I have a confession to make.  I haven’t picked up my knitting for weeks – possibly a month.  Nothing.  Not a stitch.  I did prepare some fiber (dyed mohair locks) and spin for all of an hour recently, and then nothing.  I’m a bit mystified as to why, but there is no lack of making going on.

Just today, I have made/will make:

One loaf of bread

Three pairs of dangly earrings

A jug of soymilk and a

… Golden Perfume Summer Tea Cake

Wet phase:
- 1 cup whole milk (farmer’s market) yogurt
- 1/2 c turbinado sugar
- 1/2 c white sugar
- 1/2 c melted butter (or oil, but I only had extra virgin olive oil)
- 2 VERY LARGE farmer’s market eggs – or three more average eggs
- 1/4 tsp almond extract
- 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
- zest of one small (or large, or medium – mine was small) lemon, preferably organic

Ground fine:
- 2 small dried rosebuds (just the petals, please – no stem/leaves)
- 2-4 saffron threads

Dry phase:
- 1 1/2 c all purpose flour
- 1/2 cup whole spelt flour (nuttier flavor, less gluten)
- 1 Tbsp baking powder
- 1/4 tsp salt

How to:

Preheat oven to 360 degrees.

Mix yogurt, sugars, and melted butter. Add eggs one at a time, then extracts/zest, and ground aromatics (rose & saffron). Promptly forget that you were baking a cake and go do something else for a few minutes, giving the saffron and rose a chance to infuse. Don’t worry about the raw eggs; you’re baking them for almost an hour soon.

Cut parchment paper (or greased foil, if you don’t have parchment) to fit the bottom of a 10 in cake pan. Don’t use a smaller one – it practically oozed out the sides of my 10 inch. Grease and flour the sides, plop in the parchment. Set aside.

Mix dry ingredients in another bowl, with a fork or a whisk, or fingers if you’re really bored.

Add wet to dry and fold/stir in whatever manner you like to use to minimize stirring (and therefore minimize gluten development/toughness). Pour into prepared pan and bake for 50-60 minutes, or until golden brown on top and a toothpick, after being inserted, comes out clean. Or until it’s done, you know – bake enough cakes and it tends to be reasonably obvious. There is nothing tricky about this here cake. Trust me on this.

Cool on rack for five to fifteen minutes, then turn over on rack to cool a little longer – turn back over to plop on a plate, original crust side up, when you feel like it – the crust is apparently one of the lovely parts. Devour.

And then consider checking out the recipe’s inspiration, over at the marvelous Clothilde’s blog, Chocolate and Zucchini..

This is B, in a hat I (finally) finished and sent him, of my own original yarn-combining (Malabrigo Worsted and Knitpicks Palette, if you must know) and design-composing um… design.

By sheer dumb luck with my measurements, it seems to meet his fits-in-pocket, covers-ear-tips-at-least and is-soft-and-warm qualifications, while not quite managing to clash terribly with his Mom-knitted scarf, whose warmth is so essential in numbing Salt Lake winters.

And, because he is a kind and generous soul, he even took time out of his math assignment grading to take pictures for me.

I am amused by his incredibly intent expression here…

And also by his inscrutable Lemony Snicket-ness here…

Thanks to the pattern on knitty.com, I have finally finished a project (well, mostly finished a project). I present to you, my wine cozy!

I am going to embelish it with red sparkly felt hearts, and perhaps some red beads to match. I’d like to use a smaller weight yarn next time, maybe fingering, so the overall project is thinner. Trip to the yarn store excuse much? I think a lot of people will be getting these for xmas (of course with a bottle of wine included). It was a fun project, didn’t take much time, and taught me a few new tricks. I think the next one will turn out much better now that I know what the deal is.

It felt really good to do a whole project again.

I’ve just been entirely unmotivated in the crafting arena these past few months. Moving to Oakland really took it out of me, and deciding to go off my meds certainly couldn’t have helped.

I have been drifting a bit towards paper crafts though, and now have a little shelf dedicated to them above the foot of my bed. (that way, in an earthquake, it will come crashing down on my feet instead of my head, see?)

Scarves,

My progress on Bob is stalled.  He is teal and legless.  This is the part of creating the world where I rest (or at least Bob does, ’cause he doesn’t have to go to work or anything).

However?  In terms of spinning, I feel like I have arrived.  Silk hankies, stretched into pencil thin roving, may be one of the most suprisingly easy things to spin on a drop spindle *evar*, but still… I feel like I have finally arrived as a spinner, when I have time to pick my nose while the spindle is whirling.

Boo-yah.  :-p

– Skewers

And hey look — pretty stuff I spun a couple weekends ago…

L to R? Silk DK, Merino Laceweight, Merino/Mohair Blend in a range of styles.

Skewers and I are about to embark upon our first KaL together.

Behold:

http://mochimochiland.com/weblog/2007/06/free-pattern-bob/

Skewers,

So how are things going with the spinning wheel? Is it getting plenty of use? Does it have fights with your harp for a coveted space in the front room?

I still really want a traveling wheel.

-Scarves

My friend sent me a very cool skein of yarn. It even smelled cool. How did she do that? I don’t know.

This is the end result. A scarf, of course:

Closeup of the fringe:

The best lighting was in the bathroom, sadly.

I found a cute purse at a yard sale last weekend. See where the buttons are? You can take the cover off and put a different one on. But I like this one the best:

Scarves,

I suspect, instead of my originally planned sweater, that I’ll knit this, Stephanie Japel’s Cropped Cardigan with Leaf Ties. Why? Simply because it’s so much smaller and should use less than 1000 yards of worsted weight yarn. Between the smallness and the relative simplicity of the pattern, I might even finish it in time to wear it during Summer. We’re not quite there, yet, so maybe I can manage, right?

Chances are good that I’ll go back and forth on this a couple more times, though…

I’m surprised that you’ve been having a hard time finding geeky patterns. Even just Knitty yields a couple results – a klein bottle hat

and a scarf, named for one of the intrepid discoverers of DNA’s double-helix structure, Rosalind.

So I want to make some version of this:

Probably very small (ugh, will have to break out the teenytinydriveyouinsane needles). There needs to be more nerdy knitting patterns out there, or at least more that I am aware of. Maybe a water molecule pattern, except I hate chemistry.

Also, I want to try a version of this, but needle felted instead of sewn. And with green tea.

I keep wanting to make things that don’t have a function.