazing in general. It is so smooth and hard, it is almost glasslike.

This picture below is the second spalted maple bowl, turned from the same hunk of maple. I love the slightly fluted shape of this one. It was given to Adam's brother for his birthday. The first of these maple bowls is staying with us for a while - I can't stop looking at it.

felt food

2009-03-18T12:44:00.005-04:00

I am obsessed. I got this Japanese craft book, Felt Food, for Christmas, and I can't stop sewing felt fruits and vegetables! So far, I have made a half-pear, lemon, and two strawberries...

And an egg sandwich...though it still needs cheese!

The book has patterns for tons of veggies and fruits, and some other really cute things like pancakes with a little pat of butter on top. Somehow I don't think I'll be done making felt food until I've made nearly everything in the book. I figure someday Levi will have a seriously well-stocked play kitchen!

first bowl

2009-03-10T16:08:00.003-04:00

This...

...is the first hand-turned bowl that Adam has finished. It is ash, from a tree that our neighbors took down last year. I love the different swirls of color in the wood, and the flared shape of the bowl. I am amazed that his first bowl is so gorgeous...and judging by the few other bowls that he has almost finished, this was not beginner's luck...he's a natural!

february baby sweater

2009-03-02T14:37:00.004-05:00

I knit this sweater for a friend who is having a baby girl in June. I love this pattern - especially the fact that it is knit all in one piece. The pattern is Elizabeth Zimmerman's "February Baby Sweater," which is in A Knitter's Almanac. I used Lily Chin Gramercy, which is superwash merino. The yarn isn't very interesting or nice, and I probably wouldn't choose it again, but I'm so thrilled with how the sweater turned out that, surprisingly, the yarn doesn't bother me very much.

levi's pixie hat

2009-02-19T22:27:00.004-05:00

This pattern is ingenious. You basically knit a square, and it miraculously folds into a cute little pointed pixie hat! I used Arucania Ranco Multy yarn in color 308, and size 3 needles. I didn't follow the directions for the ties on the sides as written in the pattern, and instead just picked up 7 stitches on each side and did K1P1 ribbing for the ties. I learned about this great hat from soulemama - I adore her version of it and think it is so cute that it is too big for her baby. Mine is a little more form-fitting, but still cute! In the picture below, you can see the sides of the hat - the way it is knit forms a neat triangle pattern.

The hat is really great and stretchy, so it will fit Levi for a long time - at least the rest of the winter, which is what I was hoping for. He has already grown out of his first handknit wool hat, and I needed something for his little head now that we're starting to take more walks!

a little squirrely

2009-02-13T12:32:00.005-05:00

I think I've gone a bit nuts. It all started with the squirrel dish towels on purl bee, which I immediately fell in love with. I hesitated on buying the supplies though, because I didn't want to spend the money. Well, you know how you always want what you can't have? Well, a few days after purl bee posted those dish towels, the squirrel tape in brown was completely gone. And it is discontinued, and from Japan, so there was no getting more. Once that happened, I immediately jumped on the white and red squirrel tape, and then started looking for some fabric to go with it.

In about a week's time, I had accumulated quite the collection of fabric for these towels. I did buy some of the awesome Nani Iro Double Gauze that purl bee recommended for the towels (bottom fabric in the picture above), and I bought some of this white cotton waffle fabric from a little goodness on etsy (top fabric). I figured these two fabrics would look great with the white squirrel tape, but I still needed something for the red squirrels. In the back of my mind I was thinking about a flax-colored waffle weave fabric, preferably with some linen content. I looked everywhere for something like that, and finally found this fabric on etsy. I bought the last half-yard and was so happy when it arrived because it was exactly what I had in mind.

I'm really happy with how the towels came out. I had to use a walking foot to sew the hems because the folded fabric was so thick. The two white fabrics were also both very difficult to work with. The Nani Iro fabric was just so gauzy and drapey that getting it cut into perfect rectangles was a pain. The cotton waffle weave was so squishy that it compressed when being sewn and it was hard to sew the tape on straight.

I'm thinking that these towels are way too nice to use for drying dishes, and I think I will hang them in a bathroom as hand towels. The problem is that I've gone a little squirrel crazy and am plotting all the fun things I could do to coordinate with these towels. I definitely think I want to make a bowl of needle felted acorns like these, or maybe I need a little soap dish full of acorn shaped soaps? I've gone so nutty that I'm even thinking of taking up paper cutting so I could frame this awesome squirrel valentine and add it to the squirrel themed bathroom set!

lots of fingerless gloves

2009-02-02T16:03:00.003-05:00

I went a little crazy and knit two more pairs of the purl bee fingerless gloves. I really loved the ones that I made for my friend Rachel for Christmas, and wanted to make red ones for myself. My sister left a comment on my blog post implying that she would like a pair as well...so I made a third pair. By the time I finished three pairs of these gloves, I decided that I never ever want to knit this pattern again. So this is it!

I used Blue Sky Alpacas Sport weight alpaca for both the trim and glove body. The trim on both is color "natural dark brown," my gloves are color "red" and my sister's are "eggplant." The glove pattern was originally written for a luxurious cashmere yarn, which was out of my price range. I found the sport weight alpaca to be a decent substitute - it was maybe a little less lofty than would be ideal, but the gauge worked fine and the gloves turned out great.

kimono for isaac

2009-01-25T10:04:00.003-05:00

My lovely sister, Emily, had a baby boy named Isaac on December 22, 2008. So Levi has an identically-aged cousin...unfortunately, they live 16 hours away, so Levi might not get to see his cousin as much as we would like. I got a new sewing machine for Christmas (I can sew a straight line now...so my problems of the past may have been partly to blame on my awful old machine!) and I tested it out by making another kimono - one for my nephew Isaac.

Isaac's father hates birds. I have no idea how anyone could hate birds, but he claims some chicken looked at him funny one day when he was in a dark alley as a child. I, on the other hand, have devoted most of my adult life to studying birds, and I am determined to impress upon my nephew that birds are wonderful no matter what his father might tell him! So I made him a kimono with one of my favorite bird fabrics, Windham's "A Little Bird Told Me".

This kimono turned out better than the first two I made - thanks in part to my new sewing machine. I love that it is so simple, with the solid brown fabric, but made special thanks to the bird trim. I can't wait to see pictures of Isaac in his little bird kimono this summer!

amanda hat

2009-01-11T09:34:00.003-05:00

This is one of my sleeping baby knits - The Amanda Hat, which is made from Malabrigo worsted merino. I used color "sunset." This pattern is a wonderfully fun and quick knit, and I love the way this hat fits! The pattern states that if you are careful, you can make two hats from one skein of Malabrigo. The hat was so fun to knit that I immediately cast on for a second hat once I finished the first, and sure enough I had exactly enough yarn for two hats. I had about a 12-inch piece of yarn to spare!

We got another 6 or 8 inches of snow last night, and I think I am going to leave my well-fed baby with Adam this afternoon and head out for my first post-partum cross-country ski. Can't wait.

introducing...

2009-01-02T15:46:00.002-05:00

My sweet little boy, Levi Paul, was born on his due date, December 11, 2008, at 11:50am. He takes up nearly all of my time, but I have learned how to hold a sleeping baby and knit at the same time, so stay tuned for some knitting posts soon!

vintage car coat

2008-12-10T10:47:00.002-05:00

There is still no baby to wear it...but yesterday I sewed the buttons on this sweater and it is now all ready to go! I used a pattern in the Sublime pattern book #600, but used the Sublime washable merino rather than the baby cashmere merino silk yarn. It's called the "vintage car coat," and looks absolutely adorable on the baby boy in the picture.

The only thing I hated about making this sweater was sewing together all the pieces. I think there is a good reason I tend to stick to circular knitting with minimal finishing - I am terrible at seaming, and pretty impatient with the process too. The sweater is really cute though. It has two buttons on the cuff of each sleeve, which is a pretty nice touch...although the buttons I bought are a little heavy, so our baby might get a muscle work-out from wearing this sweater! I made the 3-6 month size, so hopefully it'll fit him this winter. With my luck, it'll fit perfectly in the middle of the summer.

felt bears

2008-12-06T15:01:00.006-05:00

I think this might be one of my favorite recent projects. These little bears were really enjoyable to make, not terribly time-consuming, and I think they are absolutely adorable. I was browsing through the handmade gift guide on marthastewart.com and saw the "Tooth Bears" template...I have always loved the look of simple hand-stitched dolls and toys, so I started cutting.

I had intended to make the tooth bears, which have a little pocket on their chests for kids to store lost teeth in...but honestly, teeth are not front and center in my mind right now. I'm not even thinking about my baby (not even born yet) getting teeth, let alone losing them. Plus, I didn't have any good pocket colors in my felt stash and I wasn't terribly convinced that I could embroider a picture of a tooth (that anyone would be able to identify as a tooth) on the little pocket...so I thought I'd forgo the pocket and put a red heart on their chests instead.

I'm thinking of changing the pattern slightly - expanding the length of the ears and adding whiskers - to make some felt bunnies...because honestly, I enjoyed making these guys so much I can't imagine not having a hand-sewing project to work on!

fingerless gloves

2008-12-04T09:14:00.002-05:00

In these last weeks of waiting for baby, it seems like all I want to do is sit on the couch and knit. Which means that when I see a pattern that I can't resist, I immediately cast-on. This pattern, the cashmere fingerless gloves from Purl Bee was completely irresistable to me, but I couldn't justify the expense of the cashmere. Luckily I had some handspun alpaca, merino, bamboo yarn that seemed to be the right weight, and oddly enough I had even mentioned making it into fingerless gloves when I first finished spinning the yarn. I used Blue Sky alpaca sport weight in dark brown for the trim, as was recommended in the pattern.

The gloves are great, and the glowing hearth yarn is one of my favorite handspun yarns ever. I am giving these gloves to a friend for Christmas, but only because I have enough of the yarn left to make something for myself later. I don't think I could completely part with this one...it's so glowing and warm and gorgeous.

I am also planning to make these same fingerless gloves in red and brown (with an orange button, like in the original pattern) for myself...to go with a new wool coat with red trim that I got last fall. I anticipate that sometime in the near future this coat will zip up over my belly again and I'll be happy as a clam to have coordinating gloves to go with it!

baby kimonos

2008-11-29T18:59:00.004-05:00

My friend Rachel came over today to teach me how to make a baby kimono for our (hopefully) soon-to-arrive baby. She made one for her daughter, Maeve, and I thought it was so adorable, I had to make some too.

We used a free pattern from habitual, which worked well...and despite my not-so-great sewing skills, I was able to make two kimonos that I am totally in love with. I made the 6-12 month size, so I should be able to use them for a while.

I got both of these fabrics from Superbuzzy. The gold fabric is 100% cotton, and is called Proud Lion.

And the farm scene fabric is a Japanese linen-cotton waffle weave fabric (which has a wonderful drape by the way) called Free Range. I'm really happy with how both kimonos turned out, and can't wait to see them on baby!

frustration!

2008-10-20T10:43:00.004-04:00

When I saw this post on purl bee for the "cozy quick blankie," I immediately bought enough organic cotton fleece and rick-rack to make a blanket for myself and one for my sister. It seemed like the perfect quick but cute project for a new baby. I chose Amy Butler's midwest modern fabric for my sister's blanket, and some tree and bird fabric I had in my stash (and had intended to use for baby stuff) for myself. I figured that since I can (almost) sew a straight line, this project would be fairly simple.

Well, it wasn't.

The fleece was awful to work with. After washing, it shrunk in unpredictable ways and ended up as a big parallelogram rather than a square. So the blankets had to be smaller than I had originally hoped. Getting the two layers together smoothly proved to be even more difficult. I constructed my sister's blanket with the fleece layer on top, resulting in a puckery saggy fabric layer. Thinking I was wiser the second time around, I did mine with the fabric layer on top, and guess what? I ended up with a saggy fleece layer! The picture above is the only one in which you can't see my absolute frustration with these blankets - Adam came into the room and started taking pictures of me sewing and then I started getting mad at the blankets and mad at him!

All-in-all, I ended up with two respectable (and usable) baby blankets, but they aren't perfect. Next time (if there is one) I will tape one of the layers to the floor - like you would for basting a quilt. I think that would help. Also, I will never buy expensive organic cotton fleece again and instead would use economical 100% cotton flannel for this blanket if I ever were to make one again. Then I could make each blanket for under $10, rather than the $30 I spent on each blanket. I guess you could say it was a learning experience!

felt baby toys

2008-10-05T20:06:00.004-04:00

Wow, it has been a while! I thought life would get easier after finishing my dissertation, but between teaching, doing research, and preparing for our new addition (due in December!) I don't seem to have a whole lot of extra time right now.

I did manage to find some time this past month to make some colorful felt balls for the baby. They are all about the size of a tennis ball, or slightly smaller, and three of the four have bells inside so they rattle. They are amazingly easy to make. I used a core of white wool roving and agitated it repeatedly after dipping the mass of wool into a bowl of hot soapy water. The ones that rattle have a small cat toy on the inside. I added the colorful outer layer the same way, and then needle felted polka-dots and stripes onto them. I gave one to my sister for her baby-on-the-way, and still have three of them. I'm tempted to make more but don't know how many felt balls a baby realistically needs!

Also in the category of felt baby toys, the gorgeous felt block below was made for me by my friend Rachel. It is made from wool felt and stuffed with bamboo stuffing, so is perfectly safe for a baby to gnaw on...but I think I might love this block too much too much to let my baby chew on it! Each of the sides has a different bird sewn on it...Northern Cardinal, American Goldfinch, Wood Thrush, Black-capped Chickadee, Common Raven, and American Robin. I am quite the bird-lover, as I have devoted the past 10 years of my life to studying birds, so it is a pretty appropriate gift. I can't stop looking at it!

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.

february csa share

2008-02-02T13:00:00.000-05:00

This morning we picked up our February box of CSA vegetables from Luna Bleu Farm. It's our fourth month of organic winter vegetables, and we will get monthly boxes of produce through May. I am really happy that the cabbage is slowing down (only two red cabbages this month)...the napa cabbage was getting a little out of control...I think we still have a head of it in the refrigerator from our December box, not to mention most of what we got in January! The sprouts were a nice touch this month...we got both alfalfa sprouts and mung bean sprouts. I imagine that as the weather continues to get nicer we'll get more little treats like that...in fact, we might start some spinach and greens in the greenhouse at Fat Rooster next Thursday, so local greens are on their way.

These were our boxes from previous months. January...

December...

and November...

It has been amazing to get all this wonderful local produce every month, and I would definitely do a winter CSA with Luna Bleu again. Aside from the napa cabbage, we have managed to keep up with eating our monthly vegetables...although I could use some suggestions for what to do with rutabaga!

goldenrod

2008-01-31T08:26:00.001-05:00

I just finished spinning this lovely Blue-faced Leicester roving in colorway "Goldenrod" from Pigeonroof Studios. I actually can't believe that I managed to snatch this one up, Pigeonroof's rovings tend to sell minutes after they are listed...but I just happened across this one on a weekday and I guess I just got lucky! I used to avoid painted rovings because I really don't like the "barberpole effect," when you get a really dark color and a light color plyed together...it's just too contrasting for me, I like a more subtle effect. But I have to say that Pigeonroof's colorways are pretty amazing, and the prevalence of white fibers in the roving made all the colors mute out a little bit, and I ended up with a beautiful subtly variegated yarn.

I almost gave up on this one too...I plied a few yards and did not like what I was getting...I thought I had spun too thickly, the yarn felt coarse...so I just let it sit for a few days. That is unlike me because once I start plying I usually can't wait to get it done! Anyway, when I finally finished the plying, I was amazed at how it turned out. And once it was washed, it turned into a really soft and fluffy yarn, exactly what Blue-faced Leicester should be. The only bad thing is that now I'm hooked on Pigeonroof Studios, and I'll likely be among the crazy crowds snapping up rovings the minute they are listed!

handwoven huck towels

2008-01-29T09:25:00.000-05:00

This is another project that should have been finished a long time ago...these towels were on my loom when we moved from Portland, Oregon to New Hampshire last summer. In fact, even before we moved from Portland, they had been on my loom long enough to collect a fairly thick layer of dust. That's pretty bad...graduate school has made me a very unproductive weaver, it seems!

They are done now though, and I really like how dainty and fine they are. They are woven in 4-shaft huck lace patterns...one threading can make a variety of subtly different patterns. The threading is from Handwoven magazine January/February 2001. Below are two of the different patterns I made. I especially love the ladder hemstitching at the bottom of the towel on the right.

They are woven from a 70/30 cotton/linen blend yarn that I got from Webs years ago. They don't have this yarn anymore, but now they have a 50/50 cotton/linen blend that I would love to try. The more linen the better, in my opinion. Even the 30% linen in the yarn I used makes the huck pattern shine. The hems had to be hand finished, which took me about the length of two full movies to complete...but they look so much more elegant than if I had just been lazy and used the sewing machine. I have yet to keep any of my weaving projects for myself, so I am definitely keeping two of these towels...but the other two may become gifts one of these days.

whole grain pancakes

2008-01-27T08:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we had Mark Bittman's whole grain pancakes for breakfast, and they were really great! I love anything with separated eggs, and the beaten egg whites in this recipe really made the pancakes fluffy and light despite that they were all whole wheat and buckwheat flour, which would usually make for a dense pancake. I was really excited about the buckwheat too, since it is so high in fiber and iron. I used ground coriander and cinnamon according to the recipe, and they were very good with a slightly exotic flavor...next time I might eliminate the coriander and use some vanilla extract for a more traditional pancake flavor. I also like the idea of adding some ground flaxseed to the mix. The recipe, as written, makes a LOT of pancakes...I was surprised because Adam and I are so serious about food that usually a recipe that is written to serve 4 serves the two of us quite nicely. I made 15 good-sized pancakes from this recipe and about half of those are now in the freezer. I'm not sure how they'll freeze, but it is worth a try!

Update: To satisfy my morning maple syrup craving, I just had some of the frozen buckwheat pancakes and they were great!! I thawed them in the microwave and then put them in the toaster oven...nothing frozen is as good as it is when it was fresh, but it is definitely worth freezing the leftovers of these pancakes!

poetry in stitches

2008-01-25T08:03:00.001-05:00

This is a knitting project (sorry for the backlit photo!) that I completed years ago, but I haven't knit anything as involved and time-consuming since...so I thought it was worth posting. The pattern is from Poetry in Stitches, an out-of-print knitting book, but I had to majorly rewrite the pattern because I knit this sweater with handspun yarn that was much thinner than what the pattern called for. The original pattern was on page 120 of the book, and had accents in black instead of brown, as well as "lice," a dot pattern, all over.

The yarn is handspun Blue-faced Leicester in natural and brown. The colored yarn is the same Blue-faced Leicester that I naturally dyed with fustic, osage orange, cochineal, madder, and indigo extracts. Looking back at the original picture of the sweater, it seems I managed to match the colors pretty well with my natural dyeing!

embossed leaves socks

2008-01-23T07:47:00.000-05:00

I didn't intend for this to turn into an all-knitting blog, but I have another finished knitting project to post! The pattern is "Embossed leaves socks" designed by Mona Schmidt from the Winter 2005 Interweave Knits. Embarrassingly, I started these in 2005 when this magazine came out! I got about half of one sock knit and then they sat around for 2 years until I picked them up again. They are done in Koigu Premium Merino, as the pattern calls for. The leaf motif was easily memorized so knitting went quickly, and I'm happy with the results!

Also...yesterday there was a new post in The Ladybug Letters, a wonderful and eloquent collection of stories pertaining to farming and food. Their site is also great because of the hundreds of recipes for every vegetable imaginable!

myriads of mushrooms

2008-01-22T12:36:00.000-05:00

This weekend I knit and felted some mushrooms based on the free patterns designed by Kathryn Ivy. I used Patons Classic Wool, the yarn that the patterns were written for, because it was on sale at JoAnn fabrics! For the mushrooms on the right, I knit the large and small rounded caps with the tall and medium stems. After felting, I cut a notch in the cap of the large mushroom. For all the mushrooms, I affixed the cap to the stem using glue.

The red & white mushroom was also knitted as written in the pattern. I made the large flat cap and the medium stem. I needle-felted the white spots on the caps after felting using my scrap pieces of the white wool yarn. It took a while to figure out how to needle-felt a nice crisp dot (check out the spots on the red & white mushroom on the Kathryn Ivy website...they're amazing!), but eventually I came up with a method that worked for me. I just used a length of yarn, felted the end to the cap, then folded the yarn and felted again in the same spot. I repeated this folding once or twice more to create a more three-dimensional and saturated spot of white.

I really wanted to make morel mushrooms, because they are my favorite mushrooms to eat! I used the large and small bell-shaped cap patterns, and for the larger of the morels I made a stem that was the width of the medium stem, but the height of the tall stem. For the small mushroom, I made a stem that was the height of the medium stem, but I decreased the width by 3 stitches. Then I needle-felted patterns on the caps to mimic the folds and crevices on a real morel cap. I'm not sure I got the colors right, maybe the contrast between the caps and the needle-felted folds should have been less extreme, but I guess if you use your imagination they kind of look like morels!

These last mushrooms are my favorites. I decreased the diameter of the large flat cap to make smaller flat caps. I think the mushroom on the left has a diameter of 48 stitches, and the one on the right is 36 stitches. I also made the stems much narrower (9 and 6 stitches around) but about as tall as the tall stem. Obviously stems this narrow (even felted ones) do not provide much support, so I knew the mushrooms would not stand up on their own. Adam made me this cool base for these mushrooms. He got a piece of wood...this piece happens to have the bark attached, and drilled two small holes in the wood block. Then he put lengths of wire (from a clothes hanger) into the holes and trimmed them to the correct height. We slipped the mushrooms onto the wires, and bent the wires into a pleasing mushroom configuration. I glued a piece of felt to the bottom of the wood to protect the surface where we placed these mushrooms.

These patterns are really great, and there are lots of great ways to subtly change the patterns to make nearly any kind of mushroom imaginable! I spent a lot of time looking through my mushroom field guide, trying to find ideas for different mushrooms to make. This was a really fun project!

saartje's booties

2008-01-18T13:05:00.000-05:00

A lot of bloggers have featured these totally adorable baby booties from an online free pattern designed by Saartje Breit. Here is my version, which I knit for a friend's baby who was born just before Thanksgiving. I did not make any changes to the pattern...I made the larger of the two sizes and I used Bristol Yarn Gallery's Buckingham, which is 80% baby alpaca and 20% silk. I used size 2 needles, and I think my gauge was slightly smaller than the pattern specified, which is why I made the bigger size. I topped them off with four small shell buttons, and they were very well received. I sent the picture to my sister and she requested some in an adult's size! Somehow I don't think I'll be getting to that project anytime soon...

On another note, fifteen wild turkeys visited our backyard a couple days ago. They are actually pretty entertaining to watch and I love seeing all the turkey tracks in the snow. We got another couple inches of snow last night and I think I'm going to head out for a quick cross-country skiing break!

a good egg

2008-01-17T17:00:00.000-05:00

On Thursday mornings I work at Fat Rooster Farm in exchange for almost all the meat and eggs that we consume. Today I cleaned garlic and washed and packaged eggs that will be sold at the next winter farmer's market. Cleaning garlic is a dusty unpleasant chore, but I could wash and package eggs all day. I get to be creative when I put them in the cartons, and I have fun making all sorts of beautiful color arrangements: rows of brown alternating with rows of white, all brown with a single green egg, and my favorite of the day...a gradation of color starting with the darkest brown, then medium brown, then light brown, then ivory, then white. In the cartons I take home with me I usually just put an assortment of eggs: speckled, green, white, many shades of brown...and they are so beautiful, they make me smile nearly every morning when I open the carton!

glowing hearth

2008-01-15T10:58:00.001-05:00

Here is some yarn that I spun with some gorgeous batts I bought on etsy from loop. It is a blend of pumpkin-colored merino, burgundy alpaca, and gold bamboo fiber, and the bamboo just makes it glow! You can see all the colors better in the singles yarn before I plyed it:

It ended up being such a soft and luscious yarn, and I can't wait to knit with it. I've been wanting to make some fingerless gloves for a while now, and I think they'd be so luxurious in this yarn!

hello!

2008-01-14T08:51:00.000-05:00

bûr'jəning : Putting forth new buds, leaves, or greenery; sprouting.

Naming a blog is hard. I mused over many names, trying to accomodate my various interests...and all were either already taken or vetoed by my husband, Adam. He was flipping through a Pablo Neruda book and blurted out the word "burgeonings." Embarrassingly, I had to look it up, but it really seemed fitting for a new blog starting in a new year.

I am a little behind the times, and hadn't even read a blog until a few months ago...but I figured I'd start this one as an assemblage of my projects, activities, and ramblings. We'll see where it goes!